I Still ❤ The Web

I’ve been working on web security for a long time at this point, and spending most of my time looking at all of the bad stuff happening on the web can get pretty demoralizing. Fortunately, there’s also a lot of amazing stuff on the web that periodically reminds me of what an amazing tool it can be.

For instance, this afternoon a friend posted the following picture:

Now, I’ve loved mysteries for a long time, and this one seemed like it ought to be an easy one with all of the magical tech we have at our disposal these days.

I first gave it a shot with the Google Translate app on my phone, which frequently surprises me with the things it can do. However, while it can do translations via photo, that feature requires that you first specify the source language, and I don’t know it yet.

I gave this nice article on recognizing character sets a skim, but no perfect match leapt out at me, although it did eliminate some of my guesses. The answer’s actually in there, had I done more than skim it.

Fortunately, I remembered an amazing website that lets you draw a shape and it’ll tell you what Unicode characters you might be writing. I chose the most distinctive character I could and scrawled it in the box, and the first half of the puzzle fell into place:

After that, it was a simple matter of clicking through to the Georgian character set block and verifying that all of the characters were present. I then copied the text over to Google Translate, which reports that ელდარ translates to Eldar.

There’s a ton of amazing stuff out there on the web. Don’t let all the bad stuff get you down.

-Eric