Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked

An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."

Uh

[Threni]

The start of the thread, containing spoilers, isn't much use if you want to attempt the puzzle and haven't got the book. Do I need the book? If so, this is something of a non-story, isn't it?

Re:On Topic

[ipquickly]

That website has been known to be wrong on a regular basis.

(or someone fount /usr/bin/yes)

Re:Uh

[war4peace]

Wait, there is a puzzle? Where? xkcd? What's that? Who? What year is it?
Oh, it's /. - nevermind then, all makes sense now.

The problem is that there's no article.

[Jesus_666]

The gripe is not that it's a story about a solved problem, the gripe is about the story being about a solved problem inside a dead-tree version of xkcd - and we can't even be certain we were told the actual problem so the informational content of this story boils down to: "Randall Munroe has apparently put some tricky puzzles into an xkcd book of his and someone solved a really hard one and got a set of coordinates. You'll have to trust us on this one, we don't have further data." As far as news go that's really weak.

There's no link to details about how the answer was found and we can only guess at what the problem was (apparently Randall gave some cyphertext and an initialization vector, leaving the reader to figure out which algorithm was used and how to decrypt the string). There's no actual article and the matter isn't urgent/all-important enough to warrant turning a set of posts incompehensible to those without the book into a news story.

Had someone written a nice blog post that explains the problem, how the solution was determined and what the answer means this would have been much more newsworthy. As it is now it's only of use to the subset of /. readers who own the xkcd books - and those who do and are interested in the puzzles are most likely already reading the xkcd forum, making this story mostly pointless.

In short: This story would be a lot more interesting if it was comprehensible without the book. As it is now it might as well be a stealth ad for the book. "Buy now and you too can have the faintest clue what kdawson is so excited about."

Prediction:

[Anonymous Coward]

Prediction:

XKCD used all profits to rent out a C-130 Herc [wikimedia.org] to drop a metric ton of Ball-Pit Balls [xkcd.com] on that location.

Re:The problem is that there's no article.

[geekoid]

What a whiner.

XKCD is a popular nerd site. The owner of the sight did an interesting puzzle. Here is a link to the relevant information.

Slashdot has done that sort of thing for it's entire existence. It's like getting on an aircraft and complaining that they fly through the air.

Re:Uh

[Anonymous Coward]

There's going to be a wedding at that location on that date. What else would the 3's mean?