Random: The Insanity Post [!OT]

**Nevan** · August 27th, 2004, 09:54 PM

Back on topic: Check out www.ilovebees.com again, it gets weirder... Also check out her blog, it is really Bungie since she mentions AI, Covenant, and so forth.

**mrwiseman** · August 27th, 2004, 11:15 PM

ilovebees.com is registered by a person named to an entity known as "Margaret's House of Bees" in 2370 Market Street #510, San Francisco, CA 94114-1575 through NAMESDIRECT. It was created on 2004/06/14 (pretty recently...), expiring the same day of 2009. The registerer used a Hotmail address to register ([email protected]). The server IP is 69.20.126.147, which is owned by Rackspace.com, a commercial host which offers managed hosting. At least the Rackspace HQ is in San Antonio, Texas, and the server is surely located in the USA. It's a Linux server running Apache, and the page is a dynamically generated page, probably with PHP, unless the server is spoofing its headers which is very unlikely.

Margaret's House of Bees seems to be a small-scale honey shop. It would be great to go to the mentioned address to verify it.

If the owner of this website (who had to pay good bucks for that host) had such strange problems, he or she would have asked the host for help already. What's more curious is how did a small home-made honey seller invest a lot of money on a 5 year domain with a managed host which contract is fat enough to support the huge, unthinkable demand such an otherwise small website is getting, plus the fact that it's a dynamic website.

The website seems to have been edited in a Windows box. It has been edited with a high-level HTML editor like DreamWeaver, but later manually edited to add some strange formatting. It does a couple of tricks, one of which is used to display that message, and is not nicely done.

Curiously, the keywords the page wants search engines to boost it for include: shipwreck, hoax, game, bee hoax, and bee game. Even more curiously, "Margaret's House of Bees" is not a keyword.

If I had even more time to waste, I'd check the Californian commerce entity registry (I would have to investigate how, I'm not even American; and it would be fun to check telephones and telephone guides, as well as finding all information on Margaret Efendi available, especially prior to June. Efendi is an unusual name, I think I've heard that word before, and I believe it's a word in some language(s) of western Asia. Yes, I think it's turkish. I suggest asking a turk about it and perhaps its meaning.

Some people went a little further here.

I think it's 96% likely that this a cost-effective viral marketing operation orchestrated by Microsoft, 3% likely that this is a game created by somebody else, and 1% likely that this is an unrelated company's marketing.

**Nevan** · August 27th, 2004, 11:26 PM

See, the thing is, it was made a month before the H2 movie ad showed it. I have the H2 movie ad if anyone wants to see it (the link at the end), not for some more things.

The blog, which claims to be Dana, is semi-real, such as "real people who know Dana" posting. Then you have you fanboys and everyone else.

Of course I doubt Bungie really hacked a website. Either way it is neat.

If you click the main link on the front page (in the black box) it takes you to the links page where there are sounds. Which odd, since they are .wav, and say odd stuff, sort of a story, that isn't completely pieced together. But having it all the way to 2009 makes me really wonder. That I have no theory (as of yet) since once they reveal it (my guess around November of this year) it would be over, of course it could be something else, or maybe they'll auction it off. I really can't think of why they/she would want to have it until 2009, unless it is legit, and an AI stole it, and it was a real site. Of course that's a silly idea.

**mrwiseman** · August 27th, 2004, 11:41 PM

Any company would never hack a website, I think a marketing agency (or themselves) created it. It's most liekly that they registered it for 5 years because 1 year would be too suspicious. I haven't checked her weblog, it's too much time.

**Nevan** · August 27th, 2004, 11:52 PM

Well just read this from it (from the sidebar)(what she claims to have figured out so far):
Days investigating: 40

In early July, an AI named Melissa crash landed, badly damaged, onto the server that hosts my aunt's website. The AI tried to orient and repair itself. The result: It turned 'I Love Bees' into a holy mess.

Now we're investigating the mess. And we need all the help we can get.

Here's what we know so far:

Melissa, a.k.a. "The Operator," used to run communications on a ship. The ship's purpose: to spy on an enemy known as "the Covenant."

The Operator has started communicating again. It's constructing hundreds of "roads" out of the 'I Love Bees' server. The roads all lead to payphones. And the phones are ringing.

We don't know why it's broadcasting, but the Operator is giving us GPS coordinates for the phones, and times to show up. So we are. We're collecting its fragmented messages and trying to put them back together.

Here's what else we know:

When the Operator crashed on the 'I Love Bees' server, it didn't come alone.

It came with two autonomous programs:
1) the SPDR, designed to repair damage to the Operator, and
2) the Pious Flea, designed to... well, we're not sure yet.

The SPDR brought the Operator back to life. But now the Operator is taking orders from the Pious Flea. So when the SPDR tried to eliminate the Flea, the Operator killed it.

We don't know much about the Flea, except that it wants "to seek, behold, and reveal the truth."

There is one other voice we've found on the site: The Sleeping Princess.

The Sleeping Princess uses Aunt Margaret's email account and error pages to share secrets and play games with us. She also likes to hide text in images. We're not sure where she came from.

That's what we know so far.

We don't know what's going to happen next.

---------------

My thoughts: Now Melissa is never mentioned in the Halo books. But then again it doesn't list all the AI. The Covenant, as you know are the one's wanting to kill us. The whole payphone ringing thing is what gets me. I wonder if they really are. Pious Flea sounds like a good parasite, maybe some forshadowing of the Flood. Operator could be 343 Guilty Spark (aka The Monitor), SPDR could be Chief and/or Cortana, and the Flea could be the Flood. "To seek, behold, and reveal the truth" could be something to do with the forerunners/human correlation. The Sleeping Princess could also be Cortana.

Either way it shall be neat to find out.