Remember that weird bit of video at the end of the alternate POPstation review? With the bloke in the protective suit and all those numbers? Well, I can now reveal the solution to that puzzle! Because the Post Office have finally delivered the prize to the winner.

The spoken numbers roughly copy the format of a Numbers Station (specifically the British ones, 'Lincolnshire Poacher' and 'Cherry Ripe'). I won't explain what a Numbers Station is here, have a look on Google if you're not familiar with them.

The spoken numbers comprise the encoded message. It was encoded using a 'one time pad' which is literally impossible to decipher without the numerical key. So I put the key in the video - it's the series of numbers that appears on the screen halfway through.

So, writing out the spoken numbers gives us:
43706 85214 21511 29638 88698 78473
(Every set of five is repeated once - a quirk of Numbers Stations. We ignore the repeats.)

The numbers written on screen are:
33594 65713 01539 18730 84546 78374

We now remove the blocks-of-five formatting, and write the key numbers below the encrypted text. Here's the whole lot:

4 3 7 0 6 8 5 2 1 4 2 1 5 1 1 2 9 6 3 8 8 8 6 9 8 7 8 4 7 3 Encrypted Text
3 3 5 9 4 6 5 7 1 3 0 1 5 3 9 1 8 7 3 0 8 4 5 4 6 7 8 3 7 4 Key

Now, we subtract each number in the key from each corresponding number in the encrypted text using Fibonicci subtraction. This means we get no negative numbers - if the answer is going to be negative, we add ten to the number we're subtracting from.
For example, 2 minus 9 would give us the answer -7. We therefore add 10 to the 2, making the sum 12 minus 7 which gives us the answer 5. Confusing.

Here's the whole lot subtracted:

4 3 7 0 6 8 5 2 1 4 2 1 5 1 1 2 9 6 3 8 8 8 6 9 8 7 8 4 7 3 Encrypted Text
3 3 5 9 4 6 5 7 1 3 0 1 5 3 9 1 8 7 3 0 8 4 5 4 6 7 8 3 7 4 Key
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 0 2 1 2 2 0 5 0 1 2 0 0 8 2 1 1 9 0 8 0 4 1 5 2 0 0 1 0 9 E-K answer

Now we have the decrypted message. However, it's all just numbers at the moment, and we need to convert it back to text. This is easily done - every two numbers denotes that numbered letter of the alphabet, e.g. 01 = B, 02 = B etc. So we put all the numbers into pairs:

10 21 22 05 01 20 08 21 19 08 04 15 20 01 09

And write down each corresponding letter in the alphabet:

J U V E A T H U S H D O T A I

This is the answer. Several people got stuck here, thinking "What does JUVEATHUSHDOTAI mean?" and trying to further decrypt it. There is no further messing about necessary - you just need to realise that it has the words AT and DOT in, which are parts of an e-mail address...

JUVE AT HUSH DOT AI

or, in other words, juve@hush.ai

The first person to send an e-mail to that now-defunct address was THE WINNER. His name was Gareth, and he won the depressingly predictable prize of the POPstation from the review. I also sent him a model of Mr. T.

Incidentally, the band which appears briefly in the video is Lindisfarne performing Meet Me on the Corner. The original video can be found here.

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