It's a Red Herring

For a few days now I've been thinking about the clue that FIRST has given us. Look at my previous post for more info about the clue.

There are a couple very interesting things about this image. The first is that this fish is called a moonfish, and searching google images for this results in the very image that FIRST used as the clue. The second thing is that the image that FIRST gave as the clue is larger (in bytes, not pixels). Yes, the images are identical in dimensions, but the clue is a bit larger. Some people began to speculate that the clue was actually embedded in the image file (this would explain the size of the files being different). Some thought that the clue was embedded in the image using jphide, and required a passphrase to extract. This discussion went on for some time.

I ran STRINGS on the clue file and also on the original image found in google images. I found some interesting differences. Within the clue file, there was an XMP tag. The metadata appeared to be a long string of spaces... Nothing usefull.

Now back to that fish. The fish is also known as an Opah, which is also known to be the king of the Herrings. And look, it's red! It's the king of the red herrings! I'm not sure what it means, but I'm done trying to solve this one for now. Maybe there'll be something in the second clue that seems to make more sense. Till then, I'll be trying to understand the new hardware and programming libraries.