I went to the mailbox today to find a mysterious silver/gray envelope with the return address of:
LOKI
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
Inside was a letter telling me I am now a decoder and to visit www.vanishingpointgame.com along with a USB flash drive. Interesting.
After looking at the image, text file and video on the disc and then some googling, it's apparently some sort of viral campaign from Microsoft regarding.... ? The Vista launch, perhaps?
The cipher key on my USB drive looks like this:
It's a map of the letters/numbers to ROT13 from an image found on various Microsoft sites, such as the Windows Vista blog:
That works out to imm0rtaliz3m3, which, if typed into the box on the main Vanishing Point site listed above takes you to a downloadable MP3 file. Analyzing that in a spectrum analyzer shows that the "pattern" spells the word FILE. Take that to www.vanishingpoint.com/FILE and you get yet another message telling you to wait for the expiration of the countdown.
Apparently there are 5 or 6 keys out there with various puzzles, other videos, and lots more. For more information, check out the Vanishing Point Wiki which has been setup to explain what's known so far.
We'll know more when the countdown on the main site expires in a few days...