The F-Secure Internet Security 2007 puzzle challenge is over and we have the winners for each continent:



    Europe: Peter Nilsson, Sweden
    North America: Sean Eaton, USA
    South America: Alvaro Steckert Filho, Brazil
    Asia: Kevin Lee, People's Republic of China
    Australia: Daniel Givney, Australia
    Africa: Ashley Ross, South Africa

Congratulations to all of you. We'll be sending you F-Secure Internet Security 2007 via mail.

The challenge was about searching our blog archive for a "hidden puzzle". Those who took the time started to find entries from our blog archives that only contained a jigsaw puzzle piece with no text. Here's a sample entry from July 2004.

If you collected all the pieces and put them together, you ended up with a picture of the F-Secure Internet Security 2007 box… except that one crucial piece of the puzzle was missing. It wasn't linked from any of the blog entries. In fact, this image was on our web site but there was no link to it from anywhere. You had to guess one of the two possible URLs to find it. And over 50 people did.



Once you had all the pieces, you had to put them together. To make this easier, you could actually find the right location of each puzzle part from the image's header information (A3, C4, D1, etc). The completed puzzle image contained this text:

    To Solve:
    Send nerds(e)f-secure.com a plain text e-mail message with the following subject line:
    I Have Way Too Much Free Time! Be Sure.

 

So that's it concerning the challenge. But what about Antarctica, the 7th continent? We promised a free box to anyone who would e-mail us from there, regardless if they could complete the puzzle or not.

And just few hour later, we got this e-mail, from Jacek Piszczek jr, reprinted with his permission:


    Well, here it is. I really wonder if I'm going to be the first person from
    Antarctica to email you though :)
    
    Anyway: who am I and what am I doing in Antarctica? My name is Jacek
    Piszczek and I am a member of the 30th Polish Antarctic Expedition. I am in
    charge of the communication equipment as well as all computers, etc. The
    Polish Antarctic H. Arctowski Station is placed in a really beautiful
    Admirality Bay, King George Island, South Shetlands and has operated since 1976.
    Our expedition arrived at 9th of November last year and we are now waiting
    for our supply ship to arrive. The ship will bring the new crew here and
    transport most of us to Argentina.
    
    A nearest penguin colony is about 500m from the building we live in. They
    returned here about a month ago and are already busy with lying eggs. The
    adelis and gentoos are here already, we're still waiting for chinstraps to
    show up though. This year's spring is pretty surprising - we already had a
    day with temperature near 10C. The glaciers already began to move and
    collapse. We can hear explosion alike noises every couple of hours.
    
    If you need more info to confirm I'm really there, you could check my small
    blog out ;) It is at http://binaryriot.org/dreamolers/arctowski
    
    Regards
    --
    Jacek Piszczek jr



The picture above is from Jacek's blog. Pretty cool.