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DanaAndMargaret


Margaret runs her own business in Napa Valley, California, making (harvesting?) and selling honey. She has a humble little website with information about her, her business, and honey -- [WWW]www.ilovebees.com. Dana, her niece, has been building and running the website. At some point in the recent past, bugs (Ha! Get it? "Bugs!") started appearing on the site--text being inserted in pages, text being inserted in images, and most notably an ominous countdown clock splashed across the front page.

Dana has been trying to fix the problem, as mentioned in her blog ([WWW]ilovebees.blogspot.com), but everything she does to fix it becomes reinfected with the same problems.

At the time of this was written, the countdown says:

 HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE

 Control has been yielded to the
 SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX.

 This medium is classified, and has a
 STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION. 

 In 5 days, network throttling will erode.

 In 19 days this medium will metastasize. 

 COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL:
 32:15:38:10:831

 Make your decisions accordingly.

This Javascript Countdown only apears on Internet Explorer. (Update: the countdown also appears in Firefox, as is now appears to be controlled by CSS)

This indicates "network throttling will erode" on or about Tuesday July 27, the "medium will metastasize" on or about Tuesday August 10th, and something will be "wide awake and physical" on Tuesday August 24 at 6:07am Pacific, each taking place 2 weeks after each other.

As for the text embedded in pages, see EmbeddedText.

If you use WHOIS to look up the domain registration for ilovebees.com it has the following information:

[WWW]A poster on slashdot writes (in reference to Dana's address in the WHOIS info): : "I live in San Francisco and used to live at that address. It is the Fox Plaze apartments, a 28 story building and the 8th floors and below are devoted to commercial offices. The lease rates are quite high and most of the offices are filled by affluent companies."

Actually it's not Fox Plaza apartments. Fox Plaza is at 1390 Market St. [WWW]Fox Plaza Apartments. I live a few blocks away so I took a walk down there and 2370 Market is a group of three stores, one of which is a UPS store with mailbox service as pointed out above. I took a few pictures with my cell phone if any one is curious. [WWW]Pictures of 2370 Market St.

[WWW]The UPS Store web site shows the domain registration address as one of their stores.

Calling the phone gets you a voicemail "Hi, this is Dana, please leave a message... blah, blah, blah." (Yes, she actually says that. Recording of [WWW]Dana's Answering Machine) There is momentary laughing in the background. However, on further investigation, the mailbox is full. From this I would assume the address also belongs to Dana. Futhermore if you press * you get a message that allows you to enter a password and mailbox number.

"Margaret Efendi" is not listed in any phone book for San Francisco -- Please do not harass people in the real world just because you find them in the phone book with the same last name. Seriously. The game hands you this one phone number -- because THIS is the ONLY phone number which is "in game".

Network sleuthing

UPDATE: Since we're doing WHOIS queries and speculating on the large amount of Google-related tools Dana uses (gmail, picasa, etc.), we might as well do some more network sleuthing to see where [WWW]ilovebees.com is hosted.

%dig www.ilovebees.com

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.ilovebees.com.      1723    IN      A       69.20.126.147

%whois 69.20.126.147 @whois.arin.net

OrgName:    Rackspace.com
OrgID:      RSPC
Address:    112 E. Pecan St.
Address:    Suite 600
City:       San Antonio
StateProv:  TX
PostalCode: 78205
Country:    US

%/usr/sbin/traceroute www.ilovebees.com

traceroute to www.ilovebees.com (69.20.126.147), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
...snip...
13  0.so-7-0-0.GW6.DCA6.ALTER.NET (152.63.41.225)  38.897 ms  38.259 ms  38.030 ms
14  * * *
15  vlan903.core3.iad1.rackspace.com (69.20.1.40)  39.859 ms  37.948 ms  42.503 ms
16  aggr109a.iad1.rackspace.com (69.20.3.39)  39.494 ms  43.744 ms  38.530 ms

So the ilovebees.com website is hosted in a Rackspace datacenter in the Washington, D.C. area (hopped off the ALTER.NET backbone at DCA) - not a Microsoft datacenter, like the Bungie and Xbox sites. Not sure what else (if anything) this implies.


Correlating with the observation that the site is not hosted at a Microsoft datacenter, the ilovebees.com server does not identify itself as a Microsoft-IIS/5.0 webserver either. The Rackspace server is running an apache webserver on a Red-Hat Linux system, which is rather opposed to Microsoft. It identifies itself as a <Apache/1.3.19 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 DAV/1.0.2 PHP/4.0.4pl1 mod_perl/1.24_01> Information found using ID Serve from grc.com. Dana's blog server simply calls itself <Apache>.

twing

One other item of note (maybe). The email address for Dana is danatwing@gmail.com however "twing" is not her last name. A quick search for Twing as a second name yeilds the following [WWW]site. From the site "(origin: Danish.) From Twinge, to force, master, subdue; or a name perhaps given from his dexterity in archery." May or may not be significant.

UPDATE: Dana EmailsFridayTh The Etymologician that her nickname "Twing" refers to (among other things) a Larry Niven novel. According to the [WWW]link she pointed to: "Twing! It's kind of like a string netting that keeps everything in it's [sic] place, but can easily be released for access."

That is, "twing" is like a [WWW]bungie cord.

Draw your own conclusions.


The domain name ilovebees.com was registered on June 14, 2004, the same day as the first post in Dana's blog. The domain is registered until June 14, 2009.

Dana used [WWW]Picasa which is a Google product to edit the non-hacked images of Margaret's site posted on her blog. This information can be found in the file info portion of the jpeg files.


Photoshop

Dana also used Photoshop 3.0 to create the image of herself posted on the blog page (text embedded in the image). Since this is pretty outdated software, perhaps its release date or something is relevant?

The only thing I can find right now pertaining to Photoshop release dates is this. Photoshop 3.0 for MacOS was released in 9/1994, version 3.0.5 for MacOS was released in 5/1996. The numbers 91994 and 51996 are both evenly divisible by 7. I know this is weak but it is consistent with Bungies love of the number 7.


Margaret Efendi

"Efendi" is an old arabic word which means educated scholar or a teacher. Maybe that's the trail to be followed

I remember seeing the word "Effendi" in the adventure game Quest for Glory 2. The townspeople referred to the hero as that. Same meaning as already mentioned, of course. Unfortunately, Margaret's last name is actually Efendi, as already corrected as well. - grantakeru 10:30, 01 Aug 2004 (PDT)

Margaret's last name is Efendi, which in Turkish is taken to mean an important personage, perhaps even a noble. Maybe even a queen?

MARGARET f
Usage: English
Pronounced: MAHR-gret, MAHR-gur-et
Derived from Greek margarites meaning "pearl". Saint Margaret was martyred at Antioch in the 4th century. She is the patron saint of expectant mothers. Another famous bearer was Queen Margaret I of Denmark, who united Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in the 14th century.

[WWW]Saint Margaret of Cortona. One of the patron saints of the mentally ill. Described as one of the 'fourteen most helpful saints in Heaven.' What's fourteen divided by two, again?

for those of you that don't already know, CORTANA is the name of the AI from [Halo]Combat Evolved....

BLAM!

-iguanabob

Just thought I would add here...perhaps you all have already done this...but margarets name is a perfect anagram of "meet a friend arg" ;-)

-Dyre

Dana Awbrey

Dana's last name is Awbrey, a Welsh corruption of the Norman "Alberic", which by some sources means "supernatural power".

Looking for etymology info for Dana; Probable red herrings, but anyway...

From [WWW]baby names:

DANA: Variation of Daniel, but also androgynous. In Greek mythology Danae was the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos and the mother of Perseus. - interesting greek links??

Also, from [WWW]feminine names:

Dana - Feminine form of Daniel or meaning Queen of the Danes, Daniele/ Danielle. - interesting link back to margaret via the Danes, perhaps?

Farnsworth

I just made what may be an important discovery. Dana's cat Farnsworth may in fact be named after the inventor [WWW]Philo Farnsworth. Several things lead me to believe this. One is that his labratory is only 3.5 miles from Dana's supposed address. Secondly, he is a relatively unknown inventor, but he is credited with inventing the television, which would have influenced the creation of such things as monitors and cameras. The third and probably most important reason I believe they are connected is that the patent he filed for invention of the TV was on September 7, 1927 when he was 21 years old. Coincidentally he also died in 1971 so there are plenty of 7 references in his life and we all know how much Bungie likes the number 7.

== Is Dana a flash clone? ===

I posted this on Haloplanet forum:

This is only gonna make sense if you have gone to the ilovebees wiki, and seen the webcam.

If you watch the webcam, and read her blog, Dana mentions that they have seen her, and found her. A shot in the dark maybe, but with the refrences to the hushed casket, maybe Dana is Kelly's flash clone, and has changed her name to hide from ONI.

For those who have not read the halo books, Kelly is a Spartan, a soldeer who was taken away as a child and trained to be a soldier. ONI created flash clones of the children they abducted, including Dana. I think that Dana may be a flash clone. -Skarclaw.

Skarclaw, as you may recall, flash clones had a limited span of existence. They were imperfect; they all developed a cancer after a few years. And they all died. Dana, if she were actually a flash clone, would not be alive right now. Let alone the idea that she traveled back in time. - grantakeru 10:30, 01 Aug 2004 (PDT)


Ok, if Dana is a Skarclaw, then my theory is not wrong at all... I mean, Dana had cancer, I mean Dana SCULLY, daughter of MARGARET Scully, sister of MELISSA (that name repeating in the links) Scully... I dunno, someone at bungie must love the X files...

If I find anything else that has anything to do with the X files I'm gonna get sick...


Is Dana the Sleeping Princess?

One thing Ive noticed, if you read the emails coming back from ladybee777, is that

The Sleeping Princess friendless and alone

And a little further in..

Chapter II. Dana friendless and alone

I've been thinking along these lines for a while, but what if Dana and TheSleepingPrincess are the same?

My reasoning: From all the information I've read, it appears to me that the Queen is actually some kind of mechanical creature which is being fixed by some helper creature. It thinks that Dana is attacking it, so it plans revenge on her. Well, one way of getting revenge is to kill; how would you kill Dana?

the queen wishes, The Sleeping Princess, sealed into an airtight container

So the queen (mech) wants to kill Dana (sleeping princess) by sealing her in. Suffocation.

Ive spotted a few other things which point in this direction.

So what if this is correct? that leaves the question, who/what is the entity that is handling the ladybee account? because it definitely holds a key somehow. It appears to be an entity that knows the background of the queen, its helpers and a number of entities. I think for now, I'll concentrate on trying to get more out of the ladybee entity. Which, for the record, I dont think is Aunt M :)

.Zoom.


Maybe not food for thought, but at least a little kibble.

- Troublecat