Basically, Valve pushed an update to Portal that added a new achievement having to do with radios placed within the levels. The radios play audio once they are carried to certain points in the game. The audio files were extracted from the GCF and converted to Morse code or images via SSTV. The SSTV pictures when put in order display an MD5 hash: 9459C6CAC8C203B8128B7CC63068D4FD. After some brute forcing and the realization that it may be a phone number, they found "(425) 822-5251." This turns out to be a BBS number. They log in with backup/backup and get text dumps as well as ASCII art. Now everyone is scrambling to figure out what all the art and text mean. Also, there is speculation that the "dinosaur" file names have something to do with this comic. Anyway, it's good times, and there's still a lot people haven't figured out.

Here are some of the images:


Some links:

• Google Wave for this info
• Steam forums thread
• Steam forums thread about the dinosaur references
• The XKCD forums thread
• Youtube Video showing a Valve BBS log in (There are more there as well.)
• The Something Awful Forums thread (There's another thread for members only that I haven't seen.)
• One of the many IRC channels: irc.chat-solutions.org #portal (UBB.Threads doesn't seem to like me using irc://)