Suggested difficulty: normal

Left earphone: Bad Apple.

Right earphone: view file in notepad

Opening the file and running meta data will probably tell you this file is a binary. Its not.

If we open it in a notepad-like app we will see the file as follows:

�堌䍉彃剐䙏䱉Eā 䠌楌潮ဂ 湭牴䝒⁂奘⁚츇Ȁऀ؀㄀ 捡灳卍呆... you get the point.

Seeing these chars in a file ussualy means theres a encoding mismatch. So lets run this in a hex editor and see wassup (beijing).

FF FE FF D8 FF E2 0C 58 49 43 43 5F 50 52 4F 46 49 4C 45 00 01 01 00 00 0C 48 4C 69 6E 6F 02 10 00 00 6D 6E 74 72 52 47 42 20 58 59 5A 20 07 CE 00 02 00 09 00 06 00 31 00 00 61 63 73 70 4D 53 46 54 00 00 00 00 49 45 43 20 73 52 47 42 00 00
ÿþÿØÿâXICC_PROFILE���HLino��mntrRGB XYZ Î��	��1��acspMSFT����IEC sRGB��

And wow this actually looks familiar now. Its just a JPEG. If we were to load another one to see the difference in the header we would see the FF FE just “corrupted” it.

If we delete it and save as .jpg we load the picture and see the flag.