[solved] A858 was a mystery series of cryptographic puzzles, posted, which were never solved. Turns out it was a failed commercial venture. : r/UnresolvedMysteries

The subreddit was a hub for amateur cryptographers and computer science students who spent years attempting to decipher the seemingly random strings of numbers and letters. While most posts remained indecipherable and were later revealed to be mostly random encrypted data, several breakthroughs occurred:

Today, the subreddit is private, and most of the active "solving" takes place in the r/Solving_A858 community , where archives of the original hex posts are still maintained for those who wish to practice their decryption skills.

In the context of "downloading" an A858 RAR, it typically refers to the process of performed by the community to reconstruct files from the raw text posted on Reddit.

: One of the most famous decoded posts revealed an ASCII drawing of Stonehenge .

: Users would scrape the hexadecimal strings from a specific post, convert them into a binary format, and then save them with a .rar or .zip extension.