Yes, there are a variety: logic problems, word puzzles, alphametics, various kinds of ciphers -- transposition, substitution, steganographic --, some coding challenges, and a whole slew of other puzzles that I don't quite know how to categorize.
The tricky part of this puzzle is how to handle spaces. Prose sentences have regular spacing rules that the ensuing ciphertext doesn't follow. For instance, what to do with several spaces in a row? Should they be rearranged along with the words (effectively be treated AS words), or should they stay put, the words moving around them?
Hint: There are some extra spaces in the waiver that will become indentations if you take the former approach. (It was hoped that the fact that there is no space between the period and "risk" would suggest this: Sentences [following a period] normally start with a space, and end without one; here that is reversed.)
I'm still looking for a better way to hint this, as too many readers are getting hung up on puzzle #2 than I'd like. :)
This is odd! We can visually troubleshoot this, and see that the first characters following 1.##### are «Cnrtltos » and the final characters at the end of the (original) file are «!niauago». Taking [SPOILER] alternately the first of the first and the last of the last gives us C, o, n, g, r, a, t, u, l, a, t, i, o, n, s, !. If there is an extraneous character inserted at the end, e.g. a newline, the transformation should be spoiled and illegible: C, newline, n, o, r, g, t, a, l, u, t, a, o, i, s, n, space, !.
A little earlier, the editorial instructions read: "These hash values, or checksums [...], were generated by the SHA-256 algorithm -- implementations of which you should easily be able to find and run on your own plaintexts. (By "plaintext", I mean the entire rest of the file, correctly deciphered -- of which, however, only the next chapter will be legible ... until the subsequent decipherment, and so on.)"