Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Famous Cipher Solved!


Almost forty years ago, Northern California was terrorized by a mysterious killer who called himself “The Zodiac.” Zodiac was responsible for at least five murders, and possibly as many as thirty seven, and has never been caught. He is most famous for taunting the local newspapers and police with cryptic and threatening letters, as well as enigmatic code-like ciphers, most of which have yet to be solved. However, after forty years, it seems the most famous of these ciphers, known as the 340-cypher, for it’s 340 evenly spaced characters, has finally been solved. Experts today have revealed that it was a substitution-transposition cipher, with 336 characters in the message with four nulls at the end to make the cipher evenly spaced. The decoded text reads as follows:


onlyafoolorafraud

talkstoughorroman

ticallyaboutwarwh

eniwasfiveyearsol

dmyfatherleftforw

armygrandfatherca

mehomefromwarandd

iedthenextdayiwas

shotdownovervietn

amandspentfiveyea

rsasapowsomeofthe

friendsIservedwit

hnevercamehomeiha

tewarandiknowhowt

erribleitscostsar

eimrunningforpres

identtokeepthecou

ntryilovesafeimjo

hnmccainandiappro

vethismessagefjdg


Experts are unsure of what to make of this message, and are working on deciphering it’s meaning. More on this story as it comes in.

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