Comments on: Solution claimed to Zodiac's last code

By: nycdave

nycdave — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:35:00 +0000

Trying to crack this code was a hobby of mine.

By: David Oranchak

David Oranchak — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 17:43:00 +0000

As everyone suspects, it’s a hoax. http://oranchak.com/zodiac/corey/hoax.html

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 04:48:00 +0000

If Harold Camping wants to take another stab at predicting Judgment Day maybe he could team up with this guy.

By: Kirby Malk

Kirby Malk — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 18:06:00 +0000

Maybe the real message is in what’s missing…

By: Brian Burwell

Brian Burwell — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:38:00 +0000

Even I don’t write that bad. I don’t believe that guy has solve it.

By: Scott Elyard

Scott Elyard — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 08:02:00 +0000

Why are some of the characters boxed in the original? What’s it for?

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This looks like confirmation bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

By: princeminski

princeminski — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ha. I was actually thinking of Captain Midnight, but you nailed it.

By: starbreiz

starbreiz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Alan: thanks for that link. I was wondering something similar, though I didn’t know the proper term. I would expect something that was encoded to use better spelling, if you ever expect anyone to crack it?

By: Heavy Metal Yogi

Heavy Metal Yogi — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

When you read the article he says that one of his inspirations in “cracking” it is 340 being the area code for the U.S. Virgin Islands, but that area code wasn’t assigned until 1997. That’s a full 5 years after Arthur Leigh Allen died and almost 30 years after the cipher was sent. This makes me a little skeptical. I was really hoping that the case would be broken open. I wish I wasn’t so obsessed with this case.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It looks to me like he applied Caesar shifts to different letters seemingly at random to produce whatever the heck he wanted it to say. Whether he was doing it consciously or subconsciously, I have no idea…it seems like *he* thinks there was a method to his madness at least.

By: tristis

tristis — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

A load of bunk.

From the article, after mentioning that 340 (the name of the code, apparently) is the area code for the US Virgin Islands: “This is where it gets even creepier. 3+4+0=7. Right. So you get 7+0=7. 707…707 are the area codes for Vallejo, Napa, and Solano. So I figured, why not start this with Caesar code using 3,4.”

That’s barely even intelligible, and it reads like stereotypical conspiracy theory. Not to mention that as someone points out in the comments on the linked article, 340 wasn’t the area code for the US Virgin Islands until 1997, many years after the code was created.

Also, the article mentions that he sent his solution to a cryptographer, who called it “not valid.” Hmmm.

By: optuser

optuser — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know much about crypto, but why the hell hasn’t the NSA turned their WOPR on this for five minutes to figure it out?

Or is this part of their interview exam?

By: cramerica

cramerica — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“In Dan Brown’s latest enigmatic novel, the Zodiac Cipher, a handsome professor cracks an infamous code, putting him squarely into the sights of a killer. But is there more to the picture than first suspected?” –E! Weekly, March 11 2012

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

My thoughts exactly. This solution defiantly doesn’t make sense.

By: starbreiz

starbreiz — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This article was all sorts of disappointing.

By: Nylund

Nylund — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Well, he somewhat describes the process for decoding the first word, KILL from HERV. (he says its a V).

Can anyone tell me how you get that using a caesar cipher as he (somewhat) describes?

themastertheorem.com has a resource page (for members only) with a caesar tool to make playing around with caesar shifts easier. For people who aren’t members, here is another I found:

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/CaesarCipher/

Long story short…I think just from those first four letters, it seems like something fishy is going on, (eg, changing the cipher frequently)…aka…picking a cipher that leads to the message saying what you want it to say.

But if someone can use what he says in the article to get at least the first word, let me know.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There’s breaking a cipher, and then there’s using a Ouija board. This looks more like the later.

By: Heavy Metal Yogi

Heavy Metal Yogi — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Poor spelling doesn’t guarantee that he didn’t crack it, the Zodiac killer actually used poor spelling and grammar in several of his notes, including in cyphers. Since there wasn’t a lot of uniformity in the words that he misspelt, it has been theorized that he did it as a ruse. I won’t believe this until I see his method in details. I’m more than a little skeptical of his claim.

By: cory

cory — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I enjoy Seth Rogen’s films, but he’s not much of an amateur cryptographer.

By: SpeckledJim

SpeckledJim — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The guy comes across as schizophrenic for some reason, and it sounds like he made up the decipherment as he went along, changing both cipher repeatedly to force the results he wanted. Not credible at all.

By: SpeckledJim

SpeckledJim — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“changing both cipher and key”, that is.

By: senorglory

senorglory — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

â€œI thought, thereâ€™s no way … that Zodiac is going to be prosaic enough not to mention the U.S. Virgin Islands in this code.”

I think this statement is cipher, and needs to be decoded.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I stand by my belief that Zodiac was my neighbor on 15 th St., San Francisco. He was a painter who copied the old masters (who were into ciphers). He took special interest in the text of other languages and could recreate characters in languages he didn’t speak. He had the crosshair sign tattooed on his wrist. Always wore the same dirty beige outfit and was old enough. He is most certainly dead now. Somewhere, I have a handwriting sample. He had a great view of the Chronicle building and seemed to have a woman captive in his apartment for many of the years I lived there. Dead now, as far as I know.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reviewing on the personality of the killer, I don’t think he would write such a thing with guilt in it, he had a very big ego and the way he killed his victims (stabbing for example) denote he didn’t have a lot of empathy with them, if he was able to feel guilt he might have expressed it before; besides, his ego and his beliefs in an afterlife might refrain him for killing himself. If this is the right translation then I would assume it was a letter to fool the police.

By: Jonathan Badger

Jonathan Badger — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

It is very easy to create a “decipherment” of anything if one allows arbitrary substitutions and the like — look at all the supposed decipherments of the Voynich manuscript — a supposed coded text that according to the current theory may not encode anything at all!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Couldn’t be as ridiculous as Graysmith’s “solve,” which proposed it to involve disorganized transposition — i.e., FUBAR, absent a system by which an intended recipient could have decrypted it. Armed with this supposition, Graysmith still yielded a confused plaintext, which he then interpreted to explain all of the foregoing through its revelation the Zodiac had been taking LSD.

See also William Friedman’s tongue-in-cheek cryptanalytic “proof” that Theodore Roosevelt wrote the plays widely attributed to Shakespeare.

By: travtastic

travtastic — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Zodiac was a genius; he created a puzzle that will decode into anything you want it to.

By: Heavy Metal Yogi

Heavy Metal Yogi — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pretty sure that it has something in it, but I also don’t believe that the Zodiac would disclose his identity. Maybe I’ve just spent too many years looking at the ciphers, trying to figure them out to believe that it’s a doodle with no meaning. I think that there’s probably more math to it than Starliper put into it. I wish this story were true, but it rings so false.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

â€œI became absolutely obsessed with the case, to the point that Iâ€™d look up from Graysmithâ€™s books … and realize that Iâ€™d actually forgotten to eat.â€

By the looks of him, he wasn’t as obsessed as he claims.