Good morning to all.
Well, here is the reconstructed cipher and its solution by azd:

H+M8|CV@KEB+*5k.L
dR(UVFFz9<>#Z3P>L
(MpOGp+2|G+l%WO&D
#2b^D(+4(5J+VW)+k
p+fZPYLR/8KjRk.#K
_Rq#2|<z29^%OF1*H
SMF;+BLKJp+l2_cTf
BpzOUNyG)y7t-cYA2
N:^j*Xz6dpclddG+4
-RR+4Ef|pz/JNb>M)
+l5||.VqL+Ut*5cUG
R)VE5FVZ2cW+|TB45
|TC^D4ct-c+zJYM(+
y.LW+B.;+B31cOp+8
lXz6Ppb&RG+BCOTBz
F1K<SMF6N*(+HK29^
:OFTO<Sf4pl/Ucy59
^W(+l#2C.B)7<FBy-
dkF|W<7t_BOYB*-CM
>cHD8OZzSkpNA|K;+

IHOPEYOUAREHAVING
LOTSOFFANINTRYING
TOCATCHMETHATWASN
TMKONTHETVSHOWWHI
CHBRINGOUPAPOINTA
BOUTMEIAMNOTAFRAI
DOFTHEGASCHAMBERB
ECAASEITWILLSENDM
ETOPARALLCEALLTHE
SOOHERBECAUSEKNOW
HAVEENOUGHSLAVEST
OWORVFORMEWHEREEV
ERYONEELSEHASNOTH
INGWHENTHEYREACHP
ARALICKSOTHEYAREA
FRAIDOFLEATHIAMNO
TAFRAIDBECAUSEIVN
OWTHATMYNEWLIFEIS
LIFEWILLBEANEASYO
NEINPARADICEDEATH

The original solution:

IHOPEYOUAREHAVING
LOTSOFFANINTRYING
TOCATCHMETHATWASN
TMKONTHETVSHOWWHI
CHBRINGOUPAPOINTA
BOUTMEIAMNOTAFRAI
DOFTHEGASCHAMBERB
ECAASEITWILLSENDM
ETOPARALLCEALLTHE
SOOHERBECAUSEKNOW
HAVEENOUGHSLAVEST
OWORVFORMEWHEREEV
ERYONEELSEHASNOTH
INGWHENTHEYREACHP
ARALICKSOTHEYAREA
FRAIDOFLEATHIAMNO
TAFRAIDBECAUSEIVN
OWTHATMYNEWLIFEIS
LIFEWILLBEANEASYO
NEINPARADICEDEATH

In red another take of mine on the last lines:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING
LOTS OF FAN IN TRYING
TO CATCH ME. THAT
WASNT MK ON THE TVSHOW
WHICH BRING OUP A POINT
ABOUT ME I AM NOT
AFRAID OF THE GASCHAMBER
BECAASE IT WILL SEND
ME TO PARALLCE ALL THE
SOOHER BECAUSE KNOW
HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES
TO WORV FOR ME WHERE
EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING
WHEN THEY REACH
PARALICK SO THEY ARE
AFRAID OF LEATH
I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I
VNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS
LIFE IN PARADICE
DEATH WILL BE AN EASY ONE

If the stray words (as posited in another thread) add up to LIFE IS DEATH then could it be that Zodiac is quoting Freud ?

"the aim of all life is death"― Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
http://freudquotes.blogspot.com/2016/06 … death.html

Was "sorry no cipher" telling us the 340 was a transposition cipher, solved diagonally?

Hi all, as a looooong-time lurker who never felt I had anything to contribute that more knowledgeable people wouldn’t have thought of already, I made this account specifically to bring up one possible (?) point I noticed.

Before today, I NEVER thought there was any connection between Manson and the Zodiac. Now I’m almost convinced there is.

As Beijinghouse wrote back on Page 4: "Doesn’t the timeline actually makes a better case for this being real evidence of an actual connection to the Manson Family? Nowadays, it’s known that the phrase "Life is death. Death is life." was a common piece of cult-speak."

Now, please bear with me for just a second.

1. The "Life Is" and "Death" stand out from the rest: the "Life Is" because it is written straight-out and thus appears as though it might be designed to be noticed as distinct, and the "Death" because it’s the last word, and apparently "orphaned" from the sentence it ends.

2. At various places in the letter, the Zodiac writes words backwards, such as "PARADICE" as "ECIDARAP."

3. Since he’s reversing words, why couldn’t that apply to phrases, too? "Life Is" and "Death" are isolated in a way as different. But the reverse of "Life Is" is "Is Life." So you can equally take those "orphaned" or "distinct" words as "Life is Death" or "Death is Life."

4. So why not BOTH? He’s already playing with reversed words in the same cipher. Why can’t "Life is" and "Death" stand for both "Life is Death" and "Death is Life" at the same time, through the same process of reversal — and thus the three words could theoretically represent the Manson phrase "Life is Death, Death is Life" using just three words and a code reversal, rather than the full 6.

And given that, as pointed out in this thread, that Manson and the phrase were totally unknown to the public at the time, that kind of suggests someone who knew Manson in some way wrote the cipher. Doesn’t need to be part of his cult — just someone who knew him. Including the police working on the case — after all, the Golden State Killer/Original Night Stalker was a policeman, is it beyond the realm of possibility that Zodiac was a cop, and knew about the Manson phrase through his work before the public knew about — and included it in the cipher as a way to possibly divert attention towards Manson, without considering the possibility it could point towards a law enforcement Zodiac, too?

In short, is it a case of the Zodiac trying too hard to create a Manson red herring, thus accidentally revealing something about himself (knowledge of the Manson case before its details were public)?

I realize there are millions of crank theories about this matter, and mine is likely just another one.

But to me, the inclusion — and probable "distinction" from the rest of the text — of three words that can be rendered as "Life is Death, Death is Life" through the Zodiac’s frequent use of reversals, and there NOT being a Manson connection at precisely the same time Manson and his cult were using the phrase among themselves, appears nearly as improbable as a random solution coming up with "gas chamber" after gas chambers were mentioned on the Jim Dunbar show.

Sorry if this is stupid. Just trying to toss out an idea that occurred to me — that the 3 words can stand for all 6 in the Manson mantra through Zodiac’s "reversal" habit — in the hopes it might help a bit in some way.

Unlike the Zodiac case, there was plentiful evidence in the Manson Family case. Unsurprisingly, detectives in both cases suspected a possible link between the Manson Family and Zodiac. Many of the cult participants became informants and provided hours of verbal evidence. But a connection between the cases never materialized.

Now that we have the full key it’s interesting to look at the distributions of the symbols of the code.

We now Z used hard symbols for letters with low usage and multiple symbols for letters with more usage to obfuscate breakdown by pattern matching and by distribution. Z had more than a little fun with it as well.The coded symbol that corresponds to F is just that. F. W only has two symbols coded for it, one of which was W. That would have amused him greatly. To what level of knowledge does this coding correspond the experts say?

It may well be that the angled writing on different letters may have been a veiled hint in how to solve the code. The odd symbol in the Halloween code may well be some pictogram hint also. There’s much to unravel in the days and weeks to come.

Maybe a stretch, but:

You could interpret the left half of the symbol as the "one down, two over" knight’s move pattern, and the right half as indicating F decodes to itself. Also the one dot and two dots indicating the "one down, two over" pattern.

Unlike the Zodiac case, there was plentiful evidence in the Manson Family case. Unsurprisingly, detectives in both cases suspected a possible link between the Manson Family and Zodiac. Many of the cult participants became informants and provided hours of verbal evidence. But a connection between the cases never materialized.

True, but this cipher — which might contain the Manson phrase about "Life is Death," wouldn’t be translated for 51 years. Wonder if that would have been considered a connection at the time, if they’d been able to read it?

Well, that link https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/12/14/ … pher-crack is a pretty powerful critique of of Bauer’s solution. Specifically:
It should be immediately obvious that a very high degree of selectivity is going on here: furthermore, seven letters are left out (on lines 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7), while three extra letters are inserted (lines 5 and 8).

Adding letters that don’t have a symbol and adding padding space with dashes – just doesn’t produce a clean solution. I watched some of that Bauer video and he also seems to say stuff like a Half circle is equal to letter E for example – except sometimes it’s and M too – which is a full circle, and his reasoning is "zodiac made a mistake when he didn’t make it a full circle". That kind of stuff doesn’t seem clean to me. Do you know if Bauer’s key is available somewhere?

Dave’s key is attached.
The methods used for this new solve are:
Seperate cipher into 3 sections 9 lines, 9 lines and 2 lines.
Transpose cipher with 1 down 2 over rule.

2nd section of cipher needs:
Shift line 6 over 1 space – this looks to be a zodiac error
exclude "Life is" from transposition

Last 2 lines have complete words – some reversed

The decrypted message is so much more readable – and has the known zodiac references to "paradice", "slaves", and has the reference of "not being afraid of the gas chamber". You don’t see anywhere in their methods where they try to say symbols can resolve to multiple letters or adding letters where there are no symbols.

We all have our opinions but what Dave and the gang have here is a fantastic solution. You may think the above methods are alot of "fudging". I am of the opinion it is an official solve.

Yes Bauer has a key also.

Oranchak has it on his site http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com/?p=758

Download the powerpoint or PDF.

Also remember Oranchak stated there was evidence for gibberish in the Z408 cipher. It’s on page 67 of that presentation.

It is also here http://zodiackillerciphers.com/wiki/ind … tle=Pivots

How does this Z408 solution explain these pivots? He seemed to indicate a very low probability those pivots came about by chance. This solution seems to suggest that is no longer on the table.

Also Oranchak spent quite a bit of time raising the problem of proving causation in rebuttals to various solutions and yet here in this solution falling off one’s chair because the Dunbar show with ‘gas chamber’ precedes the sending of the Z408 is that very kind of causation claim he was rebutting elsewhere. However that isn’t fatal to his solution if he omits this.

Appeals to the Zodiac using statements outside of the puzzle for a solution is very sort of thing Oranchak seemed to not be enthusiastic about when others did it. If you have to go outside of the puzzle to explain the solution then he viewed that as not really a cipher solution at all. He would basically say Zodiac wasn’t giving us a real cipher then. In short, these solutions would not be objective but subjective and not mathematically quantifiable in any statistically significant way. However that isn’t fatal either if he omits it.

Then we have the problem that the Zodiac hasn’t given any inside knowledge in this solve and yet made it so illusive by requiring us to use multiple different techniques to derive a solution? Despite it being more of the same ‘trash’ as Oranchak puts it, the Zodiac never once bothered to give us the key like he did with the concerned citizen key? He had nothing to lose if we accept Oranchak’s interpretation of all this. That is something I would hang a question over.

People have found many Zodiac related words in the Z408 before. This is a popular example. It even has paradice.

What struck me watching Oranchak’s fine presentation was that it was resembling Bauer’s presentation in parts. To get things to make sense in some way. Granted maybe there is less fudging here but in mathematics this is usually a sign that not everything is okay when you have to do that. Oranchak would pretty much tell you this himself.

It seems to me that basically Oranchak has found something that he thinks is better than anything else he has come across before, but there is a lot of stuff here I would not expect him to have endorsed given the bar he was setting for others including proving statistical significance. There are math proofs he was looking for that are absent from this presentation. Instead what we get is a cipher solution with many unusual quirks to get it to work in some way which is the sort of thing you would expect from deriving meaning from random noise by applying lots of different rules to give it a pattern our brain finds appealing. Basically quite different from a mathematical proof.

Maybe it is the solution and I suppose now it is open to the public no doubt peers will be looking at it. In short, if this solution is correct I would expect it to appear as a peer-reviewed article in a cryptology journal. That’s how it’s done in academia.

What strike me is that after years of off the wall suggestions, from Norse, to Greek, to Batman, the real solution didn’t involve any obscure, arcane, esoteric knowledge, no great leaps of faith, no need to travel to Tibet to find a crystal skull to combine with 6 household items, no invisible ink lemon juice, no origami paper folding shinnanigans, no 3D glasses, no reading the cipher aloud at dawn 6 days before a lunar eclipse, none of the type of rubbish and nonsense that we’ve all been guilty of engaging in over the years was ever required.

The z340 was a regular, logical, straight forward cipher, probably from a book. Can we grab ahold of the grounded nature of this fact and let it bring us back down to earth.

I don’t want to hear any more tortured Z13 solutions, if it’s solvable, it will be solvable in the same way, it will reveal some coherent message, or sensible name, of that I am no longer in doubt.

I’m not saying people should stop throwing paint at the wall, I just think we should be guided and informed by the two solved ciphers. And what they tell us is that the Zodiac on at least two occasions created real, solvable ciphers with coherent messages. This should spur us on to reapply the basics to the z13. If the z340 really was a skytale cipher, then it tells us that Zodiac used existing techniques. It substantially raises the odds that all of techniques came from possibly one, or at most a handful of sources.

We can all agree that this was great work by Dave, Jarvle and Sam, with the important contributions over the years by glurk, smokie treats and many others. So we can agree that this was great work, a real achievement, while at the same time being disappointed that this solve of the Z340 does not seem to shed any further light on the identity of the Zodiac.

But I think it does shed some light on the identity of Zodiac.

First, that this is revealed as a real code, a complex one, one that defied the efforts of the FBI and others to decode it for 50 years. I think it tells us that Z was very intelligent, had some real skill in codes and mathematics.

More importantly, this code is very complex, multi – step, the decoding process involves adding numbers together to get the next step, it is multi-directional, including diagonal, and has numerous misspellings, with all or most likely being intentional to increase the difficulty of solution. This presents a very unique set of elements. The solvers do not seem aware of any other criminal or non-criminal code that employs these exact elements. If there was another code that used these exact same elements, I would think the FBI would be very interested in looking at the creator of such a code. A code like the solved Z340 is so complex, with so many specific elements, it presents something so unique that it is almost like a signature.

I am here to notify the solvers, and others, that there is a person, a criminal, a serial killer, a bomber and someone who, like Zodiac, wrote to newspapers stating innocents would die unless his words appeared on the front pages, who created and used a complex, multi-step, multi-directional code involving diagonal sequences.

This code is even more complex than the Z340. But he created this code probably in 1979 or thereabouts, so imagine the creator of the Z340 but with at least 10 more years of knowledge and experience in code creation.

Like the Z340, this code is complex, multi-step, you have to add numbers together to get the next step, is multi-directional, including diagonal, and has many misspelled words, all or most likely being intentional.

This was the code created and used by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

I know Dave, the other solvers and all of us here want more than anything for this code breakthrough to lead to a real breakthrough in the case, bringing the Zodiac to justice and bringing the survivors and the loved ones of the victims some real closure. I would ask Dave, Jarvle, Sam and others with expertise in codes to examine this evidence with an open mind.

When the FBI raided Ted’s cabin, they found a notebook with pages and pages of entries that just consisted of numbers, commas and spaces. They guessed it was a record of his crimes, but they could not break the code. Just like the creator of the Z340, Ted had created a code that the FBI could not break. It was not until they found the code key in the cabin that they were able to break the code, and found out that it was indeed a journal of all his Unabomber crimes, including three murders by bombs, bombings that injured over twenty, an attempt to blow up a passenger jet in mid-flight and the shooting and wounding of a worker at a mining site with a rifle.

The following was published in a cryptology journal details how the code worked. The author is member of the FBI Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU).

EXAMPLES OF ZODIAC & KACZYNSKI USING AN INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING TO INCREASE DIFFICULTY OF DECODING

Zodiac 408 Code: DANGEROUE
Unabomber Code: YESTERDAE

Both Zodiac and Kaczynski have a code in which in order to increase difficulty of solution they change the last consonant(the letters "S" and "Y") in a word to the vowel "E".

I originally posted this on Oranchak’s topic about the cipher, but I think this is the best place

I remembered an old topic here in the community of @Teg> An
http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=5031&hilit=typewriter

It was observed that many of the symbols and / or letters were next to each other When we look at the keyboard of a typewriter in Z408.

I observed a similar phenomenon in the keys of 340,

The letter B makes me quite sure that this makes sense, because if we look we have the letter B, the letter N and then the letter B inverted and the R letter:

Marcelo

I also dealt with this topic in depth when I presented Finder’s theory on the standard typewriter layout being a possible influence on the Zodiac codes.

viewtopic.php?f=81&t=2419&hilit=qwerty

I originally posted this on Oranchak’s topic about the cipher, but I think this is the best place

I remembered an old topic here in the community of @Teg> An
http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=5031&hilit=typewriter

It was observed that many of the symbols and / or letters were next to each other When we look at the keyboard of a typewriter in Z408.

I observed a similar phenomenon in the keys of 340,

The letter B makes me quite sure that this makes sense, because if we look we have the letter B, the letter N and then the letter B inverted and the R letter:

Marcelo

also dealt with this topic in depth when I presented Finder’s theory on the standard typewriter layout being a possible influence on the Zodiac codes.

wow, thanks Mr Ak!!I lost that in some time that I was away from the community, I will read this whole !!

We can all agree that this was great work by Dave, Jarvle and Sam, with the important contributions over the years by glurk, smokie treats and many others. So we can agree that this was great work, a real achievement, while at the same time being disappointed that this solve of the Z340 does not seem to shed any further light on the identity of the Zodiac.

But I think it does shed some light on the identity of Zodiac.

First, that this is revealed as a real code, a complex one, one that defied the efforts of the FBI and others to decode it for 50 years. I think it tells us that Z was very intelligent, had some real skill in codes and mathematics.

More importantly, this code is very complex, multi – step, the decoding process involves adding numbers together to get the next step, it is multi-directional, including diagonal, and has numerous misspellings, with all or most likely being intentional to increase the difficulty of solution. This presents a very unique set of elements. The solvers do not seem aware of any other criminal or non-criminal code that employs these exact elements. If there was another code that used these exact same elements, I would think the FBI would be very interested in looking at the creator of such a code. A code like the solved Z340 is so complex, with so many specific elements, it presents something so unique that it is almost like a signature.

I am here to notify the solvers, and others, that there is a person, a criminal, a serial killer, a bomber and someone who, like Zodiac, wrote to newspapers stating innocents would die unless his words appeared on the front pages, who created and used a complex, multi-step, multi-directional code involving diagonal sequences.

This code is even more complex than the Z340. But he created this code probably in 1979 or thereabouts, so imagine the creator of the Z340 but with at least 10 more years of knowledge and experience in code creation.

Like the Z340, this code is complex, multi-step, you have to add numbers together to get the next step, is multi-directional, including diagonal, and has many misspelled words, all or most likely being intentional.

This was the code created and used by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

I know Dave, the other solvers and all of us here want more than anything for this code breakthrough to lead to a real breakthrough in the case, bringing the Zodiac to justice and helping the survivors and the loved ones of the victims some real closure. I would ask Dave, Jarvle, Sam and others with expertise in codes to examine this evidence with an open mind.

When the FBI raided Ted’s cabin, they found a notebook with pages and pages of entries that just consisted of numbers, commas and spaces. They guessed it was a record of his crimes, but they could not break the code. Just like the creator of the Z340, Ted had created a code that the FBI could not break. It was not until they found the code key in the cabin that they were able to break the code, and found out that it was indeed a journal of all his Unabomber crimes, including three murders by bombs, bombings that injured over twenty, an attempt to blow up a passenger jet in mid-flight and the shooting and wounding of a worker at a mining site with a rifle.

The following was published in a cryptology journal details how the code worked. The author is member of the FBI Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU).

EXAMPLES OF ZODIAC & KACZYNSKI USING AN INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING TO INCREASE DIFFICULTY OF DECODING

Zodiac 408 Code: DANGEROUE
Unabomber Code: YESTERDAE

Both Zodiac and Kaczynski have a code in which in order to increase difficulty of solution they change the last consonant(the letters "S" and "Y") in a word to the vowel "E".

I’m not sure this is accurate, AK.

I think anyone with access to a code book and/or interest in codes could have done this code. It’s not overly sophisticated.

BDHOLLAND, you raise a lot of interesting points about how to confirm this solution. I hope to address some of them in my next video, by showing more detail about how the message might have been constructed. I think it is good to be skeptical and to validate claims. So far, every cryptographer I’ve talked to who has taken the time to analyze the key has concluded that they believe it to be true, but it is generally through an experience-driven feeling of "knowing" that it is right, without showing the exact mathematical arguments about why it is so.

One way I think about it is: How much information goes into producing the proposed key? For example, Corey Starliper is an extreme example, because he put an entire invented solution in his key. In his case, he added too much information into his key, and not enough of it was coming out of the cipher. In the 408, the only information that goes into the key is the list of substitutions. Everything else falls out. But you could also say some other small bits of info are "added", such as correcting some of the encipherment mistakes he made. But in that case, the amount of information added to the key was minimal.

In the 340’s solution, we had to add a bit more information: Not only do we have the substitutions, but we have a transposition scheme that is applied consistently to 2 sections. By themselves, those are enough to get really good solves from those sections. But the 2nd section produces somewhat garbled text until the transposition errors (intentionally made or otherwise) are corrected. So in that case, we have added a little more information to the key. However, I believe it is justified because when you use English n-gram statistics to measure the somewhat garbled text, it still measures very closely to normal English text. Much more closely than random text does. So it is evidence of a real message even without the corrections.

There is some subjectivity applied to the 3rd section, since we are guessing where the word divisions are, and which sections to reverse to produce the message. But in the end, those few additional steps (which again add information to the key) produce a very good and coherent message.

Ultimately, we got much more information out of the key than we added to it. So in that sense, that’s why we feel it is correct, compared to other solutions.

Coming at this from another direction, we could see if this same method could produce equally plausible but different solutions. Based on how systematic the overall decipherment method is, I think it would be extremely difficult to apply the same method in a slightly different way but still produce as coherent of a message as this. I think this would be difficult to quantify – we need to recruit some mathematicians.