It probably has to do with the contract and who has control over the show. Most of us have probably made contracts where we didn’t know exactly what we were getting ourselves into. I have for sure. It is probably something like that.

I am sorry but I must reiterate. How do Knight and Bauer try to run with this completely BS proposed solution? After even supposedly running it by the code team before taking this run of the mill BS outside the team?

I do not not believe for a minute Dave, Ryan or the Google guy are on board. How could they be when this hunk of poo is worse than Starliper and cecil when it follows the same loose parameters. At least they had a full decipherment.

I can not stress the bafflement stemming from this. Knight and Bauer should not only be ashamed but embarrassed as well. This is down right wrong on so many levels and I am seriously pissed. I am on the brink of losing respect for Knight and Bauer over this.

4on4off-

You (and everyone) should look at Oranchak’s article from a few years back here:
http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com/?p=602

The referenced paper by Garlick is here:
http://www.cse.unt.edu/~garlick/researc … ac-340.pdf

The HC solution manages to do almost ALL of the wrong things, LOL.

-glurk

From the Garlick paper (after he shows a 4 character word using the cypher symbols):

"(The answer was actually ‘dog’ since in my cipher triangle symbols are meaningless.)"

Surely he means "in my cypher triangle symbols are full stops."

I always found it interesting that if you Caesar shift the first 3 letters HER 14 places (Halloween Card) you get ‘VSF’, very similar to the new symbol also given by Zodiac on the Halloween Card.

Unfortunately following this pattern with the rest doesn’t reveal anything coherent. But maybe it’s a different Caesar shift every 3 letters or something. Or 14 somehow relates to the dot symbols on the 340.

Or maybe it’s a clue to part of the text. Something like – "The four teens shot in Vallejo San Francisco…"

Or it’s probably nothing

Here are more details about Craig’s solution to Z340 from the final episode of "The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer":

http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com/?p=758

So basically Bauer is saying that Zodiac made a bazillion mistakes in the 340 which gives him the liberty to make anything fit

His effort is clearly not correct. The 408 had mistakes but even those were logical. Like a few mispelled words or missing one word out entirely, probably by accident. However 90%+ of it was perfectly correct and could be deciphered using consistent logic. Craig breaks every rule in the book and his method gets worse as the lines go by. It’s no different than what others have done before and claimed to be correct.

My guess is the 340 is either a fake to waste police time. Or it isn’t a homophonic substitution cipher like the 408 and requires a different angle of approach. It would make sense for Zodiac to look at his ‘Crypto for noobs’ book and try a different method. I would expect there to be a message in the majority of the text if any at all, similar to the 408, not just the top few lines.

It probably has to do with the contract and who has control over the show. Most of us have probably made contracts where we didn’t know exactly what we were getting ourselves into. I have for sure. It is probably something like that.

I wanted to agree with this… But the more I hear…

His effort is clearly not correct. The 408 had mistakes but even those were logical. Like a few mispelled words or missing one word out entirely, probably by accident. However 90%+ of it was perfectly correct and could be deciphered using consistent logic. Craig breaks every rule in the book and his method gets worse as the lines go by. It’s no different than what others have done before and claimed to be correct.

I have to be honest, and say that this "solution" is just crap. And no one else in the ‘crypto world’ agrees with it either.

It seems that most of his students don’t think very highly of him as well:
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRat … tid=151908

-glurk

From http://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-k … maybe-not/

Craig Bauer is a friend of mine. He has dedicated his latest book Uncovered to me. It goes without saying that I don’t begrudge him this success. But is his solution correct?

To be honest, I dont’ think so.

I don’t think he would make a cipher that had no meaning. He thoroughly enjoyed outsmarting the cops, so wasting their time with a nonsense cipher wouldn’t be as gratifying as sending one so impossible to break, he could outsmart them while wasting their time. After looking closer at what Craig did, I’m not sure he solved anything. I should’ve done that before I took the bait believing him.

Zresearch-

In a homophonic substitution cipher:

1) A single letter may have multiple substitute symbols.
2) A single symbol may only substitute for a single letter.

Do you see the difference there?

-glurk

I know the difference but fail to see how it applies.

a homophonic substitution cipher is a cipher in which single letters can be replaced by a series different cipher-symbols which is a great method of avoiding frequency analysis.

It appeared that your issue involved several ciphertext symbols representing the same plaintext letter, which is quite common.

But your issue was the opposite, no?

Does anybody have the "gibberish" plaintext lines which were produced using Craig Bauer’s "key"?

It would save me some time here.

There are some very simple methods of creating ciphers which are very difficult to break, for example:

Ig K kei ybjbdtfhhtt kzbm oaur viuj vcrhvtb, izg jcjbu xblnp eyue uq wvftznnb etr qxfywknztq qxmcqow ntaw yvluahtnk sgx odbl vovng xmku vnoo fb rtsfvx nca ocrumvlrl vsirxeqkh jizfz u onfrgenkxw howpnb. Etvg xi mwks nejnke, zgw zjxf lrpqupiaj kg wyxkac

If I had first substituted the plaintext letters above with ciphertext symbols, it would be incredibly difficult to decode, yet it does not take an advanced cryptology scholar to create these types of ciphers.

Even if I took the coded text above and put it through a Caesar-box, would you be able to decode it?

I’m guessing that most would have trouble just decoding my example cipher text, which does hold a message.

…the point was, zodiac did not have to be some sort of a genius, or even that smart, to generate a cipher which would be near impossible to break.

Hi,

solution (scroll down, don’t want to spoil the game)

Edit:
Now I have a few more minutes than before:

You’re right, there are many ways to create ciphers with very simple methods in such a way that they can no longer be solved. In addition to very individual creations, the One Time Pad is also part of the collection. An error in the encryption process can also make sure that you can no longer access the plain text. But the statistics of z340 indicate that one day a solution can be found. Whatever z340 is….its not a bunch of random symbols (but maybe the plaintext is).
However, a substitution of your sample cipher does not guarantee that it cannot be solved.

If I had substituted this text with symbols, you would first have to transfer the ciphertext symbols into plaintext and then would then need to decode the resulting plaintext using a trithemius cipher. This is very simple, yet very difficult to decode

wow,, what a disappointment.

1. Several cipher symbols deciphered to 2 letters of the alphabet, one even a question mark as the second. ( I was under the impression this characteristic was the biggest flag of them all when it comes to a forced solution).

It’s normal for several cipher symbols to decode to the same letter.

He didn’t say several cipher symbols to the same letter, he said several to two different letters, huge difference and is the reason the ‘solution’ is not valid.

wow,, what a disappointment.

1. Several cipher symbols deciphered to 2 letters of the alphabet, one even a question mark as the second. ( I was under the impression this characteristic was the biggest flag of them all when it comes to a forced solution).

It’s normal for several cipher symbols to decode to the same letter.

He didn’t say several cipher symbols to the same letter, he said several to two different letters, huge difference and is the reason the ‘solution’ is not valid.

People mess this up so often, perhaps they just do not read carefully. In a homophonic cipher, it would be NORMAL for a common letter like "E" to have several cipher-text symbols:

E is represented by @ # % *

But, if a cipher-text symbol like # can mean either plain-text W or T, then the solution can be very ambiguous.

EXAMPLE:

SOME SAID I AM GOING TO BOMB THE PARK. THAT IS NO# MY PLAN!

If the pound sign is deciphered as T then Zodiac won’t bomb the park. If the pound sign is deciphered as W then Zodiac will bomb it.
That’s why any given ciphertext symbol must resolve to only one letter. It only takes ONE letter to change the entire message!

-glurk

A person more cynical than myself might wonder… Is this Nixon solution nicely setting up Series 2 with a hot "new" suspect, and a nice road trip to Montana perhaps?