Hi,

what incredible great news! I still can’t believe that z340 has been solved now. The solution is undeniably correct and complete. Congratulations to the three of you! So much perseverance over all these years, never giving up and triumphing over the cipher in the end. You have earned this success so much! I am very happy that it was you who found the solution in the end. This is the well-deserved reward for your tireless work! To be honest: I was afraid all these years that someone would read the forum, pick up an idea, then solve the cipher and claim everything for himself. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened.

When I heard that z340 was solved, I was completely off track. I couldn’t even continue working, I was so overwhelmed by emotions. That must have been an great moment for you, and especially for you Dave, when you were able to read the solution to the first nine lines. I think the short meme in the video describes it perfectly.
It’s especially honorable that at the beginning of the video all the victims and family members were remembered. The z340 code must have lain like a shadow on the descendants all these years. Even if the now found plain text is quite disturbing, the now gained certainty about the content must have taken a lot of pressure off.

The next weeks and months will certainly be extremely exciting. There is still so much to discover and so many unanswered questions. Finally, we can get to the bottom of the pivots, the special bigrams peaks and so on. For example, at least the left pivot seems to be partially random (related to the upper "R"), because it lies in the intersection of part 1 and part 2. So many questions will be clarified in the near future that have driven us to sheer despair in recent years. I would like so much to be working on z340 from dawn to dusk right now, but unfortunately that’s not possible for me. I have very little time until about mid-January and a lot on my plate. I hope I can still find a little time in between. I would like to investigate the one or other point from the "encyclopedia of observations".

I was not involved in the final decryption process, but I am enormously happy to be part of such a great forum and team. I first became aware of this forum about five years ago and have followed every thread enthusiastically. I was hugely impressed with the meticulousness and cleverness smokie treats, Jarlve, David and many others were working on z340. Since joining about 4 1/2 years ago, I have learned a great deal from you guys. Questions have always been answered in a factual, friendly and enormously competent manner. Thank you morf13 for providing this great forum! With that in mind, I’m especially pleased that you mentioned me in the credits, Dave. That means a lot to me. It’s great to know that I was able to give something back and contribute with my tool Peek-a-boo.

I can definitely say that those years were very formative for me. Somehow it was all more than just a hobby. Still, it wasn’t without its dangers either. Puzzles like z340, along with its dark history, can hook you so much that it can become an obsession. It wasn’t always easy to control the scale and put aside compilers, solvers and so on. So it is also a kind of relief that you have now found the solution.

I think that the programs created over the years (David’s Webtools, Jarlve’s AZDecrypt, Smokie Treat’s Excel tools and maybe my Peek-a-boo) will continue to be very useful for other projects. AZDecrypt in particular is probably the Swiss Army knife of decryption tools. Jarlve, it’s just impressive what you have created!!

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