I’m getting a real Zodiac vibe from these French ads for the “Megamac” burger from McDonalds.

https://twitter.com/Megamacisback/




Here are three promos from the Zodiac Killer special episode of Mysteries at the Museum, a popular show on the Travel Channel:

Description:

In the late 60s and early 70s, the San Francisco Bay area was terrorized by a killer who called himself the Zodiac. Through letters mailed to the press, the Zodiac claimed to have murdered up to 37 people. He toyed with police sending them cryptic codes that allegedly contained his identity. But he was never caught, much less identified. So, what happened to the Zodiac?

Don Wildman sets out to discover the true-identity of the Zodiac — one of America’s most notorious serial killers. He visits the actual crimes scenes and learns about the victims. Don works with an expert cryptographer to unravel the famous Z340 cipher – a mysterious code, written by the Zodiac, that to this day has not been solved. He speaks with an amateur detective who’s spent the last ten years looking for the killer. And finally, he learns a new theory on who may be responsible for these brutal crimes.

I will be playing the role of the “expert cryptographer.” Assuming they didn’t leave my scenes on the cutting room floor. 🙂

The episode airs Wednesday, October 3rd, 2018 at 9PM EDT on the Travel Channel.

Earlier this month I gave a talk about Zodiac’s unsolved 340-character cipher at the annual convention of the American Cryptogram Association in Hendersonville, NC. It is full of things I’ve learned over the years about the cipher. My goal was to try to summarize all the interesting “clues” in the cipher, and hopefully get more people interested in trying to solve it. Here is a video I made of the talk, including updated visuals:

It gets rather technical at times but that’s because the audience is full of fellow codebreaking enthusiasts.

The other talks at the convention were fascinating and covered a wide variety of topics, such as ancient Latin manuscripts, playing card ciphers, competitive codebreaking for kids, an NSA case study involving dictionary codes, cryptocurrencies, a code on William Friedman’s tombstone, puzzles as on-stage entertainment, and interrupted key ciphers. To top it off, the keynote talk was by Will Shortz, the famous New York Times crossword editor, in which he gave many interesting examples of devious crossword puzzles that contained hidden messages beyond the normal solutions.

There were so many intelligent and friendly codebreaking enthusiasts at the convention, and I hope some of them will turn their efforts to working towards a solution to Zodiac’s 340 cipher!

Newspapers.com recently added more old issues of the S.F. Examiner newspaper to its archives. I found this old article about Z340. I’ve never seen it before!

Someone on Quora asked, “How do people know that the Zodiac Killer’s cyphers aren’t just gibberish that have no real meaning?” I responded with the following article which I also posted on Quora:

There are four total ciphers: Z408, Z340, Z13 and Z32. Of the four, only Z408 has been solved. Z13 and Z32 are too short, so verifying solutions would rely on extraordinary evidence such as discovering the keys from Zodiac himself, or by finally catching and questioning him if he’s still alive.

As for Z340, there are a few bits of evidence that could be put in the “it’s gibberish” column:

  1. A non-gibberish cipher would probably have been solved by now.
  2. Zodiac liked to mess with people (especially to make law enforcement look bad), so making gibberish ciphers is right up his alley.

But there’s really no good test to conclude once and for all that the ciphers are gibberish, apart from an admission from Zodiac himself. You could easily create a gibberish plaintext yourself and make a cipher from it, and it could be the next famous unsolved cipher.

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On the other hand, there have been some interesting papers on the topic of the Beale ciphers that present some evidence that they are hoaxed:

  1. A DISSENTING OPINION
  2. Cryptanalysis of Beale Cipher Number Two

But apparently they are not enough of a “smoking gun” to fully convince everyone of the hoax hypothesis for the Beale ciphers.

It is possible that there is some characteristic of Z340 that could be discovered, and would only be present if the message was gibberish. I’m really curious to know if such characteristics could be discovered from homemade gibberish ciphers made to resemble Z340.

Nevertheless, there are still many things that can be put in the “it’s not gibberish” columns:

  1. Z340 uses an encoding scheme that hasn’t been fully tested yet. Maybe he used a traditional type of pen and paper cipher that hasn’t yet been exhaustively explored. For example, there are so many ways to rearrange the plaintext before assigning symbols. Or maybe he invented his own scheme that no one has guessed yet. When Z408 was cracked, the papers talked about how the solvers took advantage of patterns found in the cipher text. Zodiac could have focused on somehow removing those patterns from Z340. Or maybe he found some obscure idea in a book or one of those pulp fiction detective stories from back in those days (they were popular and often included ciphers)
  2. Zodiac was sloppy in making Z408 (details here), and thus may have made too many mistakes in Z340, which makes it more difficult (or impossible) to solve. (I suppose this could have effectively turned it into gibberish)
  3. There are clues in Z340 that have significance to cryptanalysts. Many of them are detailed here: Encyclopedia of observations For example, would a gibberish cipher really have the periodic ngram bias described there?
  4. On the 6th row the cipher text, he crossed out some symbol and wrote a backwards K above it:

    If the message is gibberish, why did he bother to correct the mistake? Was it just to give the false appearance of a real message? Or was he truly concerned about the integrity of the cipher text?

So, I think gibberish is a real possibility, but I still believe there might be a real message in there, especially since we still haven’t exhausted all the codebreaking possibilities.

On the other hand, if another 50 years goes by without a solution… 🙂

(Note: here’s a similar article I wrote a long time ago about this same topic: Cipher Legitimacy)

Reelz is airing a new episode of Real Story of…, a docu-series that “unpicks fact from fiction with interviews from the real people behind these extraordinary events”.

I was interviewed briefly about the Zodiac’s ciphers. Let’s see if they included the footage. 🙂

The episode airs tomorrow, February 6th 2018, at 9PM ET/PT on the Reelz network.

UPDATE: Here’s a video promo:

Catch me and fellow Code Team member Ryan Garlick on the “Behind True Crime” podcast, where we chat about the Zodiac case and the ciphers:

The finale of “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer” features code team member Craig Bauer’s solution to Z340 which made quite a splash in Zodiac and crypto communities.

Much has been written about it on other sites already so I’ll direct you to them:

Yesterday, Craig released a PowerPoint presentation with more details about his solution:

Click here to download (PowerPoint format)
Click here to download (PDF format)

Or, view the slides directly below:

Craig’s conclusion about his solution:

I believe the solution presented here is fundamentally correct. By this, I mean that in correcting errors made by Zodiac, I may have ended up with a couple of incorrect words, but I don’t believe I am off by more than that.

So, what do you think? Is Craig on the right track?

In my forum posts and presentations I’ve often needed a way to mark up Zodiac’s ciphers to communicate ideas about them. Forum member Largo created an excellent Zodiac ciphers font which made it possible for me to make a web-based tool to marking up and highlighting the ciphers. If you need some time off from all these ciphers, you can try playing exciting games on sites like 카지노 사이트.

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It is called Cipher Explorer and you can use it at this link:

http://zodiackillerciphers.com/cipher-explorer

Here are some examples of how you can mark up the ciphers:

Here is a quick tutorial video showing how to use the tool:

I hope you find the tool useful! Feel free to pass along any suggestions or problem reports. I hope to eventually integrate this tool with the nicer features from the Webtoy and CryptoScope.

The first episode of “The Hunt for The Zodiac Killer” made a big splash and scored almost 1.4 million viewers when it aired this past Tuesday:

Check out some of the reactions from Michael Butterfield, Tom Voigt, and Nick Pelling. Join the conversations surrounding the show at Mike Morford’s forum and Tom Voigt’s forum.

Here’s the teaser for the next episode:

And Kevin Knight gives us an overview of codebreaking and CARMEL:

Stream full episodes on History.com (if you authenticate via your cable provider). Or pick up the episodes a la carte on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW_ud6IDlb8

I’m exciting to see what these code nerds turn up next. 🙂