In our many online discussions of the Zodiac’s ciphers, I’ve often needed to create pictures of symbols or pieces of the cipher text to illustrate a point. This became tedious after a while, so I created the “Zodiac Typewriter” to make this task simpler.
The Zodiac Typewriter gives you a quick way to string together a set of symbols to save as HTML (for blogposts and web pages), or as BBCode (for forum posts). It also generates hyperlinks so you can share your chunks of cipher text. This is so much faster than creating homemade, custom images. For example:
Here’s how to use it:
First, enter some text into the input box:
As you type your text, the generated cipher text image will appear below:
Each of the available cipher symbols is displayed in a table, along with the corresponding letter you can type to use it. The symbols come from the 408, 340, 13, and 32 character ciphers:
To use a symbol, enter its corresponding letter into the input box. Or, while your cursor is in the input box, click on one of the symbols. If you enter an unrecognized letter, a red question mark will appear.
If the table of symbols gets in your way, click the “hide” button.
Click the “lighter” button to make the cipher text gray. You can then click the “darker” button to make it black again. Maybe we’ll make this thing support more colors in the future.
When you’re happy with the cipher text, you can share it in several ways. One option is HTML, which is simply a collection of image tags that link directly to the images for each symbol. Click the “show html” button and you’ll see the HTML source. Copy and paste it to your blog post or web page and you’ll see the cipher text.
Another sharing option is to use BBCode for forum posts. Click the “show bbcode” button and you’ll see the bbcode necessary to reproduce your cipher text in a post. It is a collection of image tags, just like the HTML source. Simply copy and paste the BBCode into your post.
Finally, you can link directly to your cipher by clicking the “show links” button, which will generate hyperlinks for your cipher text. The “Full” link will open your cipher in the full Zodiac Typewriter interface. The “Compact” link opens a page that displays only your cipher.
Compact: http://zodiackillerciphers.com/typewriter/index.html?cipher=ENWZ6p+&mode=compact
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Michael Cole has a great recent post on his site concerning the flood of web traffic again generated by the interest in Corey Starliper’s debunked claim of a solution to the 340-character cipher. Michael’s indictment of shoddy journalism is spot on.
If Corey Starliper walked into your office and announced that he had cured cancer, would you write the story: “Tewksbury Native: I’ve Cured Cancer” without seeking input from a medical professional? If he walked in and claimed to have solved one of math’s currently unsolved problems, would you write the article without doing something to evaluate the validity of his claim? I hope the answer to those questions is “No.” But, for some reason, if he walks in and says he’s solved a cipher that’s remained unsolved for the last 40 years, the Tewksbury Patch has no problem publishing an article without doing anything in terms of evaluating the probability that his solution is actually correct. His solution is garbage, pure and simple. Point me to one person with real cryptographic expertise who endorses Starliper’s solution. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you cannot because I’m fairly certain one does not exist.
Those of us who have definitively shown Corey’s solution to be incorrect are often criticized for being “jealous” of him for solving the code, or for not having a solution that is better than his. What those critics fail to understand is that I would be among the first people to celebrate a real solution to any of the unsolved Zodiac ciphers, no matter who comes up with it! To be rid of another long-standing mystery would be a great relief to us all. In the meantime, there is no reason to sit back and accept unsubstantiated claims without evaluating their merit.
This new Zodiac-related iPhone app was released recently by Rene Lowack:
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Screenshots: (more…)
In Part 1, we looked out how to use Project Gutenberg‘s large collection of about 39,000 digitized books to apply cribs to cipher texts to try to tease out solutions. Another way we can use the collection of books is to see if any of the unique words and phrases used by the killer in his many correspondences can be found among the books. Did the killer use a unique writing style that was similar to the style of another author? Did he use relatively rare words that can only be found in a few sources? Can any of his many misspelled words be found in common usage by other authors, suggesting a connection? (more…)
One way to attack a substitution cipher is to guess what part of the plain text solution might be, “plugging” it into where you think it might fit in the cipher text, and then seeing if you can get more of the solution to appear in the rest of the cipher text. Known as a “crib“, this type of attack can be useful if you get lucky and pick the right text.
Donald Harden, along with his wife, solved the 408-character cipher within a week after seeing it. (Image courtesy of zodiackiller.com)
Even with only the small phrase “I LIKE KILLING” used as a crib, other easily solved pieces pop out of the puzzle.
Retired Vallejo officer Lyndon Lafferty has been getting a lot of attention for his book in which he claims to know who the Zodiac killer was. The numerous criticisms of his claims aren’t mentioned by the various news stories, but you can find them here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Lafferty claims to have solved the unsolved Zodiac ciphers, but fails to provide details on his solutions. Like many of his other claims, he expects you to take his word for it. To make matters worse, instead of sharing the solutions outright, he says he intends to profit from them:
The detailed explanation and analysis, including the unbelieveable and undeniable pattern, will be offered for sale at the first opportunity.
Would you pay him?
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Over forty years of frustration have passed since the Zodiac killer first sent his mysterious 340-character cipher to the San Francisco Chronicle. It only took a week for two teachers to solve his previous cipher. But many thousands of people, over four decades, have tried to crack the mystery of the 340-character cipher, to no avail. You may have seen many would-be solutions in news stories and on the internet. The 408-character cipher was solved with a definitiveness that defies any possible doubt, because it is impossible for the Harden’s key (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) to produce such an easily understood plain text message purely by chance. No such solution yet exists for the 340, despite numerous claims to the contrary.
So, with so much failure and defeat confronting us, should we just accept the possibility that the killer, frustrated by the swift unlocking of his previous secret message, simply created a fake cipher to keep us all busy all these years?
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Mike Cole of ZodiacRevisited.com has released a tool that lets you create your own Zodiac-like cipher texts using homophonic substitution:
Screenshot:
I think this tool is very useful for creating test ciphers that can be fed into cipher solving tools such as zkdecrypto, Zodiac Decoder, and CryptoCrack. Give it a whirl!
The killer’s first cipher was solved rather quickly by amateur codebreakers because they guessed that the killer would use words such as “I” and “kill”. Can similar guesswork help us solve the unsolved 340-character cipher? This is something people have been trying for years. But nobody has yet unlocked the mystery.
Zodiac sent many letters over the years, taunting the public about his crimes. From this collection of plain text, we can see what words he really likes to use in his writings.
Here are the results of an experiment that uses an algorithm to detect phrases and words that repeat in his writings. Perhaps somewhere among the results is something that might appear in the real solution of the 340-character cipher, if it indeed contains one.
Welcome to the Zodiac Ciphers blog. Here I will try to post all the latest news on efforts to solve the mysterious Zodiac ciphers, which, with only one exception, have remained unsolved for over 40 years.
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who claimed several victims in Northern California in the 1960s and 1970s. He terrorized the area with his crimes, letters, and taunts, and has never been caught. Some of his letters included mysterious cryptograms. Only one has been solved definitively. Do the rest of them contain any real messages? If so, would they shed any light at all on the identity of the mysterious killer?
Read more about the Zodiac Killer here.
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