Time of the Signs

December 11, 2020 11:34 AM

It appears that cipher Z340 of the cryptograms sent by the so-called Zodiac Killer in 1969 has finally been solved.
posted by Rumple (37 comments total)

The video is well worth watching in my opinion, but the purported text of the message (after a little post-decrypt massaging) is:

I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me.

That wasn't me on the TV show, which brings up a point about me:

I am not afraid of the gas chamber, because it will send me to paradice all the sooner, because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice.

So they are afraid of death. I am not afraid, because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradice.

Death is life.

posted by Rumple at 11:45 AM on December 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

Can you provide the correct link? I tried the add the 'z' to 340, but the entire site is giving me a Database Error, and a 503 previously.
posted by sagc at 11:46 AM on December 11, 2020

Mod note: Deleted a couple comments with a broken link; if you have a correct link to a site that works, it's fine to repost or I can link it.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 11:47 AM on December 11, 2020

“it me, ted cruz”
posted by Going To Maine at 11:48 AM on December 11, 2020 [96 favorites]

Zodiac ‘340 Cipher’ cracked by code experts 51 years after it was sent to the S.F. Chronicle
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:49 AM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:49 AM on December 11, 2020 [42 favorites]

I will give you

An early grave

No need to thank me

Burma Shave
posted by Splunge at 11:57 AM on December 11, 2020 [70 favorites]

Is anyone able to read the SF Chronicle article? I keep getting paywalled off free views even though I know I haven't visited them in a long while.
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:01 PM on December 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yes. The article mentions:

Cameron Polan, spokeswoman for the FBI’s San Francisco office, confirmed Oranchak’s claim Friday. In a statement emailed to The Chronicle, she said:

“The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens. The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners.
posted by Transmissions From Vrillon at 12:04 PM on December 11, 2020

What the hell? First, the victims are murdered and now they will be his slaves in the afterlife? I'm beginning to think that this guy is a real jerk.
posted by NoMich at 12:16 PM on December 11, 2020 [69 favorites]

For those interested, there's a more substantial discussion of the code cracking here, over on reddit.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 12:21 PM on December 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

This SF Chronicle link worked for me, no paywall. It goes into some detail about the Zodiac Killer, the solvers, and the cypher.
posted by muddgirl at 12:39 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

The content of the message is interesting because it feels like he wanted the newspaper to read & publish it to clear up the fact that he is not afraid of being caught/killed, so why did he make the cypher harder than the first one? I guess it's kind of futile trying to understand his mindset.
posted by muddgirl at 12:43 PM on December 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

so why did he make the cypher harder than the first one? I guess it's kind of futile trying to understand his mindset.

or as a friend recently said (yes it was a non sequitur then, too), you may as well ask, why would a band call themselves Echo and the Bunnymen?
posted by philip-random at 12:47 PM on December 11, 2020 [7 favorites]

I wonder if they've tried a DNA trawl yet, like the one the caught the Golden State Killer. Wikipedia article says they've got some partial DNA believed to be from the killer, taken from stamps and envelopes.
posted by jquinby at 12:50 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Why were they enciphered at all? Presumably he liked the idea of people having to work to figure them out.
posted by atoxyl at 12:51 PM on December 11, 2020

Here is the article via TRIMREAD: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/56111
posted by jim in austin at 12:53 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I wonder if they've tried a DNA trawl yet,

In May 2018, the Vallejo Police Department announced their intention to attempt to collect the Zodiac Killer's DNA from the back of stamps he used during his correspondence. The analysis, by a private laboratory, is expected to check the DNA against GEDmatch. It is hoped the Zodiac Killer may be caught in a similar fashion to the "Golden State Killer" Joseph James DeAngelo. In May 2018, a Vallejo police detective said that results were expected in several weeks. However, to date, no results have been reported

posted by Mitheral at 1:20 PM on December 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

There's an online cult that believes all of the misspellings and odd capitalization in Trump's tweets form a code, and they're applying all their collective intellect to decode it. The obvious answer is that Donald don't write good, but I guess it keeps them busy.
posted by adept256 at 1:34 PM on December 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm beginning to think that this guy is a real jerk.

I am probably not alone in thinking this kind of brings us around to Ted Cruz again.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:47 PM on December 11, 2020 [37 favorites]

adept256: "There's an online cult that believes all of the misspellings and odd capitalization in Trump's tweets form a code"

Simply eliminate the "M" and the "P", and everything he writes is TRU
posted by chavenet at 2:06 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

...Oranchak teamed up with two fellow, amateur code crackers and ran the bewildering set of symbols through special software programs. His teammates were Sam Blake, a mathematician in Australia, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a warehouse operator in Belgium.

Paging William Gibson to the static-colored courtesy phone, please.
posted by hototogisu at 2:12 PM on December 11, 2020 [28 favorites]

“it me, ted cruz”

Zodiac Killer was just Ted's larval stage. What we're seeing now is the pupa stage which will eventually form a chrysalis on the way to the adult stage. I suspect adult stage will look something like Sarris from Galaxy Quest but don't quote me on that.
posted by ensign_ricky at 2:49 PM on December 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

static-colored

heh. i got that.
posted by slater at 3:18 PM on December 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

they're applying all their collective intellect to decode it.

Well, *checks watch*
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:22 PM on December 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Good excuse to rewatch Zodiac. 👍

⌖
posted by mazola at 3:26 PM on December 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

I would have liked it if the decoded cipher started out, "Well, FINALLY."
posted by bz at 3:40 PM on December 11, 2020

Isn't it surprising that this kid-stuff substitution cipher, aided by a little trickery in the ordering of the symbols, resisted serious decoding attempts for so long? It's like a cipher from Alvin Fernald's Secret Code.

Mind you, I never would have managed it. But I was under the impression that these types of encipherment a provided next to no security in the face of an interested and experienced decoder.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:53 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

There's an online cult that believes all of the misspellings and odd capitalization in Trump's tweets form a code, and they're applying all their collective intellect to decode it.

Well, he has to acknowledge Putin's instructions somehow.
posted by jamjam at 6:10 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Western Infidels

But I was under the impression that these types of encipherment a provided next to no security in the face of an interested and experienced decoder.

I had the same reaction to you, it seems pretty basic. I guess it just boils down to how much of a juicy target a cipher is. If cracking the Zodiac cipher had let you steal everyone's bitcoins or log into their bank account or email or whatever you can bet it would have been cracked years ago. Aside from the celebrity nature of this case there isn't a lot of incentive for people to look at it.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 6:47 PM on December 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

The content of the message is interesting because it feels like he wanted the newspaper to read & publish it to clear up the fact that he is not afraid of being caught/killed, so why did he make the cypher harder than the first one?

I suppose the reason is that the first cipher was solved by a schoolteacher and his wife working at their kitchen table. The Zodiac Killer may have taken that as a blow to his ego and made subsequent ciphers harder as a result.
posted by jonp72 at 6:53 PM on December 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Mind you, I never would have managed it. But I was under the impression that these types of encipherment a provided next to no security in the face of an interested and experienced decoder.

Difficulty in cracking this sort of cypher is inversely proportional to the length of plain text. If the Zodiac Killer had written a 1000 word manifesto via this method it would have been cracked right away. On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if 340 encrypted characters was right at the limit of possibly being decrypted and that only because they could project some probable text for cribs. Compare with the remaining cypher which is only 13 characters and will probably never be decyphered except by possible brute force of 13 letter phrases/words but there isn't any error checking built in so we'll never know with any certainty if we got it right (IE: any 13 character piece of text is just as likely as any other).

EG:

slave rewards

Zodiac Killer

Paradice now!

Are all 13 characters, are all at least somewhat plausible, and there isn't any way to eliminate them from being the plain text of the 13 character cypher text.
posted by Mitheral at 7:11 PM on December 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

As a former D&D player, I must point out that a pair a' dice is hardly a worthy goal - that's barely even a start.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:53 PM on December 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

It puts the cypher in the basket.
posted by clavdivs at 8:39 PM on December 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Mostly, it seems, it was hard to crack because he messed up the enciphering. If it had been as simple as a diagonal it would have fallen long ago, but when you have to start accounting for every way a person can mess up a simple process, it kind of explodes the problem space.
posted by joeyh at 6:51 AM on December 12, 2020 [9 favorites]

Isn't it surprising that this kid-stuff substitution cipher, aided by a little trickery in the ordering of the symbols, resisted serious decoding attempts for so long? It's like a cipher from Alvin Fernald's Secret Code.

If you only need to encode a single, short message and you're allowed to make mistakes during the encoding process, then stacking together a bunch of cereal box encryption and arbitrary text rearrangement will produce a message that's at the very least extremely tedious to break.
posted by Pyry at 7:08 AM on December 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yous all have seen that Ted Cruz has tweeted about this?
posted by runincircles at 7:06 AM on December 16, 2020 [1 favorite]