Cipher Mysteries

If you happen to like both technical-minded heavy metal and cipher mysteries, I might possibly have a hot tip for you (thanks to Phil Strahl's blog). Otto Kinzel has released an album on Bluntface Records called "I want to report a murder", where every track is based on features or events in the Zodiac Killer cipher case. Kinzel has ...

Heteroscedasticity - now there’s a word you don’t see very often (thanks to Rosco Paterson for kindly plonking it in my path). Which is a pity, because it’s a particularly useful concept that might help us crack several longstanding cipher mysteries. The idea behind it is not too far from the old joke about the statistician with his feet in the ...

One of the nice things about the unsolved Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher is that we have a previous solved cipher by the same encipherer (i.e. the Z408 cipher), which appears to exhibit many of the same properties as the Z340. Hence, if we could forensically reconstruct how Z408 was constructed (i.e. its cryptographic methodology), we might also gain valuable insights ...

Here's a nice story that should bring heart to researchers struggling with uncracked homophonic ciphers (e.g. Zodiac Killer Ciphers, Beale Papers, etc). Kevin Knight, who Voynich Manuscript researchers may remember from various posts here, has now co-authored a 2011 paper with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer from Uppsala University on how they cracked a hitherto unknown (to ...

A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I'm very sorry to say that you've missed out on three recent updates to the site. They were (in ...

Here's some more on the Zodiac Killer ciphers, specifically the interesting uncracked one ("Z340"). Though most of the images of this on the Internet are both monochrome and somewhat overexposed, here's a link to a nice image of Z340 at a high-enough resolution to be useful. Thanks to this, I think you can see that the correction on row ...

As I mentioned here and indeed here a few days ago, my usually-Early-Renaissance-focused thoughts have of late been turning slowly to the Zodiac Killer Ciphers, in particular to the unsolved 340-character cipher known as "Z340". Unusually as cipher mysteries go, we also have an earlier cipher called "Z408" (no prizes for guessing its length) by the same person, ...

Of late, I've been gradually getting into the whole culture surrounding the Zodiac Killer cipher. One pretty good source of information is ZodiacKiller.com, where to my great surprise I found a link to a November 2007 Daily Star article (how did I ever miss this?), claiming that troubled dance-pop queen Britney Spears was heavily into the whole Zodiac ...

A certain Corey Starliper of Tewksbury, Mass claimed last month (July 2011) to have finally solved the famous-but-uncracked "340" (i.e. 340-glyph long) message sent in 1969 to the San Francisco Chronicle by the Zodiac Killer. Bless 'im, but his so-called solution boils down to opportunistically choosing between multiple Caesar shifts, while modifying words and adding in extra ones where ...

I'm getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google's hits are for ghastly sites listing "Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries" or "10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes". Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I'm not getting "Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips" and ...