bobbo, the pragmatic libertarian Existential Anti-Theist says:

“He even sent the code to a cryptographer, who, after looking over the solution, said that it appeared “not valid,” according to Starliper.” /// and it was not valid, why?

“What Starliper hopes to do is to apply his number patterns to the other unsolved ciphers that Zodiac sent to the police.” //// The note took 6 hours to break. He didn’t have time to solve the others? Something missing there.

You know what cops “first think” about volunteer case solvers? Its as bad as being married to a murder victim. Ha, ha.

Bushed says:

Obviously not a tea party member – he actually solved something!

GregAllen says:

>> B. Dog said, on July 21st, 2011 at 4:21 pm
>> Psycho killers creep me out.

Me, too. I guess I’m unusual that way.

Skeptic says:

I agree bobbo, it’s a little fishy. Out of the whole story, I found this part the most palatable (cough) though:

““When I read the book, I was … just hungry for more when the book ended.”
Starliper describes the Zodiac serial killer case as “extraordinarily consuming.”
“I became absolutely obsessed with the case, to the point that I’d look up from Graysmith’s books … and realize that I’d actually forgotten to eat.”

Well, he certainly looks like he needs to shed a few pounds, eh?

bobbo, the pragmatic libertarian Existential Anti-Theist says:

Zybch==that wouldn’t kill a vampire. Reminds me of “Love at first Bite” where the guy uses all the wrong techniques trying to kill the vampire. I like that movie, its silly, but I like the actors and the subject matter: a guilty pleasure.

Seemingly, if you look at “all” the vamp movies, the only thing that really terminates them is sunlight, and even that has exceptions.

ie–even after sunlight destruction, if you gathered what ashes you could and dripped blood on them===who really knows what would happen?

Maybe this results from different “species” of vampires?

Always good fun.

Peppeddu says:

The text under the quotes (KILL/SLF/DR/HELP…) is not wrapping on the iPad and is making everything else look really small

kdog says:

304 characters is enough ciphertext to break a plain substitution cipher, even by hand. So we know it can’t be one of those, and so letter-frequency analysis is useless.

The statement “Any cipher created by man can be broken by man” is provably false. Proof: a one-time-pad, a cipher with a key the size of the message, can’t be broken without the key. Now you’re perfectly able to manufacture a key that will decrypt the ciphertext into whatever message you want, but that’s not exactly the point, right?

Yet this does sound exactly like what Starliper has done, doesn’t it? A “pattern” that changes at arbitrary points? Capricuous math that leads to area codes that didn’t exist at the time the message was sent yet is somehow meaningful? Words that are solved on the basis of “What would he have thrown in there?”

I think it makes sense to at least consider the fact that there may be no solution at all; it certainly is within the scope of a killer to send a random “garbage” message just to waste everyone’s time attempting to decode it. Even if it is a “real” message, the contents certainly do not need to be factual; and this particular “solution” doesn’t even explain why the message is coded to begin with. It’s not making any future predictions or otherwise “proving” anything.

Someone needs to go rent “A Beautiful Mind”, I’m afraid. This article seems like a publicity attempt, and shouldn’t have seen the light of day until and unless the solution is proven correct.

Aliens says:

Reminds me of a neighbor I heard on Art Bell – Coast to Coast radio show late at night
Art Bell – I live by the river and the UFOs come almost every night
More calls
– Project Blue Book new world conspiracy / Government cover up
– I have it figured out says the caller
I live by a home for wayward girls
The space ships are there for the girls ovaries
In the end the neighborhood figured out the guy was short sited and the ufos he saw were reelections from the halogen lamps of the school parking lot dancing on the river water’s surface
LOL

GregAllen says:

Nice analysis, kdog.

Could this have been harder to break because of the irregular use of English – especially no spaces and commons words missing? Or does breaking substitution cyphers rest simply on the frequency of individual letter use in English?

Isn’t it much easier to verify a solution than the original cypher? Experts should be able to quickly decide if this guy’s solution is bogus or not, right?

James says:

This is rubbish. It is out of character when compared to the letters and early ciphers. Also, it would take much longer than 6 hours to get into the head of the Zodiac!