cipher text

It was beginning to seem like a hoax, a jumbled mess of nonsense characters with no true meaning. But This week, the Zodiac serial killer's infamous "340 Cipher" has finally been cracked. The cipher was one of several sent in a letter to the S.F. Chronicle in November 1969 from the Zodiac, the serial killer who killed five people in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1968 and 1969. He has never been caught. David Oranchak, a 46-year-old web designer from Virginia has been working with a group to crack the code since 2006. In an interview on Friday, he told reporters, "We’ve been sitting on the solution since last Saturday. When I first started looking at the Zodiac ciphers all those years ago, I thought, ‘Oh, I

One step closer to cracking the Voynich Manuscript? The enigmatic Voynich Manuscript has puzzled cryptographers and historians for centuries but today, after botanists announced in the journal for the American Botanical Council that they had found matches for many of the plants depicted in the Voynich Manuscript, we may be one step closer to understanding the meaning of the 600-year-old codex.  How did botanist crack the code?  Rather than focusing on the words in the mysterious manuscript, the botanist focused on the pictures instead. Botanist Arthur O. Tucker stumbled across the discovery after recognizing one of the plants in the manuscript: "We were both immediately struck by the similarity of xiuhamolli/xiuhhamolli (soap plant ... sometimes known as the “Aztec Herbal”) to the plant in the illustration on folio 1v