The 340 was solved and also another cypher was solved.
The FBI said last weekend that none of the Zodiac ciphers had been solved. And for reasons I am not going to explain, they are absolutely correct.
For reasons I'm not going to explain, Robert99 is the only one apparently, that believes Z340 is unsolved.
Hmm, is Robert99 the Zodiac? How else to explain?
ECIDARAP
No, I am not the Zodiac and neither are you. Is the supposed Z340 solution you mention the same one that was put out several years ago? If there is a newer one, where can I find it?
several years ago? Z340 was just solved last year. 12/5/2020
David Oranchak posted on youtube 12/11/2020
Basically it was solved during covid lockdown.
Oranchak, a Roanoke-based software developer and a 1997 computer engineering graduate of Virginia Tech, had been working with Australian applied mathematician Sam Blake and Belgian warehouse operator and programmer Jarl Van Eycke to produce and examine the solutions since March 2020.
It's solution is well covered by many articles.
The deciphering was first explained in a youtube video. FBI confirmed the deciphering shortly after.
detail on how it was decoded by Dave Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke.
Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke had produced their cipher solutions in several steps broken up between them: Blake rearranged the second cipher's 340 symbols in 650,000 ways, moving them around in unique patterns using a technique known as transposition in cryptography, the age-old practice of making and breaking codes. He sent the variations in batches to Oranchak, who fed them through a program Van Eycke had designed to decrypt the symbols into plain English text.
details per Sam Blake at You are not allowed to view links.
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Loginshort summary per Nick Pelling (not part of the team) You are not allowed to view links.
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LoginSo, the core of the cipher system turned out to be a combination of a “knight move” transposition (down one row and along two columns) plus the Zodiac Killer’s trademark set of reflected letter homophonic cipher shapes.
However, Zodiac – clearly stung by the ease with which his first major cipher had been cracked – threw in some extra confounding factors.
At the end of the top line, he wrote the words “LIFE IS” in his homophonic cipher (not transposed)
At the end of the bottom line, he wrote the word “DEATH” in his homophonic cipher (also not transposed)
The rest of the bottom two lines were written in his homophonic cipher, but with the letter-order of some of the words reversed (e.g. the Zodiac’s signature word “PARADICE” was written as “ECIDARAP”)
The remainder of the cipher was split into two nine-line blocks, where the order of the letters was transposed using knight’s move reordering.
There was also, annoyingly, a single row of ciphered letters in the middle that were out by a single column, which skewed all the text passing through it. It’s fairly easy to see that once you’ve got everything else right, though.
This was – I hope you’ll agree – a simply epic slab of codebreaking. Congratulations to David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke!!!!
More details (including the FBI’s statement) can be found here.
All in all, the Z340 plaintext reads:
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT 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
LIFE IS DEATH
