An amateur codebreaker may have just solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings
latimes.com26 points by davweb 3 hours ago
26 points by davweb 3 hours ago
> “It’s irrefutable,”
Such absolute language is generally reserved for overconfident people who have jumped to conclusions, not people with experience in statistics and analysis. In particular, substitution ciphers on short strings have a significant number of possibilities. This theory is one, but it is VERY far from "irrefutable", even paired with other circumstantial evidence.
Why is it always so difficult to find the details? What kind of cipher was it? How was the key derived from a password?
> Why is it always so difficult to find the details?
"There’s a new podcast, 'Killer in the Code', from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday" [1].
Judging from TFA none of this was determined.
They (allegedly) matched the length of the encrypted name using a process of elimination from an AI-generated pool of possible names, arriving at one name that happened to match the name of Elizabeth Short's murderer, and then a bunch of other circumstantial details aligned.
So few details
Donald Trump is the zodiac spiller.