It's just past midnight but I had to write something today about this. Zodiac's 340 cipher has been solved. I couldn't believe it when I saw David Oranchak's video stating it. At first I thought it was just a clickbait title and he would talk about something serious like how to judge if a solution is correct or not, but nope. He just straight up gives out the solution.

As Oranchak and others had speculated, the cipher used a transposition scheme to obscure the message. What was tricky about it was that the cipher was in three parts and had to be split into 2 parts of 9 lines and then 1 part with two lines. I remember Oranchak mentioning the two lines on row 10 and if it meant that the cipher had to be split in two. Now knowing the solution, was it pure coincidence that the two "-" characters happened to right on either side of the second half? It was also weird how "LIFEIS" is written clearly on the first row of the second half, was this to force the row to end with the letter "S" so he would get the two "-" characters on that row?

The last row also had the reversed words that was clearly there to mess with people cracking the cipher. Oranchak keeps it open to how the last part of the cipher is supposed to be read. I think it's probably to be read as the clear part of the first line of the second part is paired with the last word of the cipher, "death", spelling out "life is death". Some people have mentioned that it reads like a suicide note. I was fascinated for a while what the crosshair symbol in the cipher stood for, given that he signs the letters with the same crosshair symbol. In this cipher the crosshair is an "A". Could his name start with an "A"? If you use this key in the Z13, you get--> DREA*A*O*LEDO. It probably means nothing. The 340 will be the last Zodiac cipher to be solved without finding some outside sources or extra material.

David Oranchak's video solving the 340

I remember seeing Oranchak's first videos on this the beginning of this year and the way he talked about the ciphers really got me into trying to crack them to the point that I joined the American Cryptogram Association and breaking codes has been something I've been trying to get better at. Feels like FATE. If anyone he and the team he was working with deserved to get the honors for breaking it. I'm really happy for them. I really recommend watching the video he made on it, the cipher is simple enough to understand but the effort required to break it was something else. The error in the transposition of the second part felt more like malice than error but who knows. It took over 50 years but now the message is out in the clear.

I never thought this day would come. As /u/FindingAlaska said in /r/UnresolvedMysteries: "Nobody in my life is equipped to handle how much I care about this." :D