unforum

[addlepated]

 A=?

[Shaded Spriter]

We need to find out who the other 19 blogs are.

[addlepated]

http://thundernroses.typepad.com/thunder_and_roses/2005/05/the_end.html
k=v and x=g

http://vienna.metblogs.com/archives/2005/05/vienna_ghost_to.phtml
o=c and y=p

http://www.timkelly.squarespace.com/cracked/2005/5/23/say-what.html
z=d

http://technicalities.mu.nu/archives/083366.php
d=h

http://www.balloon-juice.com/archives/005196.html
f=n

http://addlepated.net/blog/archives/898
n=t

http://www.davidmsc.com/?p=403
r=f

http://www.squandertwo.net/blog/
q=i

http://bookangst.blogspot.com/2005/05/rant-or-fine-whine-you-be-judge.html
v=y


11 letters so far.

[Diandra]

I think it translates to:

[addlepated]

Dang Dia, you go girl! I was gonna hunker down with it tonight once I had some free time. Nice job.

[miss_seph]

How in the heck did you get that? Care to walk us through your substitution from 11 letters and gibberish in perhaps a spoilered form?

* miss_caro bows down to Diandra's crypto-goddess-like state

[addlepated]

I think it's simple substitution, isn't it?

[miss_seph]

Yeah, but how did she get that with the letters given? because when you straight substitute the letters that we had so far, with the letters in the cipher, it all starts to look like gibberish (that and the first two letters are TH, not WE) - so I was wondering what she did after she'd swapped the letters around?

As my Math teacher would say back in highschool: 'You don't get any marks until you show your working' (but really it's just cos I wanna learn)

[addlepated]

I sent a message to the puzzle originator inviting him to join us over here. Given all the problems he had with posting the code to random blogs, I imagine there are plenty here who would welcome such a thing!

[miss_seph]

Absolutely!!! it would be great for an entire puzzle trail to be performed through blog comments - imagine you get a comment on your blog which is a link to a picture or something, and the clue you get from solving the image leads you to another blog, and so on That would be fun And a great way of finding new blogs!

[Diandra]

Well, thanks for the props, but it's not too terribly difficult, especially when you have a passage that long.

I start with a program I have on my machine that runs thru random keys very quickly. It has frequency analysis tools and such. I watch it run and I can stop it when it's pretty close to being coherent...i.e. words are starting to emerge. Then I crib and change letters until they make sense everywhere they appear and I get actual words. In this instance, I used this method by itself...not with any of the 11 clues you already had.

Some may think it's cheating, but why work hard when you can work smart!

[miss_seph]

Where'd you get the program from? Can you link me please? I've been scouring the net for a substitution program for ages!

[Diandra]

I was afraid you were going to ask. I've had it for years, and I'm not sure where I got it...I think it came in a book I got.

Okay, I searched a bit, and I believe this is a similar downloadable version:

Secret Code Breaker - Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher Solver Program.

A program written by Chris Card that can determine the KEY and break most secret messages that have been enciphered using a Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher. It is a different program than any of the codebreaker programs that come on the diskette included with the "Secret Code Breaker - A Cryptanalyst's Handbook" series.

There's a poly-alphabetic program there, too.

[Shaded Spriter]

Wow that program works fast - It solved the code in about 1 second...

Edit: Because the blog was double coded It didn't give the letters how we got them - it give us the second coded version.