So apparently some guy was murdered in 1999, he had a couple of notes in his pocket and the fbi has been unable to crack what they say. So they decided to release the notes to the public to try and let the crack them. Here is a link to the article with the notes.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-seeks-public-cryptic-code-1999-st-louis/story?id=13256467

Brains on the way! It would be awesome if some master mind could solve this.

Ooooh, that's fascinating. If the top minds in the FBI couldn't figure it out, I wouldn't bet on some Joe PhD getting it in a day or two. With that said, I also have a personal code, so I think this is awesome.

Except, Kerm, few people have that Cipher? Correct?

I think it'd be cool to have a personal code but I wouldn't find much use for it.

I say two weeks before it's decrypted.

Obviously, the messages aren't code. It's pure gibberish designed to troll all of you

Kidding aside, I'm not even going to try to take a stab at that, heh. I'm almost tempted to make my own code for you all to try yourselves, though

Ooooh, that would be a great thread idea! We should totally do that.

a competition of sorts would actually be very fun, although very difficult to resolve as the only fair way would to post them one after another so each would receive equal attention.

as for the code in the article, i think a good deal of the problems could possible be due to the handwriting being very ambiguous. what exactly is the ninth character on page one, for example. an M with a crossbar? an A with a line in the centre?

I was thinking that one person could propose a ciphertext, and the first person to reveal the plaintext (and cipher, of course) could propose the next code.

I'll start if y'all don't mind. Do we have to give any sort of hint like a simpler second ciphertext and its plaintext equivalent?

Sorry to be completely off-topic, but when a site forces me to look at this many scripts just to see the content, it's ridiculous.
Clean up your site, ABC. It's completely unnecessary.

Anyway...

That's really interesting. It's probably a grocery list or something mundane just to f*** with the cops. Actually, that'd be an interesting death. I think I'll keep a few scraps of paper in my pocket in an undecipherable code from now on as well.

Don't let that back fire
I say, no help for a week or so. After that, give hints.

if the cryptographic strength is at least half-way decent, it's likely impossible to crack. Current computing architectures aren't suitable for this sort of task. The FBI has spent years attempting to use brute-force and dictionary attacks on encryptions, only to fail at it.

You should use a triple-cascading encryption, and a password of 30 or more characters with mixed casing, symbols and numbers.

Thirty is a bit excessive; I'd say sixteen is more than enough. The problem is that your password is likely not the weakest point in the system; you're probably more vulnerable to many other types of attacks.

Excessive? There's no such thing when it comes to information security.

I think it depends what you're securing. I don't really feel like typing a 32-character alpha-numeric-symbol password every time I log onto my laptop when I can just swipe my finger instead. Even though I'm giving up some security with that, my laptop rarely is more than a few feet away from me for about 95% of my waking life, so it's not a big danger.

You shouldn't limit yourself to only mixed casing, symbols, and numbers if you want a truly secure password. If you're really fanatical about security, you'd have a low level program ready to wipe your disk if the password is entered wrong even once

Oh nooooo, definitely don't want that unless you have equally secure encrypted redundant backups.

I also use CJK-encoded strings in some of my password sequences. (笑)アマチュア

Wait, really? You can do things like that? Or do you mean you use the roman alphabetic representations?

You can use the actual encoding. If you don't have a Japanese keyboard, you can use an IME or other input-method selection to type the words with a non-Japanese keyboard.