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https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Zodiac-340-cypher-cracked-by-code-expert-51-years-15794943.php Thoughts?
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Dec 13, 2020 22:19
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| # ? May 10, 2024 12:29 |
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I think it's a little late is what I think
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Dec 13, 2020 22:20
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Mods, please correct the 'zodiac killer' bit
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Dec 13, 2020 22:20
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everyone knows its ted cruz
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Dec 13, 2020 22:20
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Dude couldn’t spell paradise. Killing was the only career option he had really
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Dec 13, 2020 22:22
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Thanks for linking an article behind a pay wall, OP.
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Dec 13, 2020 22:33
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The solution to what’s known as the 340 Cipher, one of the most vexing mysteries of the Zodiac Killer’s murderous saga, has been found by a code-breaking team from the United States, Australia and Belgium. The cipher, sent in a letter to The Chronicle in November 1969, has been puzzling authorities and amateur sleuths since it arrived 51 years ago. Investigators hoped the Zodiac, who killed five people in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, would reveal his name in one of his many ciphers, but there is no such name in the 340. According to code-breaking expert David Oranchak, the cipher’s text includes: “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. ... I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice (sic) all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me.” Oranchak, a 46-year-old web designer who lives in Virginia, has been working on the Zodiac’s codes since 2006. “This is exciting,” Oranchak said in an interview Friday. “We’ve been sitting on the solution since last Saturday. When I first started looking at the Zodiac ciphers all those years ago, I thought, ‘Oh, I can just write a computer program and solve it,’ but it’s been kicking my rear end all this time. Until now.” Cameron Polan, spokeswoman for the FBI’s San Francisco office, confirmed Oranchak’s claim Friday. In a statement emailed to The Chronicle, she said: “The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens. The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners. “The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities across Northern California, and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes,” she continued. “Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, and out of respect for the victims and their families, we will not be providing further comment at this time.” This is the second time a Zodiac cipher has been cracked. The first, one long cipher sent in pieces to The Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times-Herald newspapers in 1969, was solved by a Salinas schoolteacher and his wife. Known as the 408 Cipher, it said little beyond: “I like killing because it is so much fun.” To crack the 340 Cipher — so named because it contains 340 characters — Oranchak teamed up with two fellow amateur code crackers and ran the bewildering set of symbols through special software programs. His teammates were Sam Blake, a mathematician in Australia, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a warehouse operator in Belgium. “I could not have done this without them,” Oranchak said. “All of us in the crypto community on the Zodiac figured the cipher had another step beyond just figuring out what letters belonged to the symbols, and that’s just what we found here.” Oranchak’s findings started leaking out on some of the many Zodiac amateur sleuth forums, such as zodiackillersite.com, over the past couple of days, causing much excitement in that widespread world of true-crime buffs. In most ciphers, like the 408, the solution consists mainly of figuring out which letters are represented by certain symbols. In the 340 Cipher, it turned out the alignment of the words runs diagonally down the page, and occasionally they get shifted over a column. It’s a complicated bit of code creation, Oranchak said, but a basic scheme for it can be found in at least one U.S. Army code manual from the 1950s. As the team began breaking down the methods in the cipher, they unpeeled a couple of phrases that let them know they were on the right track. There were references to “gas chamber” and “the TV show,” which seemed to refer to Jim Dunbar’s “AM San Francisco” show on KGO-TV that aired in October 1969. On that show, Dunbar and attorney Melvin Belli took a call from a person claiming to be the Zodiac, and he said, “I don’t want to go to the gas chamber.” In the solved cipher, the Zodiac writes: “That wasnt (sic) me on the TV show.” “We knew we had something because of the Dunbar show,” Oranchak said. “One of the interesting things about this is that it forces the minimum date of the cipher’s construction — maybe he had one and adjusted it, but it couldn’t have been in that form prior to Oct. 22, when the Dunbar show aired, and ... when The Chronicle got the 340 letter.” The Chronicle published a story on the letter and the cipher on Nov. 12. The San Francisco Police Department, like the FBI, was short on reaction Friday to the cipher’s solution beyond acknowledging the code had been cracked. The Zodiac’s last victim, taxi driver Paul Stine, was shot to death by the Zodiac in October 1969 in San Francisco. And like any homicide, it’s still an open case until it’s solved. “Our statement is very much in line with what the FBI said,” said Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a department spokesman. “We’re aware of the cipher solution, and continuing to try to solve this case. That’s about all we have to say for now.” However, former city Homicide Inspector Gianrico Pierucci, who oversaw the Zodiac case for several years before retiring in 2017, said the new solution probably doesn’t advance the investigation much. The difficulty of the code indicates the murderer was intelligent, but the bragging about slaves and the misspelled word “paradise” were already present in other Zodiac writings. “Besides being taunting again, psychologically, which is what he’s good at, there’s not a lot else,” Pierucci said. “What you really want is — does it give you a location? An address? Some sort of riddle you can figure out? A certain person, a job — anything that gives you a clue to who he is? “But it is what it is,” he said. “And it’s good to finally have it solved.” The Zodiac sent two other ciphers to newspapers that are left to decode. And in at least one of his communications, the killer said his name was in one of his ciphers. “That’s the one the code-breakers have to work on now,” Pierucci said. “We need his name.” The name most commonly put forth as the man likely to be the Zodiac is convicted child molester and Navy veteran Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo. Despite scores of theories by amateur sleuths about suspects — many in books and communications sent to The Chronicle for decades — Allen is the only suspect ever named by investigators. However, he died at 58 of a heart attack in 1992 before police could build enough of a case to charge him. Meanwhile, police in all three counties where the Zodiac killed — San Francisco, Solano and Napa — continue to receive tips and investigate leads in the old mystery. It is arguably the most famous unsolved murder case in America. The Zodiac’s first victims were David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, shot to death in their car on Dec. 20, 1968, in Benicia. Next came Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau in Vallejo in July 1969, a shooting that Mageau survived. Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell were stabbed at Lake Berryessa in September 1969. Hartnell survived. Sam Blake, one of the threesome who solved the 340 Cipher, became interested in the case after seeing Oranchak’s work online. On Friday, from his home in Melbourne, Australia, he said the team tested “around 650,000 different reading directions through the cipher” before coming up with the right combinations. They worked together for eight months on the puzzle. “We now understand why it resisted attacks for so long,” Blake said in an email. “The reading direction through the cipher was so obscure, that the only way it could be found was with a massive search through many candidates using sophisticated software which can efficiently solve homophonic substitution ciphers.” But even so far from the murder scenes, conquering the science of the puzzle didn’t dissuade him from the most basic element of the case — the human element. “We would like to dedicate our work that culminated in this solution to the victims of the Zodiac killer, their families and descendants,” Blake wrote. “We hope this is a stepping stone towards finding justice for these people.”
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Dec 13, 2020 22:35
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Haulin Oates posted:Thanks for linking an article behind a pay wall, OP.
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Dec 13, 2020 22:36
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o
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Dec 13, 2020 22:58
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it's interesting insofar as, I assumed it was gibberish I thought about taking a crack at these myself a few years ago when I was getting interested in cryptography, but, while googling it, I found a forum dedicated to cracking it, and they'd become convinced that the answer was in... I think they called it "micro-writing", and the idea was when you look at it under a microscope, what looked like minor abrasions on the paper or stray pen marks or defects from the ancient photocopying process, were actually tiny symbols deliberately included that either marked that those symbols should be interpreted differently or even contained the actual message. and they were like REALLY defensive about it, like, anybody who didn't think this was the breakthrough they needed should shut the gently caress up and I was like "welp, these people are loons." it was every inch just a group of people who'd been staring at something too long and seeing patterns that weren't there, which you see in pockets of obsessives all over the internet, and I was like, you know what, 40-50 years, very public and famously uncracked, and this is what they're down to? it's gibberish. he was loving with people. that was like his main thing besides murder, was loving with people. he sent out ciphers, some of them were solvable, others were just nonsense. it's the 3 pigs labeled 1, 2, and 4, and these dudes are looking for the third pig. they're saps. anything that could have been solved was solved contemporaneously but apparently they can be solved, and it's actually me who is indeed the sucka
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Dec 14, 2020 01:20
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Do you think he couldn't spell, or is it intentional, do the spelling mistakes make the code more difficult to crack?
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Dec 14, 2020 02:27
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I think the theory that he was in the military and died in Vietnam or another war is a sound one, he obviously knew of ciphers but in reality this one wasn’t solved forever because he hosed it up
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Dec 14, 2020 02:28
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Haulin Oates posted:Thanks for linking an article behind a pay wall, OP.
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Dec 14, 2020 03:02
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The Zodiac Killer's final message: †Պ ◶Ꙙ⋌Halloween Liker posted:Do you think he couldn't spell, or is it intentional, do the spelling mistakes make the code more difficult to crack? they make it more difficult for computers to crack, but I don't know if he'd have known that in the 60s? but alternately, a thing this type of person might get off on is pretending to be stupid with the spelling mistakes. He also misspelled stuff in the non-code parts of the letters. "Ha ha they'll never suspect that I'm the killer because everyone knows I'm very smart, while this letter can't spell paradise!" Zodiac definitely had some monster ego. But, the thing is it is not that difficult to make a code that's nearly unbreakable with these short messages, when there's zero context for anyone to decrypt it. The hard part of cryptology is making it so there's some information your recipient can always use to decrypt it (today's date, a prefix to the message, etc) while still being unsolvable to someone who doesn't know the method. So don't get the idea -- which media reporting also seems to promote -- that just because a 3-400 character message was uncracked until now it means Zodiac was some genius guy. He just wasn't an idiot, or at least had some access / training with old army code books.
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Dec 14, 2020 03:30
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woohoo
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Dec 14, 2020 03:37
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The actual message looks like it was written by a dumb 10 year old kid. He seems to believe that if you kill someone they will be your slave in the afterlife.
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Dec 14, 2020 04:08
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Sounds like a total virgo am I right? 
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Dec 14, 2020 04:09
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Zodiac killer giving off some strong autism vibes. Wonder what their username is.
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Dec 14, 2020 04:58
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Haulin Oates posted:Thanks for linking an article behind a pay wall, OP. Got to hidester.com and paste the link in there. That always gets me around the paywall on news sites.
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Dec 14, 2020 05:01
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Crankit posted:Zodiac killer giving off some strong autism vibes. Wonder what their username is. XxXcoreychasefanXxX6969
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Dec 14, 2020 05:05
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Big Beef City posted:I think it's a little late is what I think
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Dec 14, 2020 05:06
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Do it ironically posted:I think the theory that he was in the military and died in Vietnam or another war is a sound one, he obviously knew of ciphers but in reality this one wasn’t solved forever because he hosed it up I don't buy the Vietnam theory. Sullivan, Allen or someone they never expected seem the most likely three candidates. They both have an obscene number of coincidences surrounding them and the killings & letters. They both fit what I'd expect the profile to be: 24-38 year old male, isolated but functional, sexual deviant, doesn't connect well with others, some post-secondary education or association with it. Sullivan was bipolar & schizophrenic which makes so many things fall into place. Allen fetishized hunting people & was known to be near the scene of the murders with no alibi & just got fired as an elementary teacher for molesting a student before the murders started. The simplest answer is usually the correct answer, and the simplest answer is by far Sullivan with what's publicly available. The second simplest is Allen. The third simplest is it's someone unknown to us who did it on a whim, in a compartmentalized way and otherwise went on with their life. Sullivan:
In his defense, he didn't have a license to drive, although that could explain why someone matching his description was seen near one of the murder scenes. There's also not super great information about Sullivan out there. Far more is known about Allen. The police may have discredited Sullivan as a suspect for some reason unknown to me. Allen:
In his defense, uhh. Umm. He wasn't as heavy as the alleged suspect. Some detectives have said he doesn't wear glasses which is a bizarre way to discredit him as a suspect in a premeditated serial killing spree because anyone can toss some glasses on. He didn't use a firearm that he still owned to shoot anyone according to one detective. Some real big thinkers were on this case. Pseudo science handwriting analyzers said the handwriting wasn't his. The type of things he wrote on his own time weren't like what zodiac wrote - but if you think about the nature of zodiac, there wouldn't be anything concrete linking his real life to zodiac at his home or anywhere. Unless zodiac were actually unhinged like Sullivan. The lack of a dna match is true for both, but the only potential dna they have to use is from the stamps. Which makes it pretty easy to imagine that the dna there may not match the killer's. It's hard to say, because the zodiac likely continued their life like normal and never really left any evidence behind. Which is why no one was ever tried for the murders. It's even possible the murders are not all linked and that the letter writer was only involved in 1 killing. Sullivan lines up really well. Allen fits the profile but we could reasonably say that while he deserved prison for life for other offenses, there's no concrete evidence he was zodiac. Khorne fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 05:51
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glad they got em murder is mean and lame imo
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Dec 14, 2020 05:58
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Khorne posted:The cypher doesn't seem messed up at all. It's a cypher & puzzle. You're allowed to have odd shifts and patterns. I don’t disagree with what you said, I’m mainly going off the three people who de-coded the cipher who said themselves that he hosed it up, I believe it is on David’s personal website. I find true crime cases like the zodiac really fascinating, like when they solved the east area rapist/original night stalker via DNA that was awesome as hell I love technology being able to solve these unsolvable things. There’s so much what if with this case, a lot of people believed that cipher was just him making something up to make himself look smarter, even I thought that so to see it was legit is interesting Also, many men at that time had military service it’s not unlikely he did what that entailed at the very least who knows so yeah maybe he didn’t die in a war but it’s also odd he just shut down forever Do it ironically fucked around with this message at 06:03 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 05:58
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Uh it was ted cruz
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Dec 14, 2020 06:01
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I admit it I'm the Zodiac.
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Dec 14, 2020 06:02
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:I admit it I'm the Zodiac. I would call him a feckless loser but he did kill a lot of people, he definitely seemed like someone who got kicked out of their dnd group because he was such a pedantic rear end in a top hat
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Dec 14, 2020 06:05
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Not in the same context but poo poo like this still happens due to law enforcement stupidity, it’s crazy to me the Delphi murders aren’t solved but it’s also insane to me that people just assume police know what they’re doing. Especially small town cops, big city cops are racist idiots and the ones who work in small towns are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel
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Dec 14, 2020 06:11
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Idk it's probably not that easy to murder dozens of people and not get caught. You don't gotta hand it to them but it's an achievement 
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Dec 14, 2020 06:26
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Yeah but not with the zodiac but a lot of serial killers killed people deemed less important like sex workers or indigenous and if you look at the solve rates for these crimes for at risk peoples it’s really sad
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Dec 14, 2020 06:31
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Who is the serial killer? 🐌 or 🐖 ?
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Dec 14, 2020 06:33
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Crowdsourcing would have solved this eons ago.
dangerstepp fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 06:33
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Wait. Attending Community College makes you more likely to be a serial killer???
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Dec 14, 2020 06:41
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Probably yeah.
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Dec 14, 2020 06:42
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Sorry where I read the fact he hosed up the cipher was from the article of the journalist who interviews David after they cracked it Link here good read http://zodiackillerfacts.com/news-and-updates/breaking-news-the-zodiacs-340-cipher-has-been-solved/ article posted:David explained, “Cracking it required undoing those arrangements then trying to discover his substitution key. That wasn’t enough because he made some mistakes in the second piece. Jarl discovered the mistakes and corrected them, which greatly cleared up the second piece.”
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Dec 14, 2020 06:46
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Just read the decoded message and its boring. What a waste of time.
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Dec 14, 2020 06:48
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CPL593H posted:Got to hidester.com and paste the link in there. That always gets me around the paywall on news sites. Thanks, that's pretty handy to know? OP is still a lazy gently caress, though.
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Dec 14, 2020 06:54
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Khorne posted:
Ok shut it down boys, he's onto us!
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Dec 14, 2020 07:04
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Richard Gaikowski was the the Zodiac killer. Ted Cruz needs to stop fronting.
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Dec 14, 2020 07:25
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| # ? May 10, 2024 12:29 |
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Kodiac Ziller
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Dec 14, 2020 07:32
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