I’ve Cracked Zodiac, a French Engineer Says. Online Sleuths Are Skeptical

> Five months after he first posted his solutions online, Mr. Ziraoui has now disappeared from the Zodiac forums. He has stopped responding to comments, saying he did not “have the skills to play” in the charged environment of the online forums.

> “My brother would tell me: ‘Bro, what you just did here is pretty much the easy part,’” Mr. Ziraoui said with a smile. “‘Actually, the most difficult thing is to convince people.’”

The most significant modern phenomenon is online social movements. They are very powerful, overriding almost any other factor in society, and not surprisingly they are used to manipulate people and public affairs.

Many do not identify them as a specific phenomenon; the movements strongly react to anything that might undermine them, of course, including defining them as anything but a grassroots, incidental grouping of individuals (e.g., no group psychology); and few understand how they work.

They are not a well-defined concept, their existence is often denied, but they are everywhere and changing our world.