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I'm interested to see if any of the cryptographers on HN can take a stab at the strange code he was carrying (featured in the picture near the bottom of the story), which no one has cracked, or at least share some thoughts about how it could be analyzed.

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I took a stab at using google's n-grams library to look at potential sentences if the code was an initialism. It generated too many nonsense values at the value of 'n' that I picked (driven purely by download size concerns really) and any kind of names or codes or abbreviated language wouldn't have worked well with that approach.

I think at some students of the mentioned Prof. Abbot looked at the letter distributions and found the highest correlation with an english language initialism.

If the top comment - stating that he might have been a Russian spy - is true, it might be worth checking correlation with Cyrillic (or it's Latin transliteration) instead of English.

If the book was indeed a disguised one-time pad, as the article and evidence suggests, then no one's going to get anywhere cracking the code without the book.

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