Astra’s hypothesis for why this particular message was previously unsolved is that “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG” was used as the key starting on December 9, 1918 - whereas, as noted above, this message was transmitted earlier, on November 27, 1918. The reason for this discrepancy is unknown.
So people assumed too much, and persistence won the day. Retrying every know password against every undecoded message would have achieved the same result for a tiny fraction of the cost.
This is sounding more and more like it’s a puzzle no one ever bothered to put effort into, it seems pretty easy to brute force, and since it is using a known key from a few months later it’s really just no one made the effort to connect some not very difficult dots.
So it seems more like PR trying to make things seem significant when it’s a puzzle no one’s really bothered with
Yeah. Pretty much. I feel like dumb people are just tossing ai at already easy to solve problems and throwing money at it to get attention