Developer Creates Word Cipher Using ASCII Code Products, Encodes Linus Torvalds Quote

A developer shared a cryptographic puzzle on DEV Community where each word in a sentence is replaced by the product of its letters' ASCII values. The encoded sentence turned out to be 'Linus doesn't want his Linux to be called GNU/Linux,' a nod to the longstanding debate between Torvalds and Stallman over naming. The slash in GNU/Linux was represented as actual mathematical division, making that word appear as a small decimal fraction. Solvers could deduce word lengths from digit counts and identify letters through ratios between encoded values. The developer also shared a short Python snippet to generate such ciphers and suggested ways to make future puzzles harder to crack.