OT: Cryptography puzzle

[Jason Drew]

Christos "TZOTZIOY" Georgiou <tzot at sil-tec.gr> wrote in message news:<lc4pb0tlatt317c3c9nnlo7hg41o3po6uq at 4ax.com>...
> On Tue, 1 Jun 2004 13:30:10 +0100, rumours say that "Richard Brodie"
> <R.Brodie at rl.ac.uk> might have written:
> 
> >There is also a lot of keyboard locality: adjacent letters, nothing from the
> >bottom row, etc.
> 
> Yes, that is the most obvious hint: it's the author's cat walking on the
> keyboard and wailing after the PSU killed the ori

I noticed the keyboard locality too, but then suspected that Python
might have the sophistication to decode this, when *my* cat walked
across my keyboard and gave me the magic key:

###
magickey  = 'nxxoanntrckpafqcaqaetxfnarwfb'

code = 'jkdf ertjgdd wer k opogl ssfd'
msg  = []

for i in xrange(0, len(code)):
    c = ord(code[i]) + ord(magickey[i]) - ord('a')
    if c > ord('z'):
        c -= 26
    msg.append(chr(c))

print 'When cryptography becomes illegal,', ''.join(msg) + '?'
###

Amazingly, it worked. Then it struck me, that I don't have a cat.