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Ciphertext

Why English wins

The trick to breaking XOR without knowing the key is that you do not need to recognise the right answer yourself — you let letter frequency do it. Real English is mostly a handful of letters and spaces, and almost never contains unprintable bytes, so out of 256 candidates the true plaintext scores far above the noise. That single idea — score by how English-like the bytes are — is what turns 256 guesses, or a whole recovered key column by column, into one answer at the top of the list.