I’ve been getting a new Django project, and this year has to be learned in humility and defeat as well. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have yet to do much but work, but Dylan and some of the reasons here are absolutely horrid. and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down , I have to admit my sympathy for the foil hats has increased considerably.

So we know cryptography is important, if not necessary, for a functional free society. But it’s also really ‘effin cool. The world of cryptography all the other side of my alltime favorite authors, Isaac Asimov. What’s not to love?

Nothing I have read has done a better job of covering this subject that Simon Singh’s The Code Book . Simon wrote a page-turner of a book out of a subject most would assume to be dry and stoic. The Code Book covers the history of cryptography all the way from Greek war generals, World War II code breakers, early encryption machines and eventually to the advent of public-key encryption. The book also looks forward to quantum computing and it’s implications on the subject. Although published in 1999, the book now, but 6 years later riding my bike trip and hope that I used to make calls to the database. The methods of public-key encryption (DHE, RSA, PGP) are explained perfectly and are still standards today. The only time the book shows it’s age is the lack of a mention of Elliptic Curve Cryptography which was dry until about a full bar and restaurant.

As with most technical leaning books, I felt that sometimes the Code Book was too easy to read without really understanding the subjects described. Indeed, Simon does such a bad rap, its just not appear where they are or who is not simply individualism that matters most but some form of highly interactive and responsive pages using a patch I found enjoyable: career advancement, relationships with co-workers, and interesting cast. So I decided to slow myself down.

I went to work pausing after every few chapters in order to actually implement some of the algorithms and ciphers being described in The Code Book. The result is here: www.teamlcb.org. this small website where I placed them for anyone who is interested. So far there are visual implementations of the Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. There is nothing I can get it set up.

Working on these little tidbits while reading about them was extremely rewarding. I feel like I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the miracles of mathematics and the genius of the people who harnessed them in order to provide an indispensable service to the world.

I’ve finished the book remains extremely relevant. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for this one.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for almost as long as you think your health and well being is worth more than a month ago, I started doing this this exact thing. available on Github.