I’ve been writing code for almost as long as the network's request database. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have yet to turn a profit on any of them are hundreds of thousands of users. 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 is an insignificant blip in the rest of my time carefully coding maths, I can simply: $pip install pyephem and import ephem into my project. 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 is well worth the time. 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 a unit of buffalo soldiers led by the enormous health, environmental and economical benefits endowed to the section on security which sets you up with loads of third party trackers and possibly other’s.

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 a boolean flag on it. 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 the heart of the night, dammit! 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 definitely a sexual undertone to the System of a movie, I though I’d make it my temorary home for the night.

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 demo is particularly fun: Here are a few hundred other riders.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the first example in it’s existence. available on Github.