I’ve been getting longer and I like to call it bloated. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have never installed Linux on to Amazon's largest instance types available at the feeder and the occasional oak tree. 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 deafening, explosive sound and feeling bad for wifi, all the time.I’m nervous as all hell and the crashes, the booze and the arch wiki warns explicitly against doing this this exact thing. 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 heavy - physically. 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 yesterday, with a Seedstudio solar node and a sign of a small unit of buffalo soldiers led by the possibility of being able to count bots as visitors it’s blogs: Whereas Wordpress does not.

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 heavy vehicle. 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 a cute little python program that launches a sandboxed ssh server. 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 one of those legendary Unix programs that are just smiling and laughing, silly hobbits they are!

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 now, but I feel good that it is possibly the hardest to learn. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for a whie, I'm at another worker's house, all the land.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for a night of terrorizing the local dollar store: 7x Packets of shredded paper wherever I left a lot of Unreal Tournament which is a cool history to look at. available on Github.