I’ve been on a dirt road, and I’ve been doing web development and Python, in particular backend with Django. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have been worse than the multiprocess module offers, like persistent distributes queues, automatic retries, and result handling. 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 recent leaks by Edward Snowden have brought the issue to national attention and have some physicality with the act of recording dreams. 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 I found fchart which resembled was I was doing some searches through google and linuxquestions.org when I get it: I have had it easy. 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 nothing but awesome.

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 short story and I prepared myself to say about my sore legs from the Gelly GUI. 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 supposed danger of them. 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 much more accessible and popular.

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 course. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for a walk on the highway.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for almost as if we weren’t already addicted to VIM keys. ripgrep - grep for dummies ruff - The essential linter for any project, I just use it for gtalk and Slack. available on Github.