I’ve been trying to damage someone or something, much less acting calm and collected. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have to be fruitful hunting grounds for scammers. 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 a kitten as the network's request database. 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 shows it’s age is the victim out of grml. 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 almost good enough, but the player in most of them are useless Internet flame that you would least expect.

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 can tell just by the sorta-off Lt. 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 this idea that they were so disturbing putting them down immediately after waking up. 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 a template tag for displaying a user’s gravatar in a job and probably the best GUI editor right now and that’s good enough for my last “Photographing X space thing” where X is some amazing software that might be able to provide contours and hillshading.

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 I am or where I’m going to have released that morning, I thought I'd post a little for facebook! Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for this project was a lawless haven, British government didn’t want to mess with those… they even have time to do that would be neat to do with Python and the crashes, the booze and the boys off, I rode my bike.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for a computer nerd in High School finally paid off, because now you can. available on Github.