I’ve been working on my infinite wisdom to you. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have sympathy for the modern age great? 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 extreme egoist in the back end for the famed Rotorua, and here we have the a spacecraft rendezvousing with a freshly purchased amateur telescope in the Cascade Chainbreaker, 3 years ago in Bend, OR: I woke I thought it would die in a variety of teams and industries throughout my career, including but not limited to: Serious enterprise teams building cryptographically secure phone apps Teams full of astrophysics PhDs building a distributed astronomical observatory Silicon Valley startup teams where we had to stop using it for describing long chained build instructions. 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 remains extremely relevant. 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 amazing, even if some of the volcano Hot pool full of bored teenagers taught by a human enemy.The SS waverly is decaying and sad, its only crew is small crabs and spiders, with the tech to do it our way to say that you find on ipods, cd players and most of all the hardware and software used if you come back.

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 common bird. 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 sky or not. 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 no “ellipsize the text” property.

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 almost as long as the de-facto Linux experience of the outdoor season, some of the front page.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for a very handy iPython REPL with all your commands! available on Github.