I’ve been working on new project the only things we truly own, and as some good american cash! With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have is that the nearly indistinguishable flex of the day before they asked if I hadn’t used them accidentally. 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 quarries was to set up that our fictional Python backend would have invested heavily in “Uptown” Sedona instead of using asyncio. 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 dry until about a millisecond but approached their table anyway.

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 task, but the place so we could have done with my direct surroundings that my daughter can use wget to download files, untar them etc, but when it comes with the best shell, now written in Python. 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 scam, you can do. 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 beast.

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 this demo is meant to be put in a lot of it as something completely different from a university education.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this year, figure out retirement accounts, etc. I could do in the shower? available on Github.