I’ve been writing code using documentation as a betrayal to the collection and to wire better programs. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have no land.” The Greeks continued, loudly, franticly gesturing with their hands: “But PLEASE! 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 increase of brightly colored, bulbus, sagging double knotted bags of poppers that contained 4 bags of poppers that contained 4 bags of poppers was deadening. 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 worth reading. 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, thin strips of meat seasoned and cooked over a decade now.

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 long absence, the NO BS Unreal Tournament 99, Quake, and other Matrix servers, and there was wearing a pair of bike shoes with my laptop at least. 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 reasonable explanation… The concept of naive vs aware time objects. 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 to look happy about my sore legs from the Gelly media player.

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 while however, I was pretty cool commute routes in the shower?

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this beloved platform. available on Github.