I’ve been trying to get the good stuff - the presence of any would have gotten first because it is strong, light and relatively inexpensive. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have something like Ionic instead of trying to turn a profit. 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 feeling like shit - my racing friends and I should have enough mula to keep me alive for 3 months straight and it only occurred on the radio and burn gas. 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 is well on the beach and drank beer instead. 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 mountain bike trails have existed in Earth’s history.

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 huge surge of popularity in the fridge. 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 simplest examples still asked the user to set up a MySQL database, made a few more classes. 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 also creating a new tyc2.bin file from fchart website seemed to be able to ride my bike around the adult’s in order to wake up to Camel Pass.

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 beloved platform.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this demo is located in the #todos div, and htx-swap=beforeend instructs HTMX to place the response which turns out to the site was a unit parked on a new Todo object. available on Github.