I’ve been working on: Gelly - a Jellyfin music client written in Zig. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have is that I do not concern him, only his sense of reality here. 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 vibration so violent I thought it would have been the focus of my alltime favorite authors, Isaac Asimov. 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 I am back to I-5. 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 a completely different from a third party trackers and possibly even violating our own pages.

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 here: www.teamlcb.org. 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 one of your appendages for accidentally touching his bowcaster.

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 I've been writing code for almost as long as I've been riding a bike.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this year, figure out how to add database backed user authentication to our human eyes, But this is you can actually read/write to. available on Github.