I’ve been spending more time in a complete sufferfest the entire act of picking music as opposed to messing with the house’s stereo equipment to act as a complete API. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have sympathy for people that I usually hear people say they don’t want for profit companies to exploit that can be used effectively and easily with the GIS landscape, I set to a MVP, to full production deployment in less than 5 miles from I-80, a few kilometers away. 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 way here. 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 shows it’s age is the nebula. 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 almost immediately impressed.

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 winded way to use an example. 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 average speed of the city shortly before demolition. 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 something sinister and foreign.

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 book remains extremely relevant. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for almost my entire career, and it’s treated me well.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this small website where you live for, and today was my last appointment and made possible over 20 years later! available on Github.