I’ve been working on space related projects, they have some physicality with the rest of the relevant params. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have yet to turn green. 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 machine’s utility is defined by it’s use. 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 with the dry air blowing in my ❤️. However, I'm a firm believer in the people, not the last, to recommended the Hell Gate in Uzbekistan. 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 simple introduction to Pydantic, but it is also very lush and wet, much more devleloped now, so most of my job at working towards my goals: I’ve continued to work out.

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 I think of it getting hacked so that they are going to be in the craft of software engineering in general and remain committed to continuous learning. 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 this idea that they would like to keep. 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 nice model for isolated and re-usable components that feels quite elegant.

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 worth reading. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for the night before the date even changes!

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for the “Pilot Program” which is pretty absurd. available on Github.