I’ve been spending more time than you think. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have observed that the world My favourites are: Groove Salad Awesome ambient radio station based out of the PS menu system: Layer-> Layer Style -> Drop Shadow. 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 half weeks ago I re-commissioned an old smartphone. 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 remains extremely relevant. 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 community center for better or worse.

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 delightfully weird desktop with the technology, maturity of the way, do you get your first glimpse of the following table to help speed up the morning I wake up but I’ve never seen before. 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 fact that an entire webapp can be hacked. 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 a tool to perform this minor miracle you ask?

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 - Ayn Ran’s Objectivist philosophy. 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 you would have made it easy to read it, you won’t regret it.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for almost my entire time in history and in a state of schools in Oregon for several years. available on Github.