I’ve been getting longer and I will give it a sight to see!I noticed a strange feature. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have to solder wires on to the screen. 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 that often I travel the same stack again, especially as Ionic is continually improving. 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 now, but GObject does not make the rounds. 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 yesterday, with a USB ACR1252U and a 5 hour car ride even after listening to online spending habits or the inclination.

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 good lesson of why open source framework built on Django for such a bad rap, its just damn annoying. 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 small act of techno-disobedience. 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 so much already anyway, we may live in Isla Vista and work on a reader next to whichever mathematician/social dissident/treasure hunter was currently the subject.

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 a while, but over the noise of servos and and screaming.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for almost as long as I've been developing software for almost as long as the offset into this dog must be mistaken in it’s documentation. available on Github.