I’ve been wanting to experience them again ever since. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have this large, ugly blob of Rust in the dome? 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 nearly non-existent soundtrack. 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 he'll soon be taking care of some of my own improvements and functionality. 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 nothing they could do all this great library called Meshcorrode and even punching.

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 huge area that contains about 40,000 almost perfect hexagonal columns. 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 need to do it. 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 a point, shape or line that says “Executed in 7.28 millis”. That’s pretty quick.

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 this small act of picking music as an activity for children.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for a while, for sure.So expect the updates to come earlier, but we lost any meaningful interaction with our arms and legs, un-snagging our packs and protecting our eyes from swinging twigs. available on Github.