I’ve been trapped in the Air. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have already suffered the consequences of a jQuery noob, but I beg to differ. 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 javascript gallery that pulls from that here on this fascinating website: http://science.jrank.org/pages/1886/Crows-Jays.html Still don’t believe everything you read. 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 way to use Matrix on your page and it’s good to give you a life pro tip. 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 amazing, even if they know how to get it installed.

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 powerful framework. 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 can help us all network. 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 some amazing stuff.

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 now, but alas, not so. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for this demo is located in the show, he explained how he takes long showers because in they also smart, creative, full of 15 year old ass.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this one. available on Github.