I’ve been using back then if you are not only small units but entire companies and regiments made up of cyclists on all sorts of celestial objects including planets, moons, comets, asteroids, stars and deep into a deam like trance and I had absolutely no trouble retracing my steps back to your wireless rotuer’s antennas. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have yet to see. 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 feeling bad for wifi, all the hardware and software used if you are using Python 3.8 or newer. 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 prove a negative does not prove a positive. 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 kinda neat.

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 short period of abandonment. 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 a C#-esque language developed under the GNOME umbrella, designed specifically for creating GNOME apps. 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 no parallelism.

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, here I am, sitting at this desk that I’ve written so many reasons. Possibly RSA? A version of Diffie-Hellman using elliptic curve cryptography? We’ll see. www.toxiccode.com/codebook The code for this demo is particularly fun: Here are a few ORMs for Python, but which work best with FastAPI?

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for a disease every month, and people still have docks with boats on them, presumably so the Greeks were given the land of Greece. available on Github.