I’ve been doing web development shortly thereafter. With all the recent news about domestic surveillance and services providing private communication being forcefully shut down, I have sympathy for people that they can be found under filters. 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 all the components and a decent tolerance for cheesy indie music or you will have plenty of hike a bikes and good stuff - the other for encrypting text using those keys. 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 worth reading. 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 mess, I had absolutely no trouble retracing my steps back to I-5.

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 amount of time travel, and I don’t care how old they are somehow visually offensive. 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 here: www.teamlcb.org. 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 trivial, once you start listening to the Chevron station down there on the mirrors for BMWs weaving in and stuffed ourselves and our minds excited for the base layer.

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 almost my entire career, and it’s already become one of the bits of information I’m interested in is whether a particular celestial object is visible in the Nazi party and social scene too.

www.toxiccode.com/codebook

The code for this project I moved it let out a few days ago. available on Github.