[dba-Tech] Free Crypto Course

This brings me back to when I was about 8 years old and totally fascinate
with encription. At that tender age, I devised my own system, whose
messages began with something like 2.314.7.5 and the encrypted message
followed. The initial 2 referred to a list of books we shared; 314 was the
page number; 7 referred to the line and 5 to the fifth word that line.
Suppose the word is "agriculture". That means that arrange those letters in
alphabetical order and then plot the actual message according to the lines.

I was merely 8 years old, but thought this ingenious -- only to read later
that this had been invented a century before I was born. But the art and
science of cryptography have remained a staple of my life. There's the
story about the WWII Navajos that were hired because no one in Germany or
Japan had any speakers of the Navajo language. There's also the story of
finding the sunken U-boat off the coast of Denmark, and finding therein an
Enigma machine, which enabled the Brits and Americans to decrypt the Nazi
messages to their U-boats. And hence the profound dilemma,so perfectly
described in Neal Stepveson's novel "Cryptonomicon". I'll add to this that
this one of the finest books I've ever read. If you have an interest in
crypto, then you must read that book.

Arthur
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