Links
I will be looking for relevant links that appear in the news (current events)
and will post them here. If you hear an interesting story, pass it on and I will
probably post it.
The web comic xkcd.com has a cult following of
people who get a laugh from nerdy cultural references. It
often has comics related to cryptography and mathematics from this course.
An April 4, 2009
news story about the World War II effort to crack the
German Enigma code. A machine that was used to break codes
was rebuilt recently (it took 14 years to reconstruct it!). Thanks to
Jennifer for passing this story along.
Associated Press
MK News
I ran across this blog entry about
peer-to-peer (abbreviated P2P) cryptography. We
will be talking about this towards the end of the course. I am guessing that this blog entry
is in response to a news story about
the Pirate Bay offering a new service called IPREDator.
This service will allow users to use bittorrents through secure internet traffic.
(April 27, 2009) I went to Google today and found the following picture on the page:
Happy birthday Samuel Morse. Your code, though imperfect because the expected code
length for English is 5.738 bits per letter (with some odd assumptions, see the handouts
labeled Trees and codes I),
is still in use over 150 years later.
(May 19, 2009) Your classmate Stan Dragnev wrote a cool applet for breaking
monoalphabetic cipher. Check it out and see if you can use it to break a cryptogram or two. It uses the same
username/password combination that we use for the handouts.
