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Current cosmology seems to be like a house of cards, a religion pretending to be science, built on some unproven and perhaps unprovable fundamental assumptions (beliefs).

Unless I just fed the troll, that is.

I've always had a knack for Maths-related subjects, but I my real enthusiasm was sparked by Simon Singh's "Fermat's Last Theorem". Singh has a great talent for communicating advanced ideas in a way that is easily understood by the layman. You won't find a single equation in the text (it reads more like a documentary), but some of the appendices contain classic mind-benders such as the infamous "proof" that 2 = 1.

His follow-up, "The Code Book", I found even more involving. It charts the use of codes from ancient times (simple substitution) through to the Enigma, RSA codes and it even touches on Quantum Cryptography. As an added bonus, Singh included a "cipher challenge" at the end of the book: ten encrypted messages, each using a more advanced form of encryption than the last. The first person to successfully decode all ten messages would win £100,000.

As a 17 year old reading these books (and, to be honest, not being much of a book-reader at the time), I can confidently say that these books are easily accessible to school children of 15 or above.

To find out more, visit http://www.simonsingh.com/

this book. I found it an enjoyable yet educational walk through the history of encoding/decoding. Cool stuff. I guess Sicilian mobsters typically aren't Mensa members...

I'll second that recomendation. The Code Book is a good read, not only explaining the basics of cryptography but also cryptanalysis.

Very interesting, even to this layman.

Simon Singh's Code Book covers history of encryption pretty extensively starting from Caesar's time. Enigma and others are covered very well.
The encryption methods are covered in layman's terms(I think!).

Everyone knows that having a low Erdos-Bacon number is more valuable than having a high one, so the proof of this is trivial. Oh, wait, computer networks? Never mind.

Have you really read "The Code Book"? Maybe it was a different edition to mine then, because mine has a competition (with a £10k prize) in the back consisting of cryptanalytic problems of increasing difficulty - including simple Caesar shift cipher, Vigenere and Enigma all the way up to RSA.

The puzzles (with the winning solutions) can be found on Singh's website : http://www.simonsingh.com/Cipher_Challenge.html

Check it out over at Simon Singh's website. Fermat's Last Theorem is great reading, not to mention The Code Book if you fancy cryptography, technology or just drama.

Hope it won't take another 400 years to solve this one...

In WW2 and the 60's, breaking book codes was difficult but not impossible. Today, if the attacker has the text of your book in a computer (he doesn't have to know which book it is, he just needs a big library of online books that includes yours), book codes are probably quite weak.

Stage 5 of Simon Singh's cipher challenge was also a book code. It turned out to be possibly the hardest of all 10 stages. But even though the message was just a few dozen characters long (and turned out to be written in Spanish), several people managed to solve it.

There's no "yet" about it. The reason this hasn't happend, and the reason it will never happen, is it is impossible.

Consideration of the age-old history of cryptography (I recommend The Code Book by Simon Singh) strongly suggests this. Code makers and code breakers are in a race, and one or the other may be ahead at any given time, but sooner or later, the other has always managed to catch up.

The easiest answer I can think of is "keyboard buffers", like you'll find in applications like Z-Term - a serial console for the Macintosh that supports X, Y and Z-term file transfers.

Disabling the Nagle algorithm in telnet clients is fairly common because the character you see on the screen is usually echoed to you by the server. Having to wait 200ms for the characters to appear on your screen in clumps would be very distracting.

Having a keyboard buffer means that you will no longer use the built-in scroll-back buffer of shells such as bash or zsh. If the keyboard buffer is implemented well, it should provide you with similar functionality. In a GUI environment, you have the added advantage of copy/paste. Ideally, all keyboard interaction would be handled by a local shell (CLI or GUI), with data only sent over the network when Enter is pressed.

A big advantage of keyboard buffers is that keystroke timing over the network becomes impossible (unless, of course, you're running the terminal application under the X11 Windows System over a network). Attackers would have to resort to measuring the length of your command lines or passwords, to try to guess what you're typing (great! we know that the root password on that host is 7 characters long!).

As far as typing analysis in general is concerned, there's a mention in The Code Book by Simon Singh. He talks about traffic analysis during World War II. The French Resistance was apparently able to track Panzer divisions by the location of their radio transmissions. They could uniquely identify the Panzer division by the "fist" (tapping characteristics) of the morse-code operator, even though they couldn't decrypt the actual message.

Using a keyboard buffer helps overcome congestion (in a friendlier way than the Nagle algorithm does), avoids people identifying you through biometrics, and especially prevents hostiles using biometrics to find out what you're typing in your SSH session.

Nagle Algorithm References:

• SearchNetworking Article (explicitly states why interactive sessions will disable Nagling)
• IBM RS-6000 Support describes the rules used by the Nagle algorithm to decide which data gets delayed by up to 200ms
• RFC 896 - Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks

Traffic Analysis references:

• Traffic Analysis and Cover Traffic, a posting to Cypherpunks mailing list
• The Code Book (it's dead trees, follow the link to find ISBN to buy or borrow)

If anyone wants more info on this kind of thing (information hiding) pick up a book by Simon Singh . I recommend The Code Book.

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Simon Singh has his own web site with details about his books and the Channel 4 programme. Including his book and BBC TV production about Fermat's Last Theorem.

The very act of observing the photostream forces you to make a decsion on how the protons will be polarized -- as the Man in the Middle you don't know which protons you are interperting are correct until you get the entire message.

For an excellnet description on this process I would recommend Simon Sings' book The Code Book. You can find it here.