The Code Book: How to Make It, Break It, Hack It, Crack It
This book by Simon Singh presents the history of encryption since the ancient Egyptians up to the today’s Internet era. It is not a technical book, and can be read and enjoyed without any special mathemathica background, being able to introduce the basics of the encryption algorithms available today, and used also in protected internet transactions. I warlmly recommend this book to all the people willing to understand the enormous power of message encryption today and in the past.
A very juicy part regards the story of the Second World War, and how the “unbreakable” german Enigma machine has been in fact broken. Puzzles are present almost in every chapter, but it isn’t a must to solve them to proceed with the reading.
I really enjoyed this book, and expecially the focus on the ingenious and groundbreaking power of the human brain.
Without dubts in the next few years Windows Vista will be present in the vast majority of dektop PCs in the world. Windows Vista is out already from some months, and as a technophile I have to say that the new Redmond creation is a big step forward. Now I am convinced that this step has been taken in the wrong direction. In a few words, the operating system must let the computer do what the owner wants, and not what the operating sysyem decides. Vista is the only program on a Windows PC that will have direct access to all the system resources, while all the other applications will have to work through the filters of Vista. This is increasing the level of security of the PC, but the operating system will choose what your computer will be able to do. This is unacceptable. Too may interests are there in this “security” game: the personal data contained in all the average PCs is worth too much money. From another perspective, do we really need such monster computers with 1 gig RAM and powerful CPUs and graphic cards just to give our desktop the newest Windows reincarnation with all those frills? Of course NOT!
There are many alternatives to this. Starting with 