lmcelhiney wrote:

Brief review:

Elonka Dunin, one of the sharpest cryptographers of this or any other age, has created a superb tutorial of cryptography --an entire classroom in a single book! A reader can be at any level of skill in crytography and achieve full enjoyment of this marvelous work. Excellent coverage of the latest in cryptograms, including Da Vinci codes and the hardest puzzle to challenge experts in a decade: KRYPTOS (Google it!) This book could be your training ground for solving the best of unsolved cryptograms of this and recent centuries.

Wow, thanks! I hope all the reviews are as positive. :)

The Amazon U.S. page is not accepting reviews yet, but the Amazon UK page is. Would you be interested in adding your advance review there?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/026-8355631-3534830

RE: Books: Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms

Dunin,Antoni

The "Virtuti Militari" is a Polish medal that is equivalent to the American Medal of Honor. This page has a list of the recipients. Antoni Dunin was my grandfather, who died in battle as a First Lieutenant at the age of 32, during the German Blitzkrieg. Our family history was pretty much shredded by World War II, so bit by bit, I'm piecing it back together. I don't know the details of why he was awarded this medal, but someday I will find out . . .

Elonka

Polish Order of the Virtuti Militari Recipients (1792-1992)

Diggin' it, cupcakes and all. :)

SNL - The 'Chronic of Narnia' Rap

I was so busy with my book, I completely missed this news as it went by . . .

November 8, 2005--A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) recently announced the factorization of the 193-digit number

310 7418240490 0437213507 5003588856 7930037346 0228427275 4572016194 8823206440 5180815045 5634682967 1723286782 4379162728 3803341547 1073108501 9195485290 0733772482 2783525742 3864540146 9173660247 7652346609
known as RSA-640 (Franke 2005). The team responsible for this factorization is the same one that previously factored the 174-digit number known as RSA-576 (MathWorld headline news, December 5, 2003) and the 200-digit number known as RSA-200 (MathWorld headline news, May 10, 2005).

RSA numbers are composite numbers having exactly two prime factors (i.e., so-called semiprimes) that have been listed in the Factoring Challenge of RSA Security®.

While composite numbers are defined as numbers that can be written as a product of smaller numbers known as factors (for example, 6 = 2 x 3 is composite with factors 2 and 3), prime numbers have no such decomposition (for example, 7 does not have any factors other than 1 and itself). Prime factors therefore represent a fundamental (and unique) decomposition of a given positive integer. RSA numbers are special types of composite numbers particularly chosen to be difficult to factor, and they are identified by the number of digits they contain.

While RSA-640 is a much smaller number than the 7,816,230-digit monster Mersenne prime known as M42 (which is the largest prime number known), its factorization is significant because of the curious property that proving or disproving a number to be prime ("primality testing") seems to be much easier than actually identifying the factors of a number ("prime factorization"). Thus, while it is trivial to multiply two large numbers p and q together, it can be extremely difficult to determine the factors if only their product pq is given. With some ingenuity, this property can be used to create practical and efficient encryption systems for electronic data.

Gotta go update my "Unsolved Codes" webpage . . .

Elonka

MathWorld News: RSA-640 Factored

There is an informal and anecdotal belief among Americans that if you dig a hole deep enough, eventually you would come out in China. This is theoretically possible if the hole is angled in the right way, but if you dig straight down and through the exact center of the earth from anywhere in the 48 contiguous United States, you'd come out in the Indian Ocean. Only in parts of Argentina or Chile would a straight hole emerge in China.

The map on this page allows you to approximately locate the place directly on the other side of the world from anywhere. The complementary red and black outlines are reversed, so that a place in the right place on the black outline map is directly opposite the place on the red outlines. The red outline map is "upside down", with south at the top . . .

I love maps. :)

The Other Side of the World

Ever wondered why your hard disk is full? Or what directory is taking up most of the space? When using conventional disk browsing tools, such as Windows Explorer, these questions may be hard to answer. With SequoiaView however, they can be answered almost immediately. SequoiaView uses a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. You can use it to locate those large files that you haven't accessed in one year, or to quickly locate the largest picture files on your drive.

This is an *awesome* piece of freeware. It's got a creative way of graphically displaying the relative sizes of the entire contents of my hard-drive at once, from large folders down to individual files. Within seconds I had spotted a few massive files that weren't needed anymore, and was therefore able to free up multiple gigabytes of space.

SequoiaView - Free up some hard-drive space

Checked images:3439950
Size of all files checked:61550089950
Total Interesting images:138050
Percentage Interesting images:02.160891307545227239

This is an open ended project to randomly stumble through the internet checking for steganography in images (basically hidden messages). Of course the best steganography is undetectable, but some common tools have shown to have statistical weaknesses that are detectable.

 . . .
The real work in checking the actual images has been done by Niels Provos, with stegdetect (which stegsearch requires), and you can see some analysis that he's done on Usenet, but the purpose here has been to audit images found on "random" websites.

A tidbit of data from someone doing research on steganography. Looks like they started but didn't really pursue it... Still, it's an interesting data point.

Steganography Stumbler

Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms (Paperback)
by Elonka Dunin

List Price:$13.95
Price:$11.16 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details
You Save:$2.79 (20%)

Availability: This item has not yet been released.

Heh, the manuscript's not even finished, and Amazon is already offering a discount on it. ;)

Books: Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms

Decius wrote:

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said during his fourth and final speech before Thursday's vote for Iraq's parliament. "As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.

Bush's position sounds a lot stronger to me when he acknowledges its weaknesses. This is not a paradox. It shows objective consideration of alternatives.

I agree. This interview boosted my opinion of him.

RE: CNN.com - Bush takes responsibility for invasion intelligence - Dec 14, 2005

Very pretty site. At first glance it's your typical personal page. But then, move your mouse . . .

hello