The Codebreakers: Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet Kahn

Description: The Codebreakers: Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet Kahn_____________________________________ The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internetby David KahnPublished by Scribners (1996) Condition:Excellent++ 1st Edition / 9th Printing Hardcover Book with Dust Jacket! NO TEXTUAL MARKS! The binding is tight and all 1,179 pages within are bright white with NO WRITING, UNDERLINING, HIGH-LIGHTING, RIPS, TEARS, BENDS OR FOLDS. The covers look perfect! The dust jacket is in excellent condition but does have some minimal wear, as can be seen in my photos. The dust jacket is now inside of a Mylar cover to keep this beautiful gem in awesome condition for generations to come. The only real flaw is a remainder mark on the top page edges (shown). You will be happy with this one! Always handled and packaged with care! Buy with confidence from a seller who takes the time to show you the details and not use just stock photos. Please check out all my pictures and email with any questions! Thanks for looking! About the Book:Since ancient Egypt, people have been creating codes to keep secrets and breaking them to reveal those secrets. For 4,000 years, intense battles have unfolded between those who create codes and those who decipher them, shaping the hidden history of civilizations. This battle has decided the outcomes of wars, exposed plots, stolen trade secrets, and led to the rise and fall of governments. In *The Codebreakers*, David Kahn unveils this hidden world with thrilling accounts from history. His narrative spans from the mysterious symbols of Druidic runes and kabbalistic traditions to modern cryptography in cyberspace. From the intrigue of the XYZ Affair to the high-stakes secrets of the Manhattan Project, Kahn's work shows how codebreaking has impacted history in ways most people never realize. Once exclusive to governments, cryptology today affects everyone. It secures the internet, protects our private emails, safeguards cash machines, and controls access to television content. Kahn’s book, celebrated as a masterpiece upon its first release, dives into stories of espionage, mystery, and cunning strategy, bringing together an astonishingly detailed history in one volume. Now updated with new information and recently declassified documents, *The Codebreakers* is the ultimate guide to the covert battles that have shaped the world—and continue to influence our lives through computer security and hacking today. This book is not just an account of code and cipher but a key to understanding the thrilling stories behind them. A Book Review:5/5 Stars - Even Includes Talking to Dolphins and Communicating with Aliens!What a tome! I feel like I just finished the Bible. It's a good fraction as long and covers an even bigger fraction of human history. Took me six weeks of pretty steady reading (and getting an upper body workout just carrying around the hardback library copy). It's pretty much four books in one -- classical secrets; codes in the era of telegraphs and WWI wireless; WWII and the Cold War; and miscellanea including rum runners and the like. (I gotta say, I wasn't expecting the decoding of Linear B script, talking to dolphins and communicating with aliens to arise in a book on cryptography, but they fit and I enjoyed them, even if modern thinking has evolved a bit (and the Mayan script decoded) since the book was written.) The original edition is 1966, and the updated 1996 edition consists essentially of only a single, short chapter tacked onto the end, so it inhabits almost entirely the pre-electronic, pre-binary age. This colors Kahn's entire way of viewing the importance of various topics. At my age, we tend to think almost entirely in terms of encryption of digital data, whereas of course much of the work prior to 1960 centered on manual encoding and the application of tremendous brainpower to solving codes. I learned a lot about the science and its evolution, of course, including the distinction between codes and ciphers (though I'm still not sure I could distinguish a nomenclator from a two-part code if you handed them to me). Basically, codes are secret, often shorthand numbers for names or phrases ("1121" = "invade Egypt on Thursday"), whereas ciphers ignore structure and operate on letters (or, later, bits). But the book goes much farther than the evolution of ideas, focusing on people, historical context, and events. We learn much about how the Union read Confederate telegraph messages but not vice-versa, about the political repercussions of Yardley's disclosures of the codes the Americans read during WWI, how "practical cryptanalysis" (stealing code books) worked, how hard creating, distributing and protecting code is, how the U.S. confirmed Midway as the Japanese target, and how the Allies worked so hard to keep secret what they knew, to prevent the codes from changing. (This last item forms much of the basis for the plot of Cryptonomicon, which certainly rivals this book in length.) The bits on secret inks and Cold War microfilms are.interesting. The latter stands in stark contrast to Tolkachev, the CIA's billion dollar Soviet spy, just handing over bags of 35mm film. Importantly, it was originally written before the disclosure of Ultra, so the extensive Enigma history in the middle part could really use to be revised more extensively than it was. Turing and the Polish contribution to cracking Enigma deserve a little more, for sure. But it's also pre-DES, pre-public key, and pre-Internet, except for a few pages at the end. Of course, books covering the modern era abound, as well, so it's easy to pick up the missing bits. As a book now more than fifty years old, it also shows its age and how much it was a product of its era. It comes across often as patronizing toward the Japanese, all women are "girls", and homosexuality was scandalous (Kahn uses pejoratives I won't repeat here). So, read it, but be prepared for a shock or two, and use them as teaching moments, if you're sharing the book with someone.Overall, this was *well* worth the six weeks I invested in reading it, during which I read almost nothing else for pleasure and not even many other things for work. (For me, this sits right at the boundary of the two.) Highly recommended.--Rod Van Meter Copyright © 2018-2024 TDM Inc. The photos and text in this listing are copyrighted. I spend lots of time writing up my descriptions and despise it when un-original losers cut and paste my descriptions in as their own. It is against ebay policy and if you are caught, you will be reported to ebay and could be sued for copyright infringement and damages.

Price: 29.99 USD

Location: Orem, Utah

End Time: 2025-01-03T00:04:47.000Z

Shipping Cost: 9.29 USD