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What really drew me to this article was how interesting the author made the subject sound. They hooked me right away by presenting something we usually consider to be ordinary as extraordinary. Additionally, the authors voice was really present and interesting throughout the whole article which is something that I really need to learn from. Also, once I got to the end I realized how well the article was organized. The title and initial premise wrapped right back up at the end with the experiment with spoons of different metal types. All in all, this article was well written; it was well organized, intriguing, and also concise.

I enjoyed reading this blog comparing medieval hospital foods to current hospitals because of the way the blog was set up with examples of medieval and contemporary hospital moves. The pictures also enhanced the blog.

This blog post interested me with the vast history of rabies, how people attempted to cure those infected, and how some civilizations used this deadly disease to their advantage in times of war.

This blog post was a very entertaining and read. The concept that the reason people get scammed because of their strengths (trust in authority/desire to follow) and not our weaknesses is a bit mind boggling. It was very well written and kept me interested throughout the entire post.

This article is particularly well written because of the amount of background research that was done. There were tests performed and their results were used in the article.

Many interesting ones in this list. I like the Kryptos at the CIA headquarters. 

Here's a list of 10 unsolved cipher texts throughout history, #2 is the Beale Papers covered in the chapter, #8 is Kryptos (the background of our website). Some date back as far as 1400 BC and some are more recent like the Zodiac Killer.

It's time to start bookmarking Charles Babbage weirdness.

Interesting to read a little more about the history of the Vigenere Cipher. Also explains how it is cracked.

This website gives a good description about the Vigenère cipher and techniques for cracking it. It also shows another way we could more easily crack one of these ciphers using Microsoft Excel. Lastly, on the menu on the left side of the page is a link that lets you contact Simon Singh.

Good link from Khan Academy that has good practice questions/explanation of the Vigenere cipher.

Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of numbers important to the field of number theory, trigonometric expansions, and analysis. Ada Lovelace wrote a theoretical program to calculate these that would work on Charles Babbage's unfinished Analytical Engine. It's pretty interesting how Lovelace was a "leading figure" in the now massively male-dominated computer programming field, but didn't receive recognition for her work until fairly recently.

See also Riley's bookmark and my comments on it.

This blog has information about military cryptography and privacy in general, including this post about the Zimmermann Telegram. Is it ethical to lie to an ally if it is in their best interest? What are the ethics behind spying on one's allies? Do ethics hinder one's ability to win a war, and if so, should ethics be disregarded in times of war? Another interesting post examines how Snowden should be viewed as a patriot, not a traitor. This made me question where one's loyalty should remain- to the government or to the people?

I really just wonder what kind of decision-making went into creating this document--what they decided to add and take out, etc. This source also has outside sources on the final pages.

Encrypted analysis of data in the cloud would allow secure access to sensitive information.

Homomorphic encryption is pretty amazing. What they're proposing in this article is a bit like having a computer analyze an encrypted novel and determining which sentences were grammatically incorrect--without even knowing what the plaintext sentences were!

Example of how improving technology requires new encryption that hasn't yet been cracked

Malicious adverts have been found on the UK version of the Match.com dating website. Anyone caught out by the booby-trapped ads could fall victim to ransomware, said security company Malwarebytes, which spotted the cyber-threat. The malicious ads appeared on pages of the dating site via an ad network that pipes content to Match and many other places.

Blog for the University of Bristol cryptography research group; research and posts geared towards cryptology students

The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit scientific organization whose purpose is to further research in cryptology and related fields. Cryptology is the science and practice of designing computation and communication systems which are secure in the presence of adversaries.

"Matt Blaze directs the Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Pennsylvania." This site links to his blog and research papers regarding topics of cryptography.

What really stood out to me about this article was that they said the NSA actually pays more attention to those people who use encryption. So, in order to protect ourselves and also avoid prying NSA eyes, we should encourage people to stand in solidarity with encryption. I thought this was really interesting because I always thought that encryption would undoubtedly make everything more secure, but here they're saying that it actually attracts attention (which isn't necessarily a good thing).

When I was a kid, I read an issue of Superman in which he faces Batman's villain, the Joker. At one point, the Joker tells Superman that he's kidnapped all of Superman's best friends (Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and so on) and locked them inside lead-lined caskets, hidden throughout Metropolis. Since the caskets are air-tight, they only have an hour to live, and Superman can't find them because his x-ray vision can't see through lead! That's what the Joker said. Actually, since Superman can't see through lead, those caskets *stood out* when he scanned the city with his x-ray vision, and he rescued all his friends in short order. Same basic idea.

You can find anything on the Internet: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/superjoker6.jpg.