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David Kahn has died
- throwaway81523 3y agoRIP. For those who don't feel like clicking, Kahn was the author of several important cryptography history books including "The Codebreakers".
- ydnaclementine 3y agoBorrow from your library before the waitlist is massive
- throwaway81523 3y agoI have a personal copy in a box someplace, I think.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y agoRIP :( I remember reading The Codebreakers with great joy some 30 years ago. Very fascinating stories and well presented history of cryptography.
- rgovostes 3y agoThe first edition of "The Codebreakers" misses some of the most important events in the history of cryptography: Published in 1967, it came out before most details about the ENIGMA effort were known to the public, and almost a decade before Diffie and Hellman demonstrated asymmetry key exchange in 1976.
- toomuchtodo 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kahn_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kahn_(writer) https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/01/david-kahn-codebreakers-nsa-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/01/david-k... | https://archive.today/dxEzv https://archive.today/dxEzv
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoShould use that Washington Post obit link instead since Schneier not really adding anything
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoCondolences page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39150382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39150382
- aestetix 3y agoWhat a loss. I had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at the NSA Cryptologic Symposium one year. He will be missed.
- OskarS 3y agoOh wow. I got The Codebreakers as a Christmas gift when I was a teenager and devoured it. It’s still on my bookshelf, almost falling apart. A great work of history. Rest in peace.
- sohkamyung 3y agoI got The Codebreakers when I saw it on sale. The parts on the history on cryptography are a fascinating read.
- sophacles 3y agoCodebreakers had a pretty big impact on me as a teenager - both feeding and fueling my curiosity of everything "infosec". I'm sorry to see he's passed.
- butlike 3y agoI had never heard of him until today. While I didn't know much about his works, I'm sorry he passed. He seems like an inspiration to more than a few. R.I.P and cheers!
- adrian_b 3y agoHis history book from 1967 had a great influence on the generation of people who have created the civilian cryptography during the seventies of the 20th century, leading to breakthroughs like the DES standard developed at IBM (1975 draft, 1977 final) based on the earlier work of Horst Feistel (1970) and the public key cryptography developed from 1976 to 1979 by Whitfield Diffie, Martin E. Hellman, Ralph Charles Merkle, Michael Oser Rabin and the RSA team. Before that, good cryptography was a monopoly of the military and diplomatic parts of the governments (except that even many governments were not competent enough to distinguish good cryptography from bad cryptography). Because his book was about the history of cryptography, its technical content was obsolete. However its importance consisted in the fact that many of its readers became interested in cryptography, so then they have studied all available sources and they have thought about improvements, eventually leading to new methods and algorithms, which became public, unlike the classified methods used by the government.
- Rant423 3y ago"The Codebreakers" is an incredible book. One of the books I would save during a fire.