What I Learned Yesterday #16 (Cryptography)

I think putting few words about main topic of the article if it belongs to this series will be useful: it’s an interesting subject for you – you read, it’s not – you skip. I don’t like to spam people with some bullshit, so it will create a first filter for the reader. Although, I believe everything I write is amazing and exciting, but the truth is – market decides. If I am good you will find it interesting, if not – you won’t. This is how the world functions. OK, now to the article.

As a part of a project at work I’ve being playing with cryptography last few days and my impressions are quite different.

I still remember that I loved cryptography in the university, it was really interesting and exciting: all these algorithms, the history, the Caesar’s cipher, encrypting/decrypting… But now, when it came to practicality, it was sooo boring. Generate a key pair, using certain algorithm, encode with public key (or private – I am still confused as the guys on the other side cannot decode the file I sent them with all the information provided), use correct algorithm for encoding, use correct amount of bytes in one key, than use correct sequence in another, use correct methods for encrypting – booooring. 

But nevertheless, I admire the guys who really understand this and especially those who design those algorithms. They are geniuses. When you go to wiki to read about one of those encrypting technologies, you don’t last long 😀 It becomes complicated very fast.

And again, when I think it one more time, from another side of view it’s pretty cool: you run the program – you get encrypted file, you change parameters  and run the program again and your file is decrypted. Really awesome. 

The best part is: you, as the normal user don’t have to even care about all those algorithms – as encryption has been made very user-friendly nowadays. In Windows it’s a built-in tool, you can encrypt your documents with Microsoft Office, there are plenty of third-party tools.

I won’t invent a wheel by writing an article on how to do all the encryption, because they are already written and and they are really good. I tried to find the most relevant and new ones, so here is the list:

• How to Encrypt Files on Windows (very detailed article)
• How to Encrypt Files and Folders in Windows 10, 8, or 7 (also in the end there is a list of 5 third-party tools for encryption)
• How To Easily Encrypt Files On Mac (and an instruction for Mac users)

Hopefully it was useful or at least interesting information for you, my reader. And if you are a cryptography expert, please leave a comment and say I am wrong and this is not boring 🙂 If you are just normal user – also leave a comment, I would really appreciate it. And if you need my help – please write me a message, I am always happy to give a hand. Have a fantastic time 🙂 See you in the next post.