42 books
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21 voters

“
The strength of a cryptographic system usually has less to do with its design than with the way people tend to use it. Humans are the weak link. Instead of changing keys or passwords at regular intervals, we use the same ones over and over, for weeks or months or years. We repeat the same words (such as "secret") at the start of multiple messages, or repeat entire messages multiple times, giving codebreakers a foothold. We choose key phrases that are easy to guess: words related to where we live
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― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

“
Elizebeth raced to stay on top of the shifting codes, the proliferation of patterns. Her worksheets grew weird, beautiful. She filled the grid squares with letters and numbers that made different geometric shapes when you stepped back and looked at the worksheet from a distance. Some of the shapes were parallelograms, some looked like stairs, other like labyrinths. She pulled mischievious letters from the sky and sorted them on the page. The invisible world was all out of whack, misaligned, and
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”
― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies
― The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies