Diary of a Network Geek

“Check your flaps and seals.”

If you’re a spy history buff, like I am, you’ll recognize that as an admonition to a fellow practitioner to make sure that their communication is secure and that they don’t have any “leaks” in their organization. When I was in high school, back before essentially all communication that mattered was digital, “tradecraft”, as it related to the spy game, was all about surreptitiously opening someone else’s mail, reading it, and then sending it along, possibly altered. The first codes go back to at least the time of Caesar and have been in use for centuries. In modern secure communications, we are often concerned with verifying that the sender of information is, in fact, the party who claims to have sent it and that it hasn’t been tampered with. In digital communications, both tampering and providing algorithmic checks to discover tampering are surprisingly easy to implement and use. Of course, most people don’t bother because, well, most of us don’t have to worry much about secure communications.
But, somewhere between the two extremes of ancient cyphers and modern digital encryption and verifications, between the 10th and 17th centuries, innovative letter-writers developed other ways to let their recipient know that the letter is from whom it claims to be and hasn’t been tampered with called letterlocking. I’d never heard of this, until I read Before Envelopes, People Protected Messages With Letterlocking. Now, I figure most of my readers will be familiar with things like wax seals and signet stamps to “secure” letters, but, like me, had never heard of “letterlocking”. It’s fascinating, the idea of folding and stamping and marking letters, mostly without envelopes, to try to ensure message security. It reminds me of my primitive note-passing in grade school. If I’d had access to the letterlocking dictionary, things might have been more interesting.

So, as I warned you earlier this year, I’d still post things on Friday, but I completely expect that they’ll be increasingly idiosyncratic and may not be “fun” or interesting to anyone else but me. But, also, I encourage you to write a physical letter and use the letterlocking dictionary to teach yourself one of the letterlocking methods there, just for fun. I may just start leaving love notes for my wife this way. Then again, I may not. Maybe if she reads this and mentions it to me, I will. Think of it as yet another method of verifying communication. (Also, don’t worry. My blushing bride has a pretty damn good sense of humor. She needs to be married to me!)

Come back next week to see what I come up with next!

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words!

Comic books are cool.

No, seriously, they’re cool again. All those super popular movies, like the Avengers? Totally all comic books. But, also, Atomic Blonde. Yeah, that’s right, that spy thriller set in the last days of the Cold War was a graphic novel first. The thing is, comics have been around for a pretty long time. They got super popular in the Forties and then again in the Eighties and, well, now. And, yes, most of us are familiar with the most famous comic heroes, like Superman and Batman, or more recently, Captain America and Ironman and Spiderman and Wolverine, but there are way more to comic books than that. And, if you want to see some of the older comics, the comics that started all this fun, for free, you’re in luck!
Now, thanks to Comic Book Plus, you can browse through a massive archive of old comic books. There are spy and espionage comics, and sci-fi comics and, yes, even superhero comics. You name the category and it’s probably there. Though, keep in mind that these are mostly pre-1960 comics, so some of our more extreme tastes may not be catered to!

In any case, they’re free and fun and it’s Friday and you can’t convince me that if you’re reading my blog you don’t have time for a classic comic book.
Go check it out!

This post first appeared on Use Your Words, my other blog.