Today’s tasks are mostly reading and learning by reading. As you read the textbook, you will find exercises scattered through the text. Part of reading the text for full understanding is doing these exercises until you are very confident in your understanding.

Please read the full list of tasks before you begin. The final task (uploading to canvas) should happen even if you don’t finish everything else.

To Do:

1. Log into canvas and follow the instructions to get set up on Discord, which we will use during the semester.
2. Log into canvas and fill out the video waiver (I record my screencast during lectures for future students).
3. Log into canvas and fill out the AI questionnaire (I’d like to know your AI opinions).
4. Print out the Self-Eval Sheet, or save a copy you can edit on your device. You will fill this out each time you do your daily post work. It should be self-explanatory (read the instructions!).
5. Read the pages which have tabs across the top of this website (About, Archive, Notes/Videos, …) so you know how the course is run. This is the syllabus and I won’t use class time to go over it. This is important.
6. Go to the Textbook link (top left on this site) and view the textbook. If you would like to use the (experimental) AI overlay, you have to enter the code that I sent you in canvas mail, which has a $5 starting budget (AI costs money). Once you put that in, it is stored as a cookie. Then you can simply highlight a passage of interest with your mouse, and you will find different options, like “show me an example” or “chat”. Note: there is no expectation of privacy. Whatever you find useful, you can save as a margin note, and then it is viewable to everyone who uses the textbook. (I moderate these.) If you don’t want the AI overlay, you use it in “Static Mode” and it’s a traditional (human-written by me!) textbook with built-in interactives.
7. READ Chapter 1 of our text, up to the end of Section 1.3 (including Enigma machine), doing the exercises. Your goal is to understand how each of these old ciphers works, so that you can encrypt and decrypt by hand. And to have a bit of a historical viewpoint.
8. CIPHERTEXT CHAIN! Encrypt a message (a quote you like), using a cipher of your choice (tools are in the textbook as interactives) and post it to the Discord #ciphertexts channel. Choose the ciphertext posted by the last person on that channel, to try to decrypt. Try to guess which cipher it was encrypted with, before you try to decrypt. Feel free to report out how you decrypted (by hand, using the provided tools, whether you guessed right…). This is for fun and to get used to discord and each other. Don’t sweat it.
9. Decrypt the following Vigenère cipher by hand, showing work, using the key “CRYPTO”: geagrdvzmc
10. Decrypt the following Caesar cipher by hand, showing work, using the key “D” (that is, A becomes D): hw wx euxwh
11. Decrypt the following ADFGVX cipher by hand, showing work, using the Polybius square shown in the textbook and column order 1324: VDDGXDXVGGAXAAAA (Hint: we didn’t really talk about decryption, so you’ll have to figure out how to reverse engineer it! Explain your ideas!)
12. Decrypt the following one-time pad message (in binary) by hand, using key “001101”: 100100
13. At the end of each daily post, collect evidence of your work, including your self-eval sheet, and upload it (PDF, jpg, etc.) to the appropriate Daily Post dropbox in Canvas. This is not graded. But it is our joint record of your hard work throughout semester. This is important.