Cryptography section added, RIP Itojun

I've recently added a cryptography section to my site. There is some material already up, though a lot of it is incomplete and/or unpolished, and there is some that I'm still working on and will put up shortly.

This section is perhaps something that has been a long time coming, as cryptography has been one of my main technical interests for many years now. I have long been of the opinion that, properly utilised, cryptography holds the potential to provide society with a lot of benefits. Admittedly, I have never been particularly optimistic that this potential would be realised, but neither was I particularly concerned with trying to change that.

I have recently been inspired to do more to rectify this situation. As was widely reported, on October 29 this year Jun-Ichiro "itojun" Hagino died at the age of 37 (I haven't found the cause of death reliably reported anywhere on the internet). Itojun was a very active and well known Japanese programmer, perhaps best known for his extensive contribution to the KAME project, which produced free IPv6 implementations for BSD unix operating systems. Itojun dedicated the larger part of his life's work to the promotion and advocacy of IPv6, at many levels - from writing code for KAME, down to producing educational IPv6 videos for lay people to distribute via YouTube. Judging by comments left in various places after his death, he is widely remembered as a genuinely dedicated, helpful and pleasant person who always put technical merit before project politics and always had time for anything or anyone on the subject of furthering IPv6 adoption.

Upon his death, it occurred to me that the cryptography world could really use someone to do for it what Itojun did for the IPv6 world. Although I dare not compare myself to Itojun in terms of talent or technical knowledge, I do feel that I can make some contribution to playing a similar role for cryptography. I can write explanations of cryptography at varying levels, I can explain possible benefits to society, I can make educational YouTube videos and I can write code.

I have thus resolved that in the near-ish future I will launch a separate website with the twofold goal of educating as many people as possible about basic cryptographic technology, together with what it can and cannot achieve, and of challenging the world's programmers and policy makers to start making wider and better use of existing cryptographic technology to solve problems. The new crypto section of this site is a case of "testing the water" - a place I can slowly build up a collection of documents to eventually polish and release in one big user-friendly bunch at a later date. Stay tuned.