Man has created codes to keep secrets and has broken codes to learn those secrets since the time of the Pharaohs. For 4,000 years, fierce battles have been waged between codemakers and codebreakers, and the story of these battles is civilization's secret history, the hidden account of how wars were won and lost, diplomatic intrigues foiled, business secrets stolen, governments ruined, computers hacked. From the XYZ Affair to the Dreyfus Affair, from the Gallic War to the Persian Gulf, from Druidic runes and the kaballah to outer space, from the Zimmermann telegram to Enigma to the Manhattan Project, codebreaking has shaped the course of human events to an extent beyond any easy reckoning. Once a government monopoly, cryptology today touches everybody. It secures the Internet, keeps e-mail private, maintains integrity of cash machine transactions, and scrambles TV signals on unpaid-for channels. David Kahn's The Codebreakers takes the measure of what codes and codebreaking have meant in human history in a single comprehensive account, astonishing in its scope and enthralling in its execution. Hailed upon first publication as a book likely to become the definitive work of its kind, The Codebreakers has more than lived up to that prediction: it remains unsurpassed. With a brilliant new chapter that makes use of the previously classified documents to bring the book thoroughly up to date, and to explore the myriad ways computer codes and their hackers are changing all of our lives, The Codebreakers is the skeleton key to a thousand thrilling true stories of intrigue, mystery, and adventure. It is a masterpiece of the historian's art.

从法老时代开始，人类就创造了密码来保守秘密，并通过破译密码来了解这些秘密。四千年来，编码者和破译者之间展开了激烈的争斗，这些争斗的故事就是文明的秘密历史，是关于战争的胜负、外交阴谋的挫败、商业机密的窃取、政府的毁灭、计算机的黑客攻击的隐秘记录。从XYZ事件到德雷福斯事件，从高卢战争到波斯湾，从德鲁伊符文和卡巴拉到外太空，从齐默尔曼电报到英尼码再到曼哈顿计划，密码破译对人类事件进程的影响超出了任何容易计算的程度。曾经是政府垄断的密码学，今天涉及到每个人。它保证了互联网的安全，保持了电子邮件的私密性，维护了现金机交易的完整性，并扰乱了未付费频道的电视信号。大卫-卡恩的《破译者》以一个单一的全面叙述来衡量密码和破译在人类历史上的意义，其范围令人惊讶，其执行令人着迷。破译者》一经出版就被誉为可能成为同类作品中的权威之作，它不仅没有辜负这一预言：它仍然是无可超越的。破译者》有一个精彩的新章节，利用以前的机密文件使该书彻底更新，并探索计算机代码及其黑客改变我们所有生活的无数方式，《破译者》是通向无数惊心动魄的阴谋、神秘和冒险的真实故事的骨架钥匙。它是历史学家的艺术杰作