Who is Jack Passe-Partout?
Joe Hyams wrote a short book: Zen in the Martial Arts. One of the final sections of the PassKey.me: Securing Your Digital Identity (available on Amazon.com) is taken from Hyams’ chapter where he explains that every black belt martial artist, even Bruce Lee, studied throughout their life with a master who knew much more than they did.
I have had luck to have masters who were very influential in my development as listed in the dedication of the book. Various others were charlatans.
So, who is Jack Passe-Partout in relation to you dear User?
While I know much more than most Users, I well know my knowledge is limited by my particular experiences. I began long ago on mainframes breaking long forgotten codes in academia as an apprentice in data processing. Then, I was hired by a series of employers as a wayfaring journeyman learning my craft on a path to now becoming a master.
I worked as a consultant dressed in bib overalls, steel toed boots, and a hard hat for Fortune 500 companies. I used a HP 85 crudely networked by today’s standards to experimental hardware and now vintage cutting edge software. I was told not to hack the computer and its network, but know that by the end of my tenure, I knew more than the computer programmers who created the programs and engineers who engineered network. Many others who worked alongside of me were clueless; for I was curious, yet relentlessly self- taught in hardware and software integration.
From the data collected, others encoded and encrypted my proprietary reports by fax and by spoken word. That experience taught me never trust a computer, a fallible invention.
Later, I continued working as a consultant, but now dressed in a button down collared shirt, cravat, and loafers in an office. There, I used an 8088 IBM computer, an amphibian coming from the water to dry land when mainframes began to morph into desktops.
I evolved on early DOS Novell networks, later on huge enterprise wide Windows and then to local area Mac networks. I worked on high end Macs with scores of gigabytes of RAM to create high resolution graphics. Those hi res files are measured in gigabytes; but when I first started long ago, files were stored in bytes.
My digital languages and projects are RPN (hydraulics), BASIC (measurement and prediction of physical phenomena), LISP (pattern recognition), HTML (websites), PYTHON (databases) and Excel (computations/databases).
I coordinated a team, which together, we created geo-referenced multi-dimensional databases that predicted human behavior with a Pearson rho coefficient of greater than +0.80 between adjacent geographic areas with a total population of a quarter million humans. Our team used incipient artificial intelligence in the early 2000’s. I have completed 8 years of post secondary education.
I have completed multiple degrees from multiple universities and taught specialized courses. I am literate and speak two natural languages.
And so I have been around.
I have used the PassKey.Me system for over ten years in obscurity and have found it works despite being hacked a number times; one of which was by the Russian Mafia, yet the damage was negligible. I say all of this in humility and let me add in the same voice that I have not used the encoding and decoding capabilities of the PassKey.Me system to transmit messages. I know a great deal about codes and ciphers; but that is an academic interest. I have not encoded and decoded nor enciphered and deciphered messages in real life. And so, my experience is limited. Users should use the system with caution, especially if their lives, liberties, and fortunes are at stake.
But I have issued a challenge to Hackers as a proof of concept by openly publishing Code Book with an enciphered and encoded message as a way to determine the validity of that method.
Perhaps the challenge will validate if the encoding and encryption system is secure enough. But maybe not: Hackers may crack the cryptogram and remain silent. The history of Enigma Encryption (discussed in Section 20.7 in the book) should remind us that the Allies defeated the Nazis by concealing that they could read their secret messages during all of World War II.
As you read these lines, you will see holes in my experience where you have perhaps exceeded me because information technology is so complex. I have strengths, but weaknesses too. Although I have been a programmer, I am primarily a User of a broad array of software, some of which is listed on the book’s final page in the Colophon.