Today I’m releasing my program eCoder Ring to the world. Although the current release is still branded as a beta, I have fixed all the bugs I can find and am now releasing it into the wild for the world to play with. Any final bugs caught will be fixed and rolled into a 1.0 release.

eCoder Ring is a digital version of the old plastic decoder rings that used to come in cereal boxes, with many new features added to actually make your secret, encoded messages secure. Using a key file that you supply (any local text file or any text file, website, or graphic file hosted on the Internet), eCoder Ring will convert your message into a series of numbers. Those numbers can then be sent to a friend who can later decode your secret message, only if he or she knows the location of the key file!

Unlike those old plastic decoder rings, eCoder Ring includes variables such as start, shift, skip and XOR flip to further modify your secret code. This program was designed to be easy enough for anyone from school age children to grandparents to be able to use it, but if done correctly, the secret messages created with eCoder Ring should be very, very difficult to crack (definitely safe from parents, co-workers and principals, perhaps less safe from “various three letter agencies”).

eCoder Ring is free to download from my new software section: http://www.robohara.com/software.