this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
433 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37343 readers
127 users here now

Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (1 children)

More than likely it's because of that book and how often it's qouted

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, but it's significant because the prompt was to choose a number. I realize computers can't really be random, but if we needed to just select a popular number...we can already do that!

https://slate.com/technology/2022/06/bridle-ways-of-being-excerpt-computer-randomness.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Computers can be random with special hardware.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are devices that measure radioactive decay for operations where truly random numbers are very important. Or something like that, I am not an expert, sorry.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. As I understand it, pure computing (not sensors recording external data) are incapable of generating truly random numbers. But I'm obviously not an expert either!

I've been using "Perfect Passwords" for years, which apparently generate nearly random passwords from server noise, but he admits it's still not truly 100% random...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Cloudflare uses a Livestream of lava lamps for their randomness in their encryption. That being said I'm not sure how uniquely random this is.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Apparently after reading that their offices do different ways on e way was the decay of radioactivity another commenter mentioned. The third method is 2 pendulum swinging at different rates, apparently it's not calculable to determine where both would be at the same time. They also use them as pieces in there lobby so visitors look at them like a tourist attraction or walk past them which adds more to the uniqueness!