Comment by victorbjorklund
17 hours ago
If I understand it the Lava lamps are 90% PR/fun. They have a lot of other sources for entropy that scales better.
17 hours ago
If I understand it the Lava lamps are 90% PR/fun. They have a lot of other sources for entropy that scales better.
Yes, they also have wave machines, pendulums, and mobiles :)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/harnessing-office-chaos/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/chaos-in-cloudflare-lisbon-offic...
Wouldn’t thermal noise in a resistor make more practical sense?
The original from SGI back in the mid 90's, before CPUs had RDRAND instructions etc... was a an actually practical solution.
At the time I was at the Internet company that originally got online-gaming banned in the US, we were looking at CCDs and Cesium emitters that required a license etc...
While I am not sure, it seems cloudflare basically implemented one after SGI's[0] patent expired.
The patent and the licensing cost and adding SGI was a major blocker for us doing it, the startup closed before we found a real solution. But the best PRNGs like Blum Blum Shub were way too slow at the time. But things did improve quickly at that time.
[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138A/en
Ant farm ? Hamster wheels ? Anything critter-driven should provide some entropy.
I once read that noise of camera in total darkness is apparently a good source.
You can already have a good entropy source from a single resistor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson%E2%80%93Nyquist_noise
Would a CRT TV tuned to channel 3 and no RF input be a good source?
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The noise probably makes the lava lamp wall just as effective as pointing the camera at the Mona Lisa - the lamps themselves are not that unpredictable frame-to-frame.
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Speaking of ants, Fourmilab (i.e. John Walker, of Autodesk fame) used to provide a random number generator powered by background radiation: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
https://www.random.org/ Uses atmospheric noise. These dudes use dice? https://youtube.com/shorts/ncoDq5EcPFg?si=lI6f9cw8dWcaDZ4Y
https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/product...