This was the era of export cryptography, just after the Clipper Chip saga, "this t-shirt is a munition, and perhaps most importantly curve cryptography was barely a thing (this is back at the time where people believed the Certicom patents would preclude it from deployment). I think people just weren't paying that much attention to cryptographic standards processes at all, at least not for a couple more years (remember, the curves were generated years before they were published).
In 2000 I installed Steve Gibson research’s “shields up” firewall onto my Windows 98 desktop so that my home printer would stop printing random things people on the internet sent to it because it was fully publicly shared on the internet (I didn’t do that on purpose). Every website defaulted to http back then and https was to be avoided unless absolutely necessary because it was slower… a very different time!
Don’t “rand()” PRNG libraries usually seed with current UNIX time by default iF no seed is provided?
I am guessing you installed Zone Alarm or BlackICE, or possibly configured your router, and then used Steve’s Shields Up to test your work. Shields up is a tool to scan your open ports.
This was the era of export cryptography, just after the Clipper Chip saga, "this t-shirt is a munition, and perhaps most importantly curve cryptography was barely a thing (this is back at the time where people believed the Certicom patents would preclude it from deployment). I think people just weren't paying that much attention to cryptographic standards processes at all, at least not for a couple more years (remember, the curves were generated years before they were published).
In 2000 I installed Steve Gibson research’s “shields up” firewall onto my Windows 98 desktop so that my home printer would stop printing random things people on the internet sent to it because it was fully publicly shared on the internet (I didn’t do that on purpose). Every website defaulted to http back then and https was to be avoided unless absolutely necessary because it was slower… a very different time!
Don’t “rand()” PRNG libraries usually seed with current UNIX time by default iF no seed is provided?
I am guessing you installed Zone Alarm or BlackICE, or possibly configured your router, and then used Steve’s Shields Up to test your work. Shields up is a tool to scan your open ports.
It's lrand48, an LCG that might precede Unix. Without an explicit seed it has a standard constant starting seed.
Well the thing that comes to mind for me was the US gov classing encryption as a munition and placing it under export controls
That was more early-mid 1990s, and not so much late-90s and early 2000s, when the NIST/NSA issues came about (from what I understand)
Still is. It's still illegal to export cryptography without permission.
Everybody exports strong cryptography without permission today.