From Newsgroup: alt.comp.os.windows-11
On Mon, 10/12/2026 3:39 AM, Daniel70 wrote:
On 12/10/2026 2:44 am, Encrypt Now wrote:
Will they ever crack lava lamps? Well they may but it will make a mess of the carpet.
https://www.youtube
Sorry!! What has "Encrypting Your Data" got to do with "Will they ever crack lava lamps?"??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand
They use Lava Lamps and a camera, to generate random numbers for
things like crypto purposes. The idea is, knowing one random number,
you cannot predict the next one. If you compute the SHA256 of the
BMP file coming from the camera frame, it's basically a random
number made from many "lumps of lava" in the jars.
While attempts have been made, in CPU hardware, to generate truly
random numbers, none of these was judged to have sufficient quality.
Linus Torvalds rejected a number of them. There is a white paper
on the Linux random number philosophy, which has changed with time,
and it relies at its base, on the entropy pool. The movement
of the mouse (mouse velocity, mouse direction theta, mouse acceleration),
these are hard to predict on a desktop, and when you move the mouse,
that helps add slightly, to the entropy pool. The random numbers
don't come directly from the entropy pool, as the really random numbers
are hard to get, so they are "metered out" in a particular way. A
compromise between "randomness" and "having enough of them".
Paul
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2