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I'm worried about relying on remote servers for random numbers, especially for cryptographic purposes. There's no way to verify that you aren't the only person with access to those numbers, and it's fairly difficult even as the sysadmin to ensure that they're logged nowhere.
the trick is to combine all your uncertainty sources together. So in the worst case your numbers still have as much entropy as if you did not have the external source. And even if somebody else knows those numbers they do not know the actual numbers you are using. Of course that raises the question: if your other entropy source is good enough that you are happy in your worst case what is the benefit from some extra source of entropy? So i have argued myself into agreeing with you :) crypto is not a good use case for such a service. The wall of lavalamps mentioned above is a better solution.
"oops our software had a bug that made it return nonrandom values for a month"
Context for those who don't get it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg
I miss tom scot videos
Excuse me, I believe, you mean qu\ntumr\ndomnumbers. You see, it's the Windows path equivalent of /dev/random.
int getRandomNumber() {
return 4; // chosen by a fair dice roll. guaranteed to be random.
}
Wasn't it a dice roll that decided that? ๐ค
yeah, i copied the xkcd wrong ๐คฆโโ๏ธ thanks, i'll edit it
Instead of returning a random number, what if we make the program guess?
What happened to bitcoin block hashes?