The History of Random.org (2009)

Re:The History of Random.org (2009) by cpeterso on Sunday June 09, 2019 @04:27PM (#20141685)

I keep a silly little script that could, in theory, be used to pull random entropy from a remote source:

  strace -CTiv -ttt nice -n 19 curl -LNv $URL 2>&1 | shasum -a 512

$URL could be "https://news.yahoo.com", "https://news.google.com", "https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random", or some other website that returns a large, unique result for each request. Even if someone was sniffing or logging the HTTP response, they wouldn't know all the local timing information reported by curl and strace.

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Re:The History of Random.org (2009) by ThePirateofOz on Monday June 10, 2019 @12:08PM (#20148033)

Why visit a website, when you could do it yourself?

    #!/bin/bash

    read -p "How many digits?   " numlen

    head /dev/urandom | LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9' | fold -w $numlen | head -n 1

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