system entropy pool (was Re: [PLUG] Do it yourself moderation)

Kyle Hayes kyle at silverbeach.net
Sun Nov 30 12:53:01 UTC 2003


On Sunday 30 November 2003 11:53, Russell Senior wrote:
> >>>>> "Keith" == Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> writes:
>
> Keith> [...] and perhaps Michael Robinson's [signal-to-noise ratio]
> Keith> will leave the zero peg where it is now.
>
> Why do the words "system entropy pool" keep coming back to me?

Interesting thought.  One of the most random sources of bits I have access to 
has to be the PLUG list.  Cool, I think I'll see if I can write a /dev/random 
driver for it!  Hmm, might suck to find out that I lose the random device 
when my ISP goes down.

Still, on a more serious note, has anyone actually looked at using something 
like Usenet to generate random data?  It has to be a huge pool of entropy.  
Perhaps the alt.binaries.* lists should be avoided, but mailing lists and 
non-binary news groups should have significant entropy.  I guess you'd also 
want to remove all quoted material (repetition can't be that good for the 
entropy level).

You wouldn't get very many bits of entropy per message, but you'd have so much 
raw data!

Best,
Kyle





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