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Comment by Core-TX | Hacker News Reader

oh noes. Not this poo again. Save money, and do the following.

- Get a high res webcam - Open it up and remove the filters. - Hook up the device. - From time to time you'll see random white dots appear.

There you have your ultra cheap random number generator. Works best in high radiation environments.

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If you don't want to build your own generator, random.org provides a service like the ANU Quantum Random Number Server, i.e. provision of unique sets of true random numbers by http request, but generated from atmospheric noise. There's a convenience R package "random" I often use for this purpose. The articles on the website are quite edifying regarding the art and science of random numbers generally. Here's a link to the interface documentation: http://www.random.org/clients/http/

Do you know of any guides to do this? Are you aware of any free software to convert the image data into a usable stream of random data?

"oh noes. Not this poo again. Save money, and do the following. - Get a high res webcam - Open it up and remove the filters. - Hook up the device. - From time to time you'll see random white dots appear. There you have your ultra cheap random number generator."

It would seem that this method would be muchmore expensive and time consuming than a simple web query. How precisely would this save me money?

Pretty simple. You want random numbers for security. If you want security, you should not trust a third party. Only yourself. If you have to generate random numbers yourself; I just provided you a cheap solution.

> How precisely would this save me money?

It's under your control. There's no chance of an attacker serving you skewed numbers, or of MITM, or etc etc.

That may be important. (Cryptography, for example.)

Some people don't care, they just need some random numbers. People doing modelling like a lot of random numbers that are random enough, but they don't care if that same set of numbers is available elsewhere, or if it's easily repeatable.

"Do you know of any guides to do this? Are you aware of any free software to convert the image data into a usable stream of random data?"

Look into LavaRnd [1][2][3][4].

[1] What is LavaRnd? http://www.lavarnd.org/what/index.html

[2] LavaRnd Process in Detail: http://www.lavarnd.org/what/process.html

[3] Construction of a LavaCan: http://www.lavarnd.org/what/can-details.html

[4] Source code (open source): http://www.lavarnd.org/download/index.html

Looks like a good resource. Thanks.

That's random, but you still need to analyze the output for a while to normalize it.

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