17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
Phil Karn says:
An even better idea: disconnect the antenna. Most of the noise comes from the front end amplifier, not the galactic and cosmic background, at least in your average consumer grade receiver. And this is a quantum process that someone else definitely can't predict or copy.
This is also cheap. If you have audio input on your computer, just put an El-Cheapo radio with its antenna off tuned to dead air into your workstation, and distill what comes out with MD5 or SHA or something similar. Assume that things are much less random than they seem and distill every N bytes down to 1 byte with the hashing algorithm -- N depends on your paranoia. Perry