At 1:55 PM 3/5/96, Tim Fulbright wrote:
Now I, a lurker for two months, am truelly confused! L. Deitweiler must be right. Surely one of you cyperpunk fellows could hack together a dongle with some kind of AD converter and buffer ram to gather a Truelly Random Bitstream off the environment every couple of milliseconds easier than this raindrop scheme or recording the fan, you're haviung me on!. Let's go back fifty years and get a vacuum tube to fitfully flicker? I who know next to nothing about electronics suspect there is surely enough noise present in electornic devices to gather a random bitstream that you could chop anywya you needed? Anyway, y
Just because someone floats their idea does not mean it is the "list consensus"! That "raindrops falling on my plate" idea was something I deleted as soon as I saw that it wasn't a joke with a nice punchline. (Not all flaky ideas get rebutted...though, as a matter of fact, I did see several quick rebuttals of the raindrop idea as being impractical, too low a data rate, etc.) Johnson noise in semiconductors and alpha particle noise have indeed been discussed _many_ times. Check the archives, or my Cyphernomicon FAQ. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."