Spinners and compression functions

[Perry E. Metzger]

JonWienke at aol.com writes:
> Since there has been a lot of discussion about spinners derived from various
> things (idle loops, video retrace, etc.) used as entropy sources, here is yet
> another idea.  Run the spinner output through a PKZip type compression
> function, and then seed a PRNG with the output from that.  This would provide
> a means of gauging the amount of entropy that has been fed into the PRNG,
> (count the bytes output from the compression function)

Actually, it doesn't. The entropy present from a reasonable source
like keyclick timings is much much lower than the output of pkzip is
going to suggest to you.

Perry