On May 17, 2016, at 11:46 PM, Jon Callas <[email protected]> wrote: > Sadly, people's prejudices get them overcomplicating the issue.
Indeed. > It's certainly true that a geiger counter measures something that's truly > random (for some suitable value of truly random) because of quantum effects. > But so does a noisy diode or resistor noise. The difference is that > radioactive decay is sexy because you have to get exotic and dangerous > material, but a resistor is just carbon, and so people are quite sure that it > doesn't actually have atoms or let alone quanta or quarks in it. Quanta are > exotic. It's not like they make quantum computers out of atoms, right? > > Similarly, the lava lamp is cool, but you get just as good (and often better) > real randomness out of the same camera pointed at a lava lamp, but with the > lens cap on. That's because the sensor gets quantum crap in it caused by many > things (from similar noise to the above to virtual particles) but with light > coming in, the image washes out the quantum crap. But it doesn't *feel* > random to take readings from a camera with a lens cap on. It doesn’t feel very random to say “shhhh…” into your computer’s microphone either, but that is actually a very high quality source of entropy. rg _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
