From: "Richard Martin" <rmartin@aw.sgi.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 95 06:16:09 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: `Random' seed.
Message-ID: <9509200915.ZM14792@glacius.alias.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Vaporware which I heard around CFP '95, and have been sort of wondering about
ever since...

Some one told me that some one else [possibly Matt Blaze] had been looking
at how much randomness could be got by forking two child processes which
would just run as asynchronous clocks: whenever the parent program needs a
little `random' bit, it queries both and gives (clock(A) + clock(B) % 2)
or something.

Questions about this [to the list]:
 * who has done any [the?] work on this?
 * was it found to be useful/good or not?
 * what would be the drawbacks to adding this [Yet Another Source Of Entropy]
   to the Netscape scheme?

frodo =)

-- 
Richard Martin 
Alias|Wavefront - Toronto Office [Co-op Software Developer, Games Team]
rmartin@aw.sgi.com/g4frodo@cdf.toronto.edu      http://www.io.org/~samwise
Trinity College UofT ChemPhysCompSci 9T7+PEY=9T8 Shad Valley Waterloo 1992