Startup to launch new random number generator from space

[David Wagner]

Udhay Shankar reports:
>http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6142935.html
>
>British start-up Yuzoz has announced that it will be launching its 
>beta service in the next two weeks--an online random-number generator 
>driven by astronomical events.

Heh heh.  Pretty amusing.  I guess the founders haven't really thought
this through.  One problem with such a service, of course, is total
reliance upon Yuzoz: Yuzoz learns all your secret keys -- and so does
any hacker who figures out how to break into Yuzoz's servers.  That doesn't
sound like such a great deal -- especially considering that high-quality
random-number sources are not that hard to come by.

I guess we can take ill-conceived startups like this as a sign of
increasing awareness about the security risks and the need for security
solutions, even if there is some, err, lack of sophistication about how
to distinguish good security technology from bad.  (Quantum crypto seems
like another one for that camp.  Oracle's "Unbreakable" marketing slogan
was another good one.)

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