[Cryptography] Finding Nemo's random seed

[Henry Baker]

At 04:34 PM 9/6/2017, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>From: Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net>
>
>On 09/06/2017 07:10 AM, Henry Baker wrote:
>
>> Two words: functional programming.
>> 
>> Another two words: no sympathy.
>
>They deserve *some* sympathy.  Everybody has learning experiences, and
>learning experiences are often painful.  But if they have the same
>learning experience again, they deserve no sympathy whatsoever.
>
>There's almost always a library call that specifies a pseudo-random
>stream - that the same sequence will be generated from the same input.
>It is almost never guaranteed stable.  They don't specify what
>generator, they don't give the parameters, and they don't give test
>vectors.  In subsequent versions, in different environments, with
>different sets of dll's or shared objects, they can fulfill what the
>library documentation promises by giving you a *different* sequence
>that's repeatable in *that* environment.
>
>If you need stable repeatable sequences, eg, for documents that may be
>read elsewhere or later or by a different version, or even by the same
>version as compiled in a different build configuration, it's just plain
>dumb to rely on a library call unless they specifically promise
>stability. Otherwise version-stable PRNG sequences are
>application-specific, and the PRNG has to be part of the application
>source code.

Slight modification: no sympathy for movie *companies*.

Although I've never worked in H'wood myself, I have lots of friends who do,
and H'wood B.S. has bankrupted a lot of animation companies.  Whether the
movie makes money or not doesn't matter; the animation companies never
make more than a pittance.  One would think that this situation may have
been foreseen by the animation company, who probably asked for additional
$$ to fix the code, and were turned down.  The animation company probably
thought to themselves: "f**k them; let'm learn".

H'wood is absolutely notorious for doing a terrible job preserving
*even its most famous and profitable movies*.  Many "re-released"
features have had to be cobbled together from garbage dumps, screener
demos, etc.  And this includes the re-release of the original Star
Wars movie.

For an industry that makes such a BFD out of "intellectual
property", H'wood is the biggest slum lord of them all!

Many H'wood movies have only been preserved due to the actions
of "pirates", who made "illegal" copies, which subsequently
turned out to be the *only* copies, due to the incompetence of
the H'wood studios.

---
All that having been said, two more words: "reproducible builds"