[Cryptography] Generate Random Data From Sound Card

[Kent Borg]

On 3/7/26 12:08 PM, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:
> You bring up an interesting point about seeding /dev/urandom instead 
> of /dev/random.  I think that makes sense because the effect on 
> /dev/urandom would be more direct and immediate.  Directly seeding 
> /dev/random might take a while to percolate into /dev/urandom, which 
> is what we actually use.

I think the difference between /dev/urandom and /dev/random has mostly 
gone away, I said /dev/urandom because /dev/urandom was the one that has 
always worked: read it and you get output, whereas /dev/random would 
throttle on mostly spurious entropy estimations. (The guy turning off 
all the entropy sources was trying to make /dev/random more honest, a 
reasonable goal, executed stupidly.)

But these days I don't know that there is much difference.

-kb, the Kent who points out that from the time he built the casino RNG 
to today the random number driver was completely rewritten, think once 
only once, but at least once.