Cloudflare uses lava lamp as a source of randomness

12 days ago by gandalf_der_13te to c/til

TropicalDingdong 84 points 12 days ago

I think they just wanted a wall of lavalamps.

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Steve 26 points 11 days ago

Now I want a wall of lava lamps.

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random_character_a 16 points 11 days ago

Now everyone wants a wall of lava lamps

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SkaveRat 13 points 11 days ago

The lesser known game "the wall is lava lamps"

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toynbee 6 points 11 days ago

99 lamps of lava on the wall, 99 lamps of lava ...

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Varesti 8 points 11 days ago

Ok, but it's going to get really hot.

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Bourff 33 points 11 days ago

As pointed out by others as well, this is not used anymore. It's interesting but an artefact from the past.

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BlueEther 31 points 11 days ago

I feel that I read about something very similar nearly 25 years ago

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tyler 48 points 11 days ago

Because that’s about when they started doing it. It’s a TIL, not a news article.

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grue 27 points 11 days ago path: 0 26104623 26105236, hotness: undefined, score: 27, children: 0
PixeIOrange 17 points 11 days ago

Fun fact: theres an app for the flipper zero that uses the ir receiver and a lighter to generate random numbers.

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damnthefilibuster 7 points 11 days ago

Where can I get me one of those? Flipper zero, not lighter.

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Varesti 13 points 11 days ago path: 0 26104985 26105042 26105412, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 0
als 15 points 11 days ago path: 0 26106904, hotness: undefined, score: 15, children: 0
M137 8 points 11 days ago

lamps*

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chaospatterns 4 points 11 days ago

IMO this is more PR than anything. The lava lamps are far away from the camera that the variance in pixel data from the lava lamps is low. Think about the percentage of pixels changing compared to the total camera space and the range of pixel data.

I've heard about pointing a camera at a black surface, then massively upping the gain which causes the camera to oversaturate the noise in the sensor measuring process to get random seed data.

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damnthefilibuster 25 points 11 days ago

No the lava lamps were a real thing. But they aren’t used any more. They said they moved to post quantum crypto now, so they can’t rely on that tech any more.

But the lava lamp randomness was a real thing while it lasted.

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gandalf_der_13te 22 points 11 days ago

yeah but even if only 1 pixel changes, if you take the hash value of the image data, you'll still get some entirely different numbers.

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