Lava lamp random number generator for encryption at Cloudflare

[ergophobe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg

[littleman]

I watched this and thought it was pretty cool, but I am skeptical of it being legit.  Or, maybe it is real, but more of a publicity stunt than being done out of necessity.

[ergophobe]

more of a publicity stunt than being done out of necessity

As he says, the necessity was a random number generator that was truly, unhackably random. The laval lamps in the US and the pendulum in the UK and the radioactive whatever in Singapore were, I think, whimsy.

He skips over very quickly the fact that they are basically taking a bitmap image and then grabbing the bytes and hashing it, so they only need one bit to flip from image to image. So it's an elaborate way to do it, but it sounded to me more like an internal employee morale method (it's fun) than a publicity stunt.