On May 13, security advisories published by
Debian and
Ubuntu revealed that, for over a year, their OpenSSL libraries have had a major flaw in their
CSPRNG, which is used by
key generation functions in many widely-used applications, which caused the "random" numbers produced to be extremely predictable.
[lolcat summary] [more inside]
posted by finite
on May 16, 2008 -
81 comments
Gregory Chaitin's Meta Math! The Quest For Omega
"Okay, what I was able to find, or construct, is a funny area of pure mathematics where things are true for no reason, they're true by accident... It's a place where God plays dice with mathematical truth. It consists of mathematical facts which are so delicately balanced between being true or false that we're never going to know, and so you might as well toss a coin." From
Paradoxes of Randomness.
"In my opinion, Omega suggests that even though maths and physics are different, perhaps they are not as different as most people think. To put it bluntly, if the incompleteness phenomenon discovered by Gödel in 1931 is really serious — and I believe that Turing's work and my own work suggest that incompleteness is much more serious than people think — then perhaps mathematics should be pursued somewhat more in the spirit of experimental science rather than always demanding proofs for everything." From
Omega and why maths has no Theory Of Everythings.
[
previously,
see also,
via]
posted by MetaMonkey
on Apr 13, 2006 -
17 comments
LavaRand ...harnessing the power of Lava Lite® lamps to generate truly random numbers....
That's a bold statement, but who am I to doubt the power of the
lava lamp. The mathematical purist may disagree with the "truely random" part, but this
geek speak convinced me that LavaRand can handle all my random number needs.
posted by bicyclingfool
on Apr 30, 2001 -
1 comment
