Re: your mail

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>]

Phil Karn says:
> An even better idea: disconnect the antenna. Most of the noise comes
> from the front end amplifier, not the galactic and cosmic background,
> at least in your average consumer grade receiver. And this is a quantum
> process that someone else definitely can't predict or copy.

This is also cheap. If you have audio input on your computer, just put
an El-Cheapo radio with its antenna off tuned to dead air into your
workstation, and distill what comes out with MD5 or SHA or something
similar. Assume that things are much less random than they seem and
distill every N bytes down to 1 byte with the hashing algorithm -- N
depends on your paranoia.

Perry