Re: [Hampshire] OpenSSL in Debian is broken

Nick Chalk said the following on 14/05/08 22:56:
> Peter Alefounder <p_alefounder@???> wrote:
>> Why are pseudo-random numbers used anyway? Is it
>> beyond the wit of man to devise a bit of
>> hardware that would produce genuine random
>> numbers?
>
> What is a "genuine" random number?
>

As I understand it, a "genuine" random number is as follows:

Assume you have a stream of numbers in base 10 (i.e. made up of a series
of digits from 0-9).

This stream of numbers would be considered random if, given the first x
digits, it is impossible to determine the x+1 th digit with probability
> 1/10. That is to say, each digit is equally likely to be any one of
the possible values.

I'm sure I will be corrected if I am wrong.

Chris Oattes.