The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure

It's a clever work of art, not a financially effocient solution. It would be orders of magnitude cheaper to connect the ADC inputs of a $5 Raspberry Pi Pico to a broadband antenna and point the contraption towards space, or heat up a resistor and measure the thermal noise caused by quantum mechanics.

The throughput of random numbers would be just as good. Modern CPUs, even those recovered from e-waste phones, have hardware RNGs built in, so there would be no extra cost since you need to buy CPUs anyway when you're a cloud company. The lava lamps do have the advantage of looking cool, while a lamp in a Kitchen-Aid toaster oven (probably) does not count as a piece of art.

So these guys are responsible for me not being able to log into Discord today, huh?

Easily one of the coolest concepts

Awesome vid, cool lamps.

Interesting Video.

thats.....genius

Yooo we found RNJESUS

Nice

Some random video from Tom...

Omg! Cloudflare saved AO3 last week! YAS!

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Cheaper than a basket of kittens, or an aquarium. You could also point the camera at the clouds, or at the surf. (As an NYC resident, I'd be inclined to point a camera at Times Square.) But you can't beat a small radioactive source for cost and convenience - you could DIY your own random number generator from a smoke detector.
Has anyone used laser speckle as a source of random input?

I now want my data to be protected by kittens :D

I'd've probably just aimed a camera at a window.

well, im all about high maintenance so SHOW ME THE KITTENS!!

what

groovy...

Everyone give a random number.....

that was random

Alright but the data is still read by a computer and stored by a computer. This to a degree is a gimmick

Oh, so it's free. I know what that means. Not only am I getting charged for this, it's more than likely screwing me over too. Remember, facebook is free, look what it's doing. DO NOT THINK FOR ONE SECOND THESE PEOPLE HAVE YOUR BEST INTEREST IN MIND. There's an angle. How are they supporting this system? If THAT much internet is piped through this awful mess, the US GOVT. has it's tenticles in it. BE WARY OF STUFF LIKE THIS. This will be used against us.

Random and encrypted UNTIL the Quantum Computers show up.

OK, buttplugs saving the internet. Fine for me.

One thing I thougth about is someone walking in front of the lamps changes it WILDLY. Also if some lamps die out (as lava lamps tend to do) it can be replaced whenever so long as a good majority are working. That also makes it harder to simulate since you don't know when a lava lamp will die.

Using the same rack of lava lamps would lead me to believe a lot of randomness is removed- gravity, shape of the lamp, position of the camera, the fact the blobs kinda always do the same thing based on physics, all of that could be used to make "tables" to lessen the chaos.

Why not just take a picture of the sky / clouds?

But why are the lamps spread so far apart?

what if i stood in front of it

This reminds me of that episode of South Park where they have seals write the jokes in Family Guy

Waterfalls and clouds would be more naturally random compared to artificial lava lamps that are predictable more than natural randomization

This guy is wrong. You can generate your own SSL for free.

Why not use tv static?

Or You could simply place a camera in a dense forest.

God bless our troops

Well, there are certainly definitely much cheaper ways of producing randomness. Rather than producing 3 kW of heat continuously, for no good reason. But I guess it's a somewhat clever marketing stunt.

This is what Family Guy should be using to write jokes with instead of using inhumanely treated manatees.

Clock skew is good enough randomness in a computer.

I use my lava lamp to make up pass words. The lamp is from the 1960's so the code is COBOL.

Ah the threaded rod was bought by their UK site and shipped to the US that clears thing up. I was amazed to see metric rod in the board carrying the lava lamps.

I don’t totally understand everything that just happened, but lava lamps are cool.

Wow talk about a waste of eletricity.

I wonder if they are genuine Mathos lava lamps like the one I have at home.

Mathmos lava lamps still made in Poole Dorset.

People don't realise how hard it is to generate random numbers. If a calculation is involved, it is no longer truly random, and can be unravelled.

Saw this on NCIS. Didn’t know it was real

You could do the same thing with an aquarium full of fish.. js..

You could even do this using sand with tiny pebbles in it that went over a conveyor and was recycled onto it.


Lava lamps are just the most passive and cheapest way to do it as they provide a constantly changing image and therfor randomness.

wait WHAT