Things like these are absolutely idiotic. Every single computer, be it a laptop or desktop or a phone, are able to produce randomness. Why in the hell would you trust a random website?
The idea here is that it's a public, traceable generation of random numbers. So, if the two of us wanted to flip a coin to settle a disagreement, we could agree on some future value of this beacon (unknowable to us at the moment) to use as the source of entropy, then let one of us choose heads or tails, telling the other person what we chose. Then we wait until the agreed time, check the beacon, and boom, a fair coin toss, which we can be fairly certain wasn't manipulated by either of us.
Often, randomness is thought of as something you want to keep hidden, such as when generating passwords or cryptographic keys. However, there are many applications where an independent and public source of randomness is useful. For example, randomizing public audits, selecting candidates for jury duty, or fairly assigning resources through a lottery.
Sometimes you need publicly verifiable randomness, and then your own hardware (which you might or might not even trust privately, depending on how much you trust your vendors) isn’t much help.
If you still think that's idiotic, I'm happy to bet against you in an unbiased* coin flip simulated on my machine which you unfortunately can't inspect :)
Because, firstly, this is a university, not some rando self-hosting, and secondly, you can't generate randomness from any classical computer, only pseudorandomness [0]. This means that a dedicated adversary can potentially work out what the outcome will be. For something like the use cases they mention - jury selection, lottery, etc. - you want actual randomness.
OkayPhysicist|7 months ago
ghkbrew|7 months ago
Often, randomness is thought of as something you want to keep hidden, such as when generating passwords or cryptographic keys. However, there are many applications where an independent and public source of randomness is useful. For example, randomizing public audits, selecting candidates for jury duty, or fairly assigning resources through a lottery.
lxgr|7 months ago
If you still think that's idiotic, I'm happy to bet against you in an unbiased* coin flip simulated on my machine which you unfortunately can't inspect :)
dmitrygr|7 months ago
svota|7 months ago
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandomness
throw0101d|7 months ago
Back in 1999 Intel used amplified thermal noise from analog circuits on their chips to generate randomness:
* PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20100714102630/https://www.crypt...
This was further refined and in 2011 they published how RdRand (formerly "Bull Mountain") works:
* https://spectrum.ieee.org/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-gen...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND
* PDF: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/doc...
So classical computers can generate randomness if you have the right circuits for it.
dekhn|7 months ago