Q1.3: Can I download the generator software and run it on my own computer?
No. It’s not just the software you’d need, but also three radios (or one, at any rate), which must be carefully adjusted to pick up atmospheric noise at the right volume. It’s not completely trivial to set up.
What a pompous ass. It IS completely trivial to obtain random entropy. Three radios? Give me a fecking break. This guy clearly sees himself as some sort of God of Random. Evidence suggests otherwise. A pure random distribution of bits can be found in every single computer in the world via simple and indeed TRIVIAL programming. All you need do is:
Query RTC, or if there is no RTC in hardware ask the software for an RTC.
Dependant on RTC, read a bit of memory.
Truly random. 100% guaranteed to produce a bit that could be either 1 or 0 and is entirely unpredictable.
Sure, it requires kernel-level code, and sure it’s a tiny bit predictable, but if you think that is any less random than using atmospheric noise, you’re in for a shocking treat sonny. Randomness is EVERYWHERE. Not just at random.org.
Christ, it’s like this guy’s literally walked out of some kind of weird-ass steampunk machine and said “WOW I SEE RANDOM”.
EDIT: In the clear light of day, one obvious flaw is apparent; the procedure for grabbing random entropy I outlined would give a tendency towards zero. However, it is indeed entirely trivial to program a RNG (not a PRNG) using hardware available to every computer system on the planet. Even if you don’t have a Real Time Clock in hardware, you can quite easily program a recursive function whose randomness increases with each recursion:
#define RECURSION 1
#define RECURSION_LEVEL 3
int current_level = 0;
int randomInt(int seed) {
int n = // use inline assembly to fill n with whatever is currently in an arbitrarily chosen register
if(RECURSION && current_level++ <= RECURSION_LEVEL) randomInt(seed);
return seed;
}
Sure it’s messy but it’s a 2 minute proof of concept.
Linux Wizard 