reading internet data to generate random numbers.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 15:51:30 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

>> I have no idea what distribution data from the Internet would
>> have, I would imagine it is *extremely* non-uniform and *very*
>> biased towards certain values (lots of "<" and ">" I bet, and
>> relatively few "\x03").
> 
> I've never heard of anybody using the data as source of
> entropy.  All the entropy gathering I've read about used the
> timing of network events, not the user-data associated with
> those events.


Me neither, but the original poster did ask how to read every nth byte
of "the Internet stream", so I assumed he had something like that in mind.


-- 
Steven.