[Tutor] What are these things urandom() returns?

[Terry Carroll]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Tim Peters wrote:

> If you want /true/ randomness, you can buy a certified hardware random
> number generator, based on non-deterministic physical processes (like
> timing radioactive decay, or measuring thermal noise).

Why buy when you can borrow?:

def truerandom(n):
    """
    truerandom(n) --> str

    Return a string of n truly random bytes.

    see:
      http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
      http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/generate.html

    """

    import urllib
    _url = "http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Hotbits?nbytes=%s&fmt=bin" % n
    return urllib.urlopen(_url).read()