How to deal with "randomness" depends on its purpose. Linux's /dev/random
is specifically designed to produce cryptographic-quality random numbers,
successive bytes are not determinable from the preceding bytes by any
method. So it's great for generating cryptographic keys. But if you only
need bytes that are statistically unrelated to each other with respect to
any process that your code is already using, use /dev/urandom. As long as
you don't care if a dedicated adversary can guess the values you received,
/dev/urandom is adequately random, and doesn't have blocking problems.
Dale
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Received on Mon Feb 14 15:59:04 2005