I know it has no security impact in this case, but isn’t it odd a bunch of cryptographers would choose a weak PRNG seeded by the date for a task like this?
Even state lotteries back then used physical ping pong balls and a nothing-up-my-sleeve show after the evening news.
The prolonged conspiracy theories until this discovery make some sense… not having a ceremony around anything supposedly “random” is unexpected, even back in the 1990s.
No, it's not odd. This isn't a task for which a cryptographically secure random number is needed. In fact, it's closer to the kind of task where you want the opposite thing (a deterministic random number generator, like you'd use for a simulation).
The starting point for finding a curve coefficient is totally arbitrary (so long as the math on the resulting curve equation checks out). Competing curves use mathematical constants like pi and e to do the same thing. It's simply a number everyone has to agree on; it has no other significance.
> Microsoft Office free on every installation of Windows
Microsoft Office is quite useful, and probably good value for money. But it has never ever been free, and I’ve been buying it for work and home since Office 4.x on Windows 3.1 was the new hotness.
> And the boss doesn't have to give a shit about which draft is the latest because the boss is the boss.
As a boss myself I have to say: I totally give a shit. Salaries are my company’s #1 expense by a wide margin. I don’t want my staff spending their time manually merging docs received via email when there are much better solutions out there. I hire people because they are smart and can get shit done that makes money, not because I want servants.
This is the killer app for Office 365 and google docs: stop wasting time emailing shit around, one canonical version even outside of company walls.
To minimize annoyance I’ve set my password manager to generate 16 character random passwords by default. This seems to be the sweet spot for the USA; I don’t recall recently encountering a site with a min >16 or a max <16. Assuming 85 chars that’s ~102 bits of entropy so plenty strong and compatible with almost every site (excepting the rare idiots that ban repeating characters or some subset of symbols).
General Magic failed with all the talent and all the resources. Cautionary Tales podcast featured General Magic in a recent episode; the basic argument was no constraints led to no focus.
You don't need a counter example to a counter example.
It's not that I think the opposite of the original statement is true, I'm suggesting that's it's just all noise as there are both successes and failures at both extremes.
I’m not so sure. The iPhone is the most popular in the USA despite the cost premium.
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