Rand-Dumb or Random?

[Indy Coug]

Here's my geeky contribution for the day.

http://www.soa.org/library/newsletters/compact/2010/july/com-2010-iss36-campbell.aspx

[Uncle Ted]

Here's my geeky contribution for the day.


http://www.soa.org/library/newslette...-campbell.aspx

This article reminds me of some of the dumb things that I have seen application programmers would do with random number generators. For example, when I was moonlighting in college for a small company that did password recovery for computer popular software. Word Perfect, at the time, come out with their new version of their software which introduced a new encryption feature that was touted as very secure way of protecting your documents. It turned out they did use a very strong and proven encryption algorithm, however, they seeded the (pseudo) random number generator with the date and time. Of course, the file was stamped with this same date and time. In short, their new encryption feature was embarrassing insecure. There is an old saying computer security circles that states that randomness shouldn't be left to chance. I guess the RAND() function in Excel should be added to the list.

[Katy Lied]

I could swear that Indy brought up this discussion like, about, 3 years ago.

[Indy Coug]

I could swear that Indy brought up this discussion like, about, 3 years ago.

Really? I guess it's possible. My posts are pseudo-random enough.