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Re: OpenFerrari
> It certainly reeks of snake oil.
Indeed. If you look at the paper, which for some reason I did (OK-
I've been working on my thesis all week, I was in a state of mind to
read random buggery on crypto), their bogonym or whatever the numbers
are called are produced by a black box that has to be hooked up to a
random number generator.
<pause>
They are selling a product that gives you random numbers IF YOU HOOK IT
UP TO A RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR!?!?!
> so-called contest like this. In fact, give n integers {x1,x2,...,xn},
> for each integer i, one can come up with an infinite number of
> algorithms that would generate the sequence {x1,x2,...,xn,i}.
Well, most of them *would* be degenerate.
> So what they have is not a guess the number conest, but a guess the
> algorithm contest. One algorithm out of infinitely many possible
> algorithms.
They also say that - they aren't interested in someone who can pull the
number out of thin air, but someone who can explain why.
The product is moderately interesting in that it's an all-in-one-place
SSID generator, random number source, and so on. And their boringons
are human-readable, avoiding any number or character that might not be
100% obvious (no l and 1). That is to say, if it cost $10 and had some
practical use I'd recommend it to a Windows hosting site.
--
Matthew Weigel
Research Systems Programmer
mcweigel+@cs.cmu.edu