Michael S. Gilbert dixit: >it has been discovered that all of the major web browsers use a >predictable pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). please see >reference [0]. lynx is fairly basic, so it may not be affected, but it >would be useful to check nontheless. thanks.
If arc4random(3) is available¹, lynx uses it. I sent in a patch for that years ago. Otherwise, there is no good self-seeding SRNG available in the standards, so it will use lrand48(3) instead², with a fallback to rand(3) like everyone else. So, basically, lynx uses a good SRNG or PRNG if available from the OS, and it’s not lynx’ fault if there is none. (After all, lynx runs on DOS and VMS, too.) ① http://www.mirbsd.org/man3/arc4random ② http://www.mirbsd.org/man3/lrand48 //mirabilos -- “It is inappropriate to require that a time represented as seconds since the Epoch precisely represent the number of seconds between the referenced time and the Epoch.” -- IEEE Std 1003.1b-1993 (POSIX) Section B.2.2.2 _______________________________________________ Lynx-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lynx-dev
