On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 10:53:54AM -0700, Daniel C. wrote:
> On 11/22/05, Michael Halcrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On a more serious note, to avoid strange tty effects, you might want
> > to do `od /dev/urandom`.
> 
> Why does the left column here count upward 20 at a time?

It's octal by default.

> Also, I did od /dev/urandom > asdf and then hit ctrl-c as quick as I
> could, and there were already 15,941 lines in it.  How random is
> this, really?

Your answer is in the comments in near the top of this file:

http://lxr.linux.no/source/drivers/char/random.c

> That's a lot of "random" data being generated really quickly, is it
> safe to use this for password generation a la diceware?

In short, yes.

Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
                         Michael A. Halcrow                          
       Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center       
GnuPG Fingerprint: 419C 5B1E 948A FA73 A54C  20F5 DB40 8531 6DCA 8769

You will lose an important disk file. 

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