hebig.org/blog

"People working with computers often sloppily talk about their system's 'random number generator' and the 'random numbers' it produces. But numbers calculated by a computer through a deterministic process, cannot, by definition, be random. [...] Truly random numbers are typically generated by sampling and processing a source of entropy outside the computer. [More precisely, using processed data from a chaotic source as the seed value for a software-based pseudorandom number generator, ed.]

The [PHP] function presented here randomly retrieves a random number either from HotBits or Random.org. HotBits numbers are generated by timing successive pairs of radioactive decays detected by a Geiger-Müller tube interfaced to a computer. The Random.org random number generator works by converting background radio frequency noise in to random numbers."

developer-resources.com

In a related story, Lavarnd uses the movements of Lava Lite lamp's globules as the starting point for generating random numbers: "A digital camera periodically photographs a set of six lava lamps, adding its own electronic noise to the data. The 921,600 bytes of the original image are compressed and scrambled into a 140-byte packet, which then serves as the seed value." Developed by some SGI lab researchers, it is intranet only until November though: "Unfortunately certain SGI bogons decided that allowing employees to express creativity on the web was a legal libility and so they destroyed a wonderful web culture. To our knowledge there is now no external view of an SGI lavarand server." Check back then as idea and realization are way too cool.