4 ms·
Is that a reference to the hilariously broken PS3 RNG? For those unaware, the PS3 was jailbroken because their RNG always returned 4.
by sloppycee 9y ago
Is that a reference to the hilariously broken PS3 RNG? For those unaware, the PS3 was jailbroken because their RNG always returned 4.
- okket 9y agoThe self-inflicted degradation of the random number generator in the Debian OpenSSL packages were the main inspiration for this, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack#Debian_OpenSSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...
- mikeash 9y agoThe comic is from 2007. The Debian vulnerability wasn't announced until 2008. I'm fairly sure this basic joke predates xkcd by quite a while. For example, here's a Dilbert comic from 2001 with a slight variation on it: http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 This Jargon File entry listing several specific "random numbers" has the same theme: http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html
- okket 9y agoThanks. It came up so often during 2008 that I assumed it was inspired by this event, never bothered to check the dates.
- edmccard 9y agoXKCD 221 came out February 9th, 2007[1], so either Randall new about the bug before details were announced in May 2008, or it's just a joke about randomness not tied to any particular reference. [1] Go to https://xkcd.com/archive/ https://xkcd.com/archive/, hover over the title of a comic, and a tooltip will show the date EDIT: I see 'mikeash beat me to it.