4 ms·

Reading this, I'm curious how much could be automated with software. There's quite a lot of 'plug in this, measure that voltage, manually reset this' in the doc

Reading this, I'm curious how much could be automated with software. There's quite a lot of 'plug in this, measure that voltage, manually reset this' in the docs. I compare this to just subscribing to quantum entropy over the internet and conclude you'd need a lot of private random bits before this approach makes sense in terms of time. I found really fascinating the comments and complaints about dumping bits through SHA-1 (which they do) and then testing randomness of the SHA-1 bitstream. In short, they think it's stupid to test randomness using just heuristics on SHA-1. Presumably because SHA-1 is actually pretty good already, and so it obscures some of the upstream quality.

acqq 16y ago
The whole point of determining the lower bound is measuring the sensitivity of the input of the sound card. If you don't know the exact sensitivity of your device you have to measure it. The author evaluates the quality of the different sound cards inputs as a byproduct: note that he for example measures: "(Creative Labs) Extigy has astonishingly poor input sensitivity. It’s about 5 times worse than a typical cheap sound card, and about 100 times worse than a decent 24-bit soundcard, as you can see from table 4." The sensitivity is the first column of his table, demonstrating some products being unusable for this purpose and obviously unusable for any quality recording too. It would certainly be good to have the database of the measurements for different products. It's amazing how little we know about the consumer products being sold unless we measure them.