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That sounds like a non-trivial energy expenditure. Hopefully it's part of their office heating plan.
by mcdonje 5y ago
That sounds like a non-trivial energy expenditure. Hopefully it's part of their office heating plan.
- gambiting 5y agoIt looks like there's 100 lamps. If they have regular 20W bulbs in them like any lava lamp, then that's just 2kW being used for this. Not nothing, but in an office it might as well be. That's less than a single AC unit. If you want to save energy in an office start by switching off equipment at night.
- mkr-hn 5y agoIt also helps serve the needs of millions of websites. This is like the mileage of a freight train: you have to look at how many tons it carries in that distance compared to alternatives. That's 2KW for easy true randomness. They have to get it some way, and this is probably the most efficient option for their purposes.
- willvarfar 5y agoIt’s probably not literally the most efficient, but it is very good publicity. It is deliberately displayed behind the reception as a talking point.
- dTal 5y agoIt's definitely not the most efficient. Let's get that straight. Even within the space of "cameras pointed at chaotic systems", it's trivial to imagine less energy intensive chaotic systems than a rack of heaters convecting molten wax.
- treesknees 5y agoFrom the end of the blog post, the LavaRand project was never actually used as a primary source of random numbers. >Hopefully we’ll never need it. Hopefully, the primary sources of randomness used by our production servers will remain secure, and LavaRand will serve little purpose beyond adding some flair to our office. But if it turns out that we’re wrong, and that our randomness sources in production are actually flawed, then LavaRand will be our hedge, making it just a little bit harder to hack Cloudflare. So, no, it isn't serving a purpose for millions of websites. It's 2kW of lamps running as a backup in an office nobody is going into right now to even look at.
- mkr-hn 5y agoYes, it is. I'm not sure what you think that post says, but it means LavaRand is currently serving a purpose in production. The whole point is to add more randomness to their other methods to protect against exploits or failures in the implementation of those methods. This is like the drives in a RAID setup. All those drives are a waste of power if you only care about when things work right. The point is to provide safety when things break. The previous paragraph: >> "LavaRand is a system that uses lava lamps as a secondary source of randomness for our production servers. A wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office provides an unpredictable input to a camera aimed at the wall. A video feed from the camera is fed into a CSPRNG, and that CSPRNG provides a stream of random values that can be used as an extra source of randomness by our production servers. Since the flow of the “lava” in a lava lamp is very unpredictable,1 “measuring” the lamps by taking footage of them is a good way to obtain unpredictable randomness. Computers store images as very large numbers, so we can use them as the input to a CSPRNG just like any other number."
- treesknees 5y agoBut unfortunately it's not. In the analogy given in the comment I responded to, these lava lamps are a locomotive burning fuel while not actually moving any load. Sure it's there to "serve a purpose" if the primary breaks, but that doesn't mean it's doing any work when the primary is functioning just fine.
- mkr-hn 5y agoThis is the check on the primary. It moots the concern of whether or not the primary is working. You could turn them off, but then the system is open to all the vulnerabilities known and unknown this mitigates.
- dTal 5y ago2kW still seems like a lot compared to just putting the cameras in a lightless cardboard box, which will work just as well. This is energy spent because it looks cool, not because it's effective.
- jhgb 5y agoWhy even use a camera? Use an avalanche diode and sample the noise.
- dTal 5y agoOf course. I'm just pointing out the inefficiency by noting a minimal modification that would use less power. An even more minimal modification would be to use those USB-powered "glitter" lava lamps. The idea that 2 kilowatts of heat being dumped into molten wax represents some kind of efficiency optimum is completely absurd.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoStop using your computer, its a non trivial energy expenditure
- ByThyGrace 5y agoIANAC but any sufficiently secure RNG implementation should be inherently wasteful.
- BenjiWiebe 5y agoIt doesn't need to be inherently wasteful. A reverse-biased diode provides a completely unpredictable source of noise while also taking extremely little power. Or cranking up the sensitivity of a sensor. Or reading the low bit of an ADC. All of these provide good entropy sources without being wasteful.
- juancampa 5y agoit's not _actual_ lava you know? Probably not significant
- lovecg 5y agoIf they use heating at all (and not just AC) and have a thermostat as everyone else it would automatically account for the extra heat and not run the furnace as much. This is also why a blanket ban on incandescent lightbulbs is silly.
- andbberger 5y agoA blanket ban on incandescents is not at all silly. Your underlying assumption, that 100% is the peak efficiency for electricity to heat, is false. Heat pumps.
- lovecg 5y agoFair enough, I haven’t considered that. I would still prefer a tax or something over an all out ban but that’s a different conversation.
- andbberger 5y agowhy tho? given that there are more efficient ways to produce light and heat and there are drop in replacements for incandescents? Do you just prefer blackbody spectrums?
- lovecg 5y agoYes on spectrums, I’m also sensitive to flicker and it’s hard to find LEDs that consistently don’t (I understand that it can be done with some circuitry - but then again I could just not use LEDs).
- willvarfar 5y agoLate to the party, but using low watt incandescent bulbs to stop small compartments from freezing in winter is a classic off grid cabin and camper van trick.