<story><title>A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/encryption-lava-lamps</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samuel</author><text>I might be prejudiced, but this looks like a big PR stunt&amp;#x2F;done for the cool factor kind of thing. Aren&amp;#x27;t there simpler&amp;#x2F;saner alternatives for getting good randomness?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rm999</author><text>For sure. In another office they use a geiger counter (a much more standard way to get randomness, and probably easier to setup).&lt;p&gt;That said, this doubles as a public art installation in their lobby - something many companies spend thousands (or millions!) of dollars on. So it&amp;#x27;s not just PR, it&amp;#x27;s actually surprisingly practical.</text></comment>
<story><title>A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/encryption-lava-lamps</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>samuel</author><text>I might be prejudiced, but this looks like a big PR stunt&amp;#x2F;done for the cool factor kind of thing. Aren&amp;#x27;t there simpler&amp;#x2F;saner alternatives for getting good randomness?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pns</author><text>See cloudflare blog post conclusion - they&amp;#x27;re quite aware it&amp;#x27;s hopefully unnecessary and possibly just a flair factor (their pun :) but may help prevent an attack ever so slightly.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hopefully we’ll never need LavaRand. Hopefully, the primary entropy sources used by our production machines 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 hopefully LavaRand will be our hedge, making it just a little bit harder to hack Cloudflare.&amp;quot;</text></comment>