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Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure. In another office they use a geiger counter (a much more standard way to get randomness, and probably easier to setup). That said, this doubles as a public art installation in their lobby - something many companies spend thousands (or millions!) of dollars on. So it's not just PR, it's actually surprisingly practical.
If it was a public art installation, wouldn't that leak their entropy?
Seems like a waste of energy... I can imagine putting a weather station on the roof would be more useful (albeit less cool). Use multiple sensors for rainfall, UV, wind speed, wind direction, temperature, pressure and aggregate the signals from each... Surely the combination of localized weather readings would provide enough randomness.
It's ~100 lamps for entropy that covers ~10% of the internet, energy consumption is a ridiculous complaint.
That’s not what “computer codes” and “algorithms” mean.
That's approximately 100 lava lamps each at 100W = 10,000W = 10kW/h * 20.4 cents = $2.04/h * 24 = $48.96/day $1,489.20/month. Ignoring the fact that is very little money in Silicon Valley. Lava lamps consume a large amount of electricity in order to generate the heat they need. There are cheaper better ways to generate randomness, this is purely for spectacle clearly. It makes me nervous more than anything. If that's…
IIRC a standard size lava lamp used much less than a 100W bulb. So your costs are maybe half that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was a public art installation, wouldn't that leak their entropy?
This is addressed in the last paragraph of the article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be susceptible to traffic patterns.
Not meaningfully. The input doesn't need to be uniform, just unpredictable. Statistical patterns are fine, as long as no one can predict exactly what's going to happen (to the pixel level). Even if all the drivers on the road were collaborating, they couldn't coordinate well enough to feed the camera adversarially predictable inputs. At least, not human drivers...
Not specifically some sort of giant coordinated attack to modify the randomness generated to specific values.