Console Screensaver on Linux

[Michael Halcrow]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 09:24:46PM -0700, Andrew McNabb wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 09:21:27PM -0700, Andrew Jorgensen wrote:
> > I was going to laugh, but then I thought I'd try it.  This command
> > does nothing at all on my box, and cat /dev/random only spits out
> > a few chars and then stops.  Then I didn't laugh at all.
> 
> /dev/urandom doesn't block.  Try cat /dev/urandom.

How about `cat /dev/urandom > /proc/kcore`? I hear that emulates some
other well-known OS kernels that are out there...

On a more serious note, to avoid strange tty effects, you might want
to do `od /dev/urandom`.

And I hear that `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp` is useful for people
with tinnitus. Almost as effective as `lynx -dump www.slashdot.org >
/dev/dsp`.

Okay, wait, this is kind of neat. I can actually detect non-random
data by listening to it as PCM data through my sound card. There seem
to be distinct 'popping' noises and brief regions of similar
tones. Maybe this is a feasible way to gauge the entropy of any given
string of bits?

Great, now I'm going to be piping stuff on my hard drive through my
sound card for the rest of the night.

Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
                         Michael A. Halcrow                          
       Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center       
GnuPG Fingerprint: 419C 5B1E 948A FA73 A54C  20F5 DB40 8531 6DCA 8769

To know recursion, you must first know recursion. 
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