True Random Number Service

6 December 2009

A couple of handy new features for the Third-Party Draw Service are now online. First, the Public Records allow your entrants to view the results of all your drawings (except private ones). This makes life a lot easier for your entrants.

Second, the cool new Draw Widget allows you to publish the result of your drawings on your own web pages, so your entrants don't have to leave your site to convince themselves the drawings were conducted in a fair and unbiased manner. You can create a widget for any drawing held with the Third-Party Draw Service, even ones that you've held in the past. To create a widget for one of your drawings, simply go to the Third-Party Draw Service and click on the ‘create widget’ link for the drawing you want. The widget is currently in beta, so comments are extra welcome.

Other additions include the reintroduction of the bit counter (near the bottom of the main page), which shows how many random bits RANDOM.ORG has generated all the way back since October 1998 when it first went online. There's also a new Bit Tally page that shows the exact number of bits (it's a lot!) and calculates the average speed of the generator.

Finally, the RANDOM.ORG web site is now running off a cloud hosting company in the United States. Hopefully this should mean even better uptimes and an extra performance boost, especially for US customers.

25 October 2009

The Trails feature of the Premium Generator now also uses the time zone that you choose for your account to print its timestamps.

A beta version of the new Public Pecords page is available to all draw holders (make sure you are logged in to try it out).

11 October 2009

The Third-Party Draw Service now has a button to switch between the public view and the owner's view for individual drawings. As a result, you no longer need to logout to see your drawings the way your entrants see them. The owner's view also contains a few new features, such as a permalink (e.g., to post to your blog or web site or just keep for your records) and share links to Facebook and Twitter, so you can easily share the results of your drawings with your entrants.

It is now possible to set your own time zone in your RANDOM.ORG account. The time zone is used to display the completion time for all your drawings. This makes it easier for your entrants to see exactly when your drawings were held. This functionality works for all your past drawings too.

A bunch of new lotteries were added to the Lottery Quick Picker.

18 September 2009

The Third-Party Draw Service now has a nice feature that allows owners of drawings to switch between Owner's View (where all details for a given drawing are shown) and Public View (which is what everyone else sees). Another new feature is direct links to Facebook and Twitter to make it easy to share the results of your public and entrant-accessible drawings.

A new style sheet now makes RANDOM.ORG look better on smartphones, such as iPhones and Android phones.

The Random Web Redirector will redirect you to a random generator on RANDOM.ORG. I'm thinking of offering this service for people's own sites. If you would like to use this service with your own site, let me know.

A Hungarian 200 Forint coin was added to the Coin Flipper and a number of new lotteries were added to the Lottery Quick Picker.

19 August 2009

Two new generators have been added:

The Password Generator will generate strong passwords, which do not contain characters that are easy to get mixed up, e.g., ‘1’ (the digit one) and ‘l’ (lowercase L).
The Geographic Coordinate Generator will pick a random spot on the planet's surface and show it using Google Maps.

A new favicon was added (check it out), which uses the font in the new RANDOM.ORG logo (OCR-A), rather than the Courier New font that was used in the old logo.

The RANDOM.ORG web server now redirects all traffic for http://random.org to http://www.random.org. This was done to fix a problem that caused people to get warnings about the RANDOM.ORG certificate in certain situations.

2 May 2009

Video Tutorial #1 shows how to use RANDOM.ORG to hold a promotional giveaway for your blog or business.

20 April 2009

Big news! The Third-Party Draw Service is now automatically included with any RANDOM.ORG Premium Account. See the Guide to Random Drawings for details on how to use it. Tried and tested over two years by a range of charities and PR companies, this is a truly professional solution for holding independently verifiable random drawings with up to 2,000,000 entrants.

Other news: Due to popular demand, the Sequence Generator now supports multi-column format.

9 February 2009

The Integer Widget Wizard is now online! You can use it to put widgets like the one below on your own web pages.

14 December 2008

New functionality:

You can now choose which currency you want to use for invoices. Currently the following currencies are supported: AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, USD. If you have requests for other ones, email me.
It is now possible to add credit to your account balance, but you can't actually use the credit for anything yet.
The account editing features can now also be used to change your login.

1 December 2008

This month's new functionality:

New account editing features that allow you to change your password and email address for your Premium Account, and which you can also use to recover lost passwords.
A small formatting problem was fixed on the List Randomizer.

4 November 2008

Lots of behind-the-scenes server maintenance has been performed over the past months, but there are also some visible improvements to RANDOM.ORG:

The brand new Gaussian Random Number Generator can generate random numbers from a Gaussian distribution.
The Calendar Date Generator, the Clock Time Generator and the Decimal Fraction Generator are now free and no longer require a Premium Account.
The Integer Set Generator still requires a Premium Account, but has new, fancy sorting options.
There is now a list of hosts that have been permanently banned for violating the Client Guidelines.
The Possible Lessnesses site, based on a work by Samuel Beckett, is now hosted at RANDOM.ORG. Access is free but requires a password due to copyright considerations. Email e@lessness.org to get the password.

23 June 2008

The Premium Generator now supports email notifications. This feature has been requested by many users, especially players of strategy games.

10 June 2008: New services

A couple of great new additions:

The brand new Sound Generator allows you to generate random sound samples. They may sound like radio noise, but a spectrum analysis will reveal that they have a much more uniform power level distribution across the frequency range.
The new Calendar Date Generator allows you to pick random dates within a specified interval and subject to weekday constraints.

21 May 2008: New services

It has been a while since I've added new features, but here they finally are:

There is now a fancy Card Shuffler, which will shuffle configurable decks of playing cards and pick cards from them.
The shiny new Set Generator allows you to generate multiple sets of random numbers at the same time.
There is now a Quota Check function that can easily be used by automated clients to check their current bit allowance.
All pages now contain a search box.

7 December 2007: Premium services

A couple of big changes this month:

The Premium Generator is now officially open. It can be considered a flexible alternative to the Sequence Generator and Integer Generator, and it also features very handy trails that can be used to remember the last 10 times you used it. Trails are useful if you need to pick a random number with someone who is in a different location.
Registration for Premium Accounts is now open, and payments are accepted via PayPal. At this point, an account gives you full access to the Premium Generator. In the future, other premium services will be made available to RANDOM.ORG account holders.
To anyone who is curious, I am in the process of finalising changes to the Third-Party Draw Service. Please inquire if you are impatient or if you're interested in getting access to a trial account that will let you test drive this service.

30 October 2007: New functionality

Some more changes:

Instant quota top-ups can now be purchased via PayPal.
Cute halloween logo in place :-)
Two new sections were added to the FAQ, one on the quota system and one on documentation and media coverage.
Changed configuration to an IBM eServer machine with nice SCSI disks.
More lotteries added to the Quick Picker.

14 August 2007: New functionality

A few additions:

A Clock Time Generator was added that allows random points in time to be generated within a given interval.
The new Fraction Generator can generate decimal fractions in the [0;1] interval.
A bunch of new lotteries were added to the Lottery Quick Pick form.
Keno Quick Pick was added as distinct from Lottery Quick Pick because keno (as opposed to most lotteries) allows a variable number of numbers to be played on each ticket.
A bug in my CSS style sheet was fixed that caused numbers generated to be printed with a very small font in some browsers.

11 June 2007: More minor updates

A few more changes:

Due to popular request, Lottery Quick Pick now supports lotteries with multiple types of balls (e.g., bonus balls).
The Integer Generator's Advanced Mode now supports hexadecimal, decimal, octal and binary.
An Information Entropy Test was added to the statistics.
The graphs for the current day are now generated every hour, so you can monitor the progress of today's statistics.
The server was updated to Debian 4 (‘Etch’).
The server upgrade caused a bug to occur in the bitmap generator; this has been fixed.

10 May 2007: Minor updates

Over the last month, the following changes have been made:

A broken parameter check in the coin flipper has been fixed, which allowed someone to ask for a gazillion coins to be flipped. Although this didn't break the server per se, flipping a gazillion coins does use a lot of random numbers.
A bug in the timestamping has been fixed, causing the timestamps printed on the pages to run behind by up to one hour.
The server now uses pure GMT, i.e., Greenwich Mean Time without adjustment for daylight savings time. I'm still undecided whether it's easier for people in other time zones to convert to/from pure GMT or Irish Summer Time (IST), which is essentially just GMT with adjustment for daylight savings time. If you have an opinion on this, drop me a line.
The multi-column format for the Integer Generator has been reintroduced by popular request.
A bunch of US coins have been added to the coin flipper.
A list of peer-reviewed citations has been added to the Media and Citations page.
My homebrew log rotation program for the statistics logs has been replaced with cronolog, which is actually a much better solution.

8 April 2007: Minor updates

The new server is performing well and seems quite capable of keeping up with demands. A couple of more features have been added:

Support for SSL.
Several people reported they thought the new features on some of the forms (e.g., the Integer Generator) were a little confusing and cluttered the interfaces. The features were important to some hardcore users of RANDOM.ORG but not relevant for most people, so I have moved them to an Advanced Mode on the respective forms, which I think actually works much better.
A major change to the quota system that should allow much better utilisation.
Miscellaneous bug fixes related mostly to differences in JavaScript support between different browsers.

If you find bugs or have suggestions, let me know!

1 April 2007: New server goes online!

No, this is not an April's Fools joke... The new setup, which has been in the works for a year and a half, is finally replacing the old. This is a major overhaul of the software, so except for the quality of the numbers (which remains exactly the same as the old server), I'm expecting there may be a few inconveniences from things breaking. However, I hope it will be worth it in the end. The old server is still around at old.random.org for the moment, but it's running at reduced speed (with only one radio), so I strongly encourage you to use the new one.

Please send me any feedback (good and bad) you have on the new setup!

Here is a partial list of new features:

The back-end has been completely rewritten to use the ALSA audio libraries. The approach is completely the same as the old server, though, and my tests show the numbers to be exactly the same quality (i.e., as good) as the old.
A three-radio setup now offers a total generator capacity of 6,000 bits per second, which is over twice as fast as the old setup.
The dynamic content has been nearly completely migrated from CGI scripts to PHP. This makes it much easier for me to maintain it, which means improvements will appear more frequently in the future.
First steps towards migration towards much better statistics based on the NIST test suite instead of the ent program. Check out the fancy new graphs and the stats browser. (While I don't have graphs for the whole NIST suite online yet, the numbers have of course passed the whole suite, as described on the analysis page.)
Some new interfaces have been added, such as the Jazz Scale Generator and the List Randomizer.
Many of the interfaces now support pregenerated randomizations, either generated on specific days in the past or based on persistent identifiers. If you don't know what this means, it is probably not relevant to you, and you can continue using the service as always. You will find more details in the FAQ.
The draconian and erratic script that I used to ban clients that didn't conform to the guidelines has been replaced with a much superior quota system. You are restricted to 1,000,000 free bits per day, but top-ups are free for now. The much-ignored checkbuf script still exists (and works) but isn't really important anymore.
New and better interfaces for automatic clients. The old ones should be retained for now, but may disappear in the future.
My essay about randomness has received a much-needed update.
Much improved web design based on XHTML and CSS. Thanks to TSDA for donating it!

Some things that remain to get done:

Port some of the clients from the old server to use the new interfaces. If you update them and send them to me, I will put them on the new server.
CORBA and SOAP services.
Probably about a million other things... Tell me!