Testimonials

I discovered Random.org due to the New York Times article on random numbers today. I've already downloaded the three pre-packaged 10 MB files and wish there were more of them (at least three more 10 MB files). I'm using them as audio—interpreted as 16-bit WAV files, they form perfect white noise, which has many uses in acoustics and audio-equipment testing, which is my field. Used in pairs, they form perfect, uncorrelated stereo white noise.

I've been able to get more use out of the first three 10 MB files by reversing their byte order (the resulting white noise sounds the same) and by using various other audio-editing tricks like concatenating the files to produce long streams). I've also used 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes at a time to produce different audio wordlengths. Thanks to the 2's complement number system, this latter scheme is particularly effective for audio since you always get equal distributions of data points above and below zero.

Your files produce better noise than some pseudo-random schemes I've tried, since the latter can produce an audibly detectable cyclic effects in the sound quality if the sequence length is too short. The ear is an extremely good detector of such patterns. A quick-and-dirty one-time-pad scheme would involve Xor-ing your random bytes with the lower bytes of each 16-bit word on a commercial audio CD to produce the random number table. The recipient would only need your file and another copy of the audio CD. To crack it you'd have to search through every data sample on every CD ever released!

—David Ranada, Technical Editor, Sound & Vision Magazine

Dear Mr. Random,

I used your random generator. I am an office specialist at a University department. It is my responsibility to enter and close out all the accounts on our department copier. The copier does not allow me to actually erase existing accounts. Since you need a 8-digit passcode to access your account and use the copier, I instead ‘close’ the account by changing the passcode on that account to something the previous user will not know.

This month I'll have to do around 200 such entries on the copier. I got sick of devising my own numbers, so I searched on the internet for a random number producer, and I found you. It was fun producing numbers. I definitely fulfilled my geek quota for the next year.

—Jason Miller, University of Minnesota