This reminds me a lot of that scene from Johnny Mnemonic when they encode 3 random screenshots from the TV in order to encrypt the data stored in Keanu Reeves's head.
Java lamps: randomness found on an island in the Far East Fava lamps: randomness due to beans made famous by the film The Silence of The Lambs Cava lamps: randomness due to Spanish wine Lava lamps: randomness found by analysing the glow of a volcano Lava Lamb: a model of a farmyard animal carved from solidified lava Cassava lamps: randomness from root vegetables
I've been there. It's in their lobby at reception, so it's also a gimmicky "cool thing" to have at a tech office. It's not hidden in some back room. It's proudly on display. Having said that, imagine the technicolor carnage when the inevitable (larger than normal tremors) earthquake happens.
This sounds like a fact you would tell your friends on a bet to secure yourself a 100% chance of winning, because who would believe the phrase "Cloudflare is encrypting your data by using lava lamps.". This is mindbogglingly simple and genius at the same time.
This would result in a hour-lasting discussion between me and my friends, about how much the chaotic pendulum and the radioactive device counts into the encryption, about how true this phrase is.
It isn't necessarily the lava lamps themselves, but rather the code that makes up the image that the camera sees at any given time. It's an image hash. Clever idea really.
Two fun facts: -Tom didn't necessarily need to approach Cloudflare about filming in front of the lava lamps as Cloudflare encourages people to come pass by, take photos/videos, and even put on approved demonstrations or performances in front of the lamps, as that introduces further randomness. -Their London office has a machine that utilizes the RNG data their offices have produced to spit out receipts that contain random numbers, phrases, Magic 8-Ball responses, mazes, sudokus, and QR codes.
They did not invent it. books.google.com/books?id=-yCWwricVlYC&pg=PA50. In the 1980s there were many people using fluids and lights and CCD to make random numbers. And some people used noise. (random electricity from Mic feed into a ADC). And quantum random numbers can be made with a smart phone but smart phones can be hacked
The one in Singapore that uses a radioactive source really interested me. The pendulum and lava lamp are macroscale versions of the Singapore one in a way, and yet using radioactive decay to generate random numbers uses such fundamental physics. It's like they have directly linked their RNG to the fabric of reality itself. The code the universe was written in is effectively interfaced directly with cloudflare servers.
I feel like a aquarium would be a perfect job for this fish never swim exactly the same in the same place with the same fish around them in the exact same spot its always totally random even the plants sway as the water currents clash with the side of the glass
3 ปีที่แล้ว +137
aquarium would work, but more maintenance. have to feed the fish and all
@@vibaj16 if it was that easy they would have done it. The position of the"lava" inside the lamp counts on the number generation. Even with noise, a white wall won't give you enough variety.
@@CalaTec No, a blank wall would absolutely work, especially when it's in an active office reception area with changing light conditions. The lava lamps are a gimmick to draw attention. You can just use static background radiation for randomization.
If you can start predicting those numbers, you can start breaking those locks. Which is why I'm here at the headquarters of Cloudflare, in San Francisco. Erm, phrasing XD
No. You couldn't. You could predict the lava lamp's state, yes... But the exact amount of dust, the placement of the lamps, the amount of dust in the room, whether or not a car drove by, the exact angle of the camera and the quality of the camera (i.e how often does it take a photo, how high is the resolution, what colour space is it mapping it to), all contribute to the number
_"Chris urquhart"_ You clearly don't understand chaos theory. Even if you had the EXACT lava lamp, and put the EXACT same bubble pattern in it, minute differences (your exact voltage heating the lamp, error in exactly approximating the lava lamp, a 0.001C difference in room temperature) would propogate and quickly have your "copy" diverge from what it is modeling. It's a CHAOTIC SYSTEM. What you are proposing is aakin to forecasting the weather, a decade in advance, from today's known data. There's NO POSSIBLE WAY you could know the data precisely enough to do that...you could be pretty damn accurate for a week, then chaos would rear it's ugly head. (You forgot to account for that one butterfly in Madagascar that flapped its wings.)
The sad thing is people think they are safe using ssl when they are not. Browsers always have " security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation" off. For mozilla firefox, in the address bar type about:config then enter. Then type ssl into the search box. Then look for security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation . Change it from false to true. *just a warning. websites with bad security won't work anymore* . And Some ads may disappear. Some insecure ssl advertisements were used by foreign governments to hack everyone's internet browsers. I don't know if they still are
When I was writing computer games in the 1970s, I used the memory refresh register as my source of random numbers. Since my games involved a lot of human interaction, there is was adequate variation in activity to ensure that different games had different outcomes. The refresh register cycles through the memory to keep it powered, and has a large number of values each second. A weakness of the register is that numbers are sequential, but using them as a seed to a pseudo random number generator give a range of values.
Yay! Someone uses lava lamps as source of randomness again! I've actually covered them briefly in my thesis - and then proceeded to extract randomness from movement of microorganisms :D
Cloudfare, this is the most insane idea I ve heard so far. Quite imagined randomly also. Who came up with the idea of videotaping lava lamps? That's really smart guys, keep up.
"pointed a camera to a basket of kittens" ..... "that would be a high maintenance" Tom.... you know there's TH-cam Live streams of baskets of kittens right.....? :P
I remember reading an article back in '96 about that other lava lamp random number generator company. I always thought it was an interesting concept, and I wondered if anything ever became of it.
"Hey Dave, I saw you charged 400 lavalamps to the company credit card." "Oh... Uh Yeah... It's for, uh... Cyber...security." "Brilliant! Dave you've done it again!"
And somewhere in future these lava lamps will be replaced by randomly selected schroedinger cats, because some mathematician accidentally makes it easier to predict lava lamps. So you might be not that far off, Tom.
If the singapore office is recording radioactive material, they're already using the mechanism behind the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment without the needless felicide
Latooni Subota But you know, cats are bigger than splitting atoms. There are so many different cat species out there that a cat popping into existing still very random as you don’t know how big it was and it fur color. An atom is a little more predictable. But I agree, if cats (although internet’s favorite, still manages to be difficult to manage), radioactivity is a close and good second option.
d2factotum except for the fact, that you could hack youtube and filter the types of video you need to create the code for you. Nobody should know, that youtube is the source for the randomness in that case.
I almost instantly predicted what this was about when I started the video but I was like "that can't be what they are doing, that's way too weird and ingenious to actually work" but it turns out it's done exactly the way I thought it would. The world is a cool place...
qrng.anu.edu.au/ uses the electromagnetic fluctuations created by quantum mechanical virtual particles bubbling in and out of existence in a vacuum. Considerably more SCIENCE!, but not as a e s t h e t i c
There was also that machine which rolled real dice around and photographed them to generate random dice rolls, which you'd think would work pretty well for this use case too.
One thing I thougth about is someone walking in front of the lamps changes it WILDLY. Also if some lamps die out (as lava lamps tend to do) it can be replaced whenever so long as a good majority are working. That also makes it harder to simulate since you don't know when a lava lamp will die.
So if someone wanted a huge wall full of lava lamps in their own home, would they be able to point a high definition webcam at it and sell the randomness to other companies which need that for their operation, in order to get back a bit of the power cost for those lamps?
I don't think that would be recommended mainly because the photos could be accessed by hackers and used to generate the same random keys. This is probably on a closed network making it very difficult to hack.
The pieces are inexpensive enough that any company that needs such setup probably already has one. Using a lava lamp to generate and re-generate your own passwords and keys is probably smarter.
No, because the duplication would compromise the "randomness". Think about it. You're pointing your camera at the lava lamps, running an algorithm to get a random number - e.g. 4589237598236529870 - and then you send out that exact same number to 100 companies. They're all getting the exact same number. So let's say that you're getting this feed of random numbers and so am I. We both get the number 4589237598236529870 sent to us. You use it to create an encryption key. All I have to do is use the exact same algorithms as you and the encryption key I get will be exactly the same. Thus, I can break your encryption. You can't duplicate random numbers and hand out the same numbers to different people, because that makes them perfectly predictable. Whatever number you were given is exactly the same number I was given too. Thus, if you were doing this, then you could only sell your random numbers to a single company. Either that, or you couldn't send out the same number twice. But that has its own problems, in that you have to obtain a random number, send it out, obtain a new random number, send it out, and so forth. You'd be limited in the amount of companies and / or the rate at which you could send out numbers, simply because of the time it takes to "round robin" through all your customers to hand them each a unique random number. (To explain, imagine that it takes 0.1 seconds to take a picture, process it and produce a random number. You have 10,000 customers. So to "round robin" through all your customers, giving them each a unique random number would take 10,000 x 0.1 seconds = 1,000 seconds or 16.667 minutes. So one particular customer only gets 1 random number from you every 17-ish minutes. If they need a lot of random numbers for cryptography, then that rate would just be much too slow for them.) No, if you're serious about your random numbers for cryptographic purposes, you can't source them from the same place as anyone else. You need your own source of randomness. Like, ooh, a big wall of lava lamps, say. Sure, choosing to use lava lamps, that's "theatre" to generate publicity. But the fact that they own their own source of randomness like this to ensure that it's totally unique and can't be duplicated, that's perfectly sound and logical security.
PokerStars' headquarter in Australia has a laserbeam constantly shooting at a transparent mirror/glass thing. Sometimes the beam of light shoots through this material and sometimes it gets reflected and does not go through. That system is in their own words "100% random" and will decide how the cards are shuffled in every deck. Randomness is funny!
Years ago before this I always heard that using atmospheric weather data was the standard for a good seed/source for random number generation. This is a cool idea for an alternative though ;)
Thanks A LOT for all the work you put into sharing fun, strange and interesting information. I'm learning and having a lot of fun at the same time, and this has no price. Thanks again. Cheers!
If some jerk put black cardboard over the camera, then it would mean the visual component would be the same black screen! Though I imagine Cloudlfare also uses more typical randomness functions in their algorythm and are really using the image just as part of the seed for the randomness (maybe the other part being the unix timecode), so that this kind of malfunction wouldnt straight-up result in the keys becoming the same, they would just temporarily become easier to figure out, and probably not for long enough for someone to breach it. I wonder if they used a low quality camera on purpose that gets a good layer of extra noise in its image or something?
putting a piece of cardboard over the camera, would cause the camera to capture a lot of "static noise" ... a bunch of seemingly random dots all through the picture. Not ideal but it would still be at least somewhat random. Using a low-quality camera .... could actually be a decent solution, as it would indeed cause a lot of random colored pixels in the picture.
Well sort of, they probably have multiple cameras looking at the lava lamps in different directions generating even more encryption hashes seems pretty hard to do anything with just their vid feed, you would also need their exact software to generate the "random keys"
If your camera feed was timed wrong (due to network lag, different computer, etc.) by even a a fraction of a second you may not get the same random numbers. A very small variation in speed or very small deviation from their process for generating numbers from that many continuously moving lava lamps generating that long of a number would lead to failure because a 99% correct key would be useless.
SGI is alive and well, lavarand was weird at the time in the late 90's but well those folks at SGI would try anything once! I'd imagine most viewers have never heard of SGI, what a great place to work.
1. Pay a bunch of teens minimum wage to sit at a computer 2. Run a chat program and let them talk to each other 3. Add some bots (pretending to be people) to randomly change up the conversation 4. Take the hashes of their conversation 5. Profit
@@user-pc5sc7zi9j That way there's a high demand. You also can't just take it from a public chat room, or other people could access the data you use for your security protocol
I would hate to be the poor sap who assembled that shelf. Imagine having to run the nuts on either side of the boards down an entire 8 foot section of all-thread...
3:28 - I was fortunate enough to have been around for the genesis of that... to think, it all started with a lavalamp set up to play itself in a game of basketball! Back in good ol' Building 15... I've got a lot of fond memories from there. Before long, there 12 lavalamps (4 in each of 3 groups, on staggered 8-hours-on, 4-hours off cycles) in a data center (in another building). Fun times! P.S. How did I not see this video until now? Oh, I guess I wasn't subscribed... fixed! Thanks for refreshing the memories. :)
So... each lava lamp uses a 40 watt incandescent bulb. There are 100 lava lamps shown. That's 4,000 watts to run them - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So, roughly, that wall consumes about 2,900 kilowatt-hours per month, which, in San Francisco, adds about $550 to their electric bill. But that's not all... 90% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted to heat. So, in addition to the light, the wall produces about 12,000 BTUs/hr of heat, which, in summer at least, must be removed by the building's air conditioning system. If we assume a very efficient system rated at 12 EER, that's another 1,000 watts continuous power consumption to remove the heat, adding another 25% to their power use. --- Seems using something like a beehive with a window to generate the random images would be far more cost efficient, less wasteful of electricity, and maybe even profitable if they sold 'encryption honey'.
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
This is not a sponsored video. I'll always declare if something is. I just emailed and asked if I could film their lava lamps!
To be honest, you need a high IQ to understand that this video is not a sponsored video.
Do you have to say it's a sponsored video because of British law?
TH-cam guidelines/rules- you need to disclose sponsored videos
This reminds me a lot of that scene from Johnny Mnemonic when they encode 3 random screenshots from the TV in order to encrypt the data stored in Keanu Reeves's head.
this comment is one week old but youtube says the video was uploaded today
are you a time traveler?
"Oh sh!t they're onto us"
*moves a lava lamp 1mm to the left*
"phew that was close!"
Angel 2 years and u dont have a comment yet so i decided to change that
Angel 2 years one day, and you only have 1 comment so i decided to change that
Angel 2 years, 1 day, and 5 hours and you only have 2 comments so i decided to change that
Heja Angel, it's been 2 years, 1 day, and 6.3 hours. You only have 3 comments! And broski, so kind of me I know, I just had to change that
I love the internet,
because of comment sections like this
i can rest easy knowing that i'm being protected by a lava lamp
An entire wall of lava lamps
Ikr it’s very reassuring
Java lamps: randomness found on an island in the Far East
Fava lamps: randomness due to beans made famous by the film The Silence of The Lambs
Cava lamps: randomness due to Spanish wine
Lava lamps: randomness found by analysing the glow of a volcano
Lava Lamb: a model of a farmyard animal carved from solidified lava
Cassava lamps: randomness from root vegetables
all it takes is getting to the software engineer. Compromise him and the lamps are a distraction.
Lavae lampai*
Great video
indeed
Ey
How does this comment from smartereveryday only have 40 likes!?
@@BenjaminAnderson21 Because people dont like a comment just because someone is verified
@@MrJustin2105 ps I’m joking
I've been there. It's in their lobby at reception, so it's also a gimmicky "cool thing" to have at a tech office.
It's not hidden in some back room. It's proudly on display.
Having said that, imagine the technicolor carnage when the inevitable (larger than normal tremors) earthquake happens.
They could just move the whole thing to South America.
@@kibe2134 South America would have lava for once hehe
Wouldn't that make for even more complex encryption?
@@kibe2134 South america also has eartquakes.
Are earthquakes just a normal thing in America??
You could say, it's a firewall
Firewall from another mother
Lavawall
@@Dicaso9 ooh that's kinda cool ya know
That's the most perfect pun I ever heard in my life.
take my like and leave
This sounds like a fact you would tell your friends on a bet to secure yourself a 100% chance of winning, because who would believe the phrase "Cloudflare is encrypting your data by using lava lamps.".
This is mindbogglingly simple and genius at the same time.
This would result in a hour-lasting discussion between me and my friends, about how much the chaotic pendulum and the radioactive device counts into the encryption, about how true this phrase is.
My passphrase is now "Cloudfare is encrypting your data by using lava lamps.".
Nobody will guess that!
Sounds like something Beret Guy from xkcd would pitch at a company meeting.
+Felix 100% true
Pendulum should be deterministic, albeit chaotic. But the radioactive source is true randomness (as random as the universe provides)
Doesn't this basically mean that if a key was made during the making of this video Tom would be included in the key?
I would assume so but it's not like that matters because it just introduces more entropy.
YES.
@@replaceitem *algorithm
@@hansmuller1846 I think algyrthym sounds better
It isn't necessarily the lava lamps themselves, but rather the code that makes up the image that the camera sees at any given time. It's an image hash. Clever idea really.
I was half expecting him to go “But lava lamps will only get you so far. That’s why I use
D A S H L A N E”
Lmao
Nah, Tom Scott is ethical
@@MrJason005 best joke
@@dontspikemydrink9382 What makes you think Tom Scott isn't ethical?
@@MrJason005 i didn't
It's certainly cheaper than hiring 256 nerds throwing D16's with hex numbers on.
Now I want a hex d16. Internet, please let this be a thing I can order online.
How is anything cheaper than hiring 0 nerds?
GET IT?
No?
@@ferulebezel roll a tetrahedron twice
@@coolguy284_2 or get a d16 and paint it
@@neilisbored2177 no, i don't get it
There is no better RNG than a box with a keyboard and a cat inside.
Disagree. Cat + box + keyboard = sleeping cat on keyboard, generating one or two characters varied only when cat stretches and goes back to sleep....
onafixedincome What about Some Lion Babys or Animals that give born, and you count how many of them are coming out... 😂
nah = wall avoidance etc skews # probability
*shake shake shake*
Also usable for quantum cryptography. The cat can both press and not press a button at the same time ;)
Two fun facts:
-Tom didn't necessarily need to approach Cloudflare about filming in front of the lava lamps as Cloudflare encourages people to come pass by, take photos/videos, and even put on approved demonstrations or performances in front of the lamps, as that introduces further randomness.
-Their London office has a machine that utilizes the RNG data their offices have produced to spit out receipts that contain random numbers, phrases, Magic 8-Ball responses, mazes, sudokus, and QR codes.
Are the puzzles actually able to be solved?
Another fun fact: no one cares
thats freaking cool tho
Fun fact im homophobic
@@a2kvarnstrom80 I care though.
Shouting “The Wall is Lava!!” at that office is the quickest way to get yourself thrown out.
Ha. Comedy.
Quicker if you throw one on the ground and shatter it, and shout the floor is lava
@@espen4330 Aw I was gonna say that...
It's a firewall
Are you speaking from personal experience or....
i really hope theres now some keys with encrypted pictures of tom scott standing next to the lava lamp wall now
There are probably hundreds of keys with the maintenance guy changing a light bulb.
Just use a chicken and some pressure plates
BuT It'S CoDeD
Bats are more random
@@maggotmaskstudios7180 Bats are harder to catch.
Nah chickens are too random
Villagers are better than chicken
Damn this is clever! Who knew that lava lamps are keeping us safe 😂
These lamps can't keep us safe knowing that you could easily just poke them to turn them into Aces.
Tech people, of course :)
Oi steven its nice seeing you here. I am very passionate about citrus fruit
FELLOW MAGICIAN!!!
Cloudflare knew
So, this is how the TH-cam algorithm works?
Yes
No
Hopefully
Maybe
Could be
I imagine that somewhere on the internet, there's a key that contains Tom Scott
Oh my gosh yes
The Red shirt encryption key.
God damn it Tom! How do you keep finding all of this interesting crap?
حسين عبدالله it's not crap
catsdgs it's a good kind of crap
Its not crap if its interesting 😂😂😂
Depends on your field of study, now doesn't it?
look a millimeter past your media bubble and you will see that _everything_ has interesting aspects to it
That is brilliant! And super mesmerizing!
This Little Critic yes!
They did not invent it. books.google.com/books?id=-yCWwricVlYC&pg=PA50. In the 1980s there were many people using fluids and lights and CCD to make random numbers. And some people used noise. (random electricity from Mic feed into a ADC). And quantum random numbers can be made with a smart phone but smart phones can be hacked
I wonder what cloudflare does to keep us safe
Cloudflare: haha lava lamp go blob blob
Xd
PewDiePie 🤗
@Mialisus nobody asked
@Mialisus nice
@Mialisus gottem
I need a lava lamp next to my computer.
I HAVE a lava lamb next to my computer.
Someone wanted to throw it away years ago. I rescued it.
I had one until it stopped working.
I have a plasma ball next to mine. Does that count?
I need a basket of kittens
Ok is this the new account that appears everywhere?
The one in Singapore that uses a radioactive source really interested me. The pendulum and lava lamp are macroscale versions of the Singapore one in a way, and yet using radioactive decay to generate random numbers uses such fundamental physics. It's like they have directly linked their RNG to the fabric of reality itself. The code the universe was written in is effectively interfaced directly with cloudflare servers.
cloudflare servers is part of the code of the universe
I feel like a aquarium would be a perfect job for this fish never swim exactly the same in the same place with the same fish around them in the exact same spot its always totally random even the plants sway as the water currents clash with the side of the glass
aquarium would work, but more maintenance. have to feed the fish and all
literally just pointing a camera at a blank wall would work just as well. The noise would be enough
@@vibaj16 if it was that easy they would have done it. The position of the"lava" inside the lamp counts on the number generation. Even with noise, a white wall won't give you enough variety.
@@CalaTec No, a blank wall would absolutely work, especially when it's in an active office reception area with changing light conditions. The lava lamps are a gimmick to draw attention. You can just use static background radiation for randomization.
@@chrismanuel9768 Now add the static randomness of a wall + laval lamps randomness and you get why they use lava lamps
If you can start predicting those numbers, you can start breaking those locks. Which is why I'm here at the headquarters of Cloudflare, in San Francisco.
Erm, phrasing XD
Tom Scott pro hacker
No. You couldn't. You could predict the lava lamp's state, yes... But the exact amount of dust, the placement of the lamps, the amount of dust in the room, whether or not a car drove by, the exact angle of the camera and the quality of the camera (i.e how often does it take a photo, how high is the resolution, what colour space is it mapping it to), all contribute to the number
leave a camera in there
_"Chris urquhart"_
You clearly don't understand chaos theory. Even if you had the EXACT lava lamp, and put the EXACT same bubble pattern in it, minute differences (your exact voltage heating the lamp, error in exactly approximating the lava lamp, a 0.001C difference in room temperature) would propogate and quickly have your "copy" diverge from what it is modeling.
It's a CHAOTIC SYSTEM. What you are proposing is aakin to forecasting the weather, a decade in advance, from today's known data. There's NO POSSIBLE WAY you could know the data precisely enough to do that...you could be pretty damn accurate for a week, then chaos would rear it's ugly head. (You forgot to account for that one butterfly in Madagascar that flapped its wings.)
The sad thing is people think they are safe using ssl when they are not. Browsers always have " security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation" off. For mozilla firefox, in the address bar type about:config then enter. Then type ssl into the search box. Then look for security.ssl.require_safe_negotiation . Change it from false to true.
*just a warning. websites with bad security won't work anymore* . And Some ads may disappear. Some insecure ssl advertisements were used by foreign governments to hack everyone's internet browsers. I don't know if they still are
And then the company currently using a basket of kittens slowly, and surreptitiously raises their collective eyebrows...
I personally use a erratically swinging lava kitten.
...that is radiocative.
Well, they HAVE to raise them slowly and surreptitiously...ever tried moving anything quickly around a basket of kittens? :P
When I was writing computer games in the 1970s, I used the memory refresh register as my source of random numbers. Since my games involved a lot of human interaction, there is was adequate variation in activity to ensure that different games had different outcomes. The refresh register cycles through the memory to keep it powered, and has a large number of values each second. A weakness of the register is that numbers are sequential, but using them as a seed to a pseudo random number generator give a range of values.
Z80?
this is a really cool way for random numbers to be generated, much cooler than atmospheric noise!
When you're dealing with 10% of internet traffic, the cost of keeping a few dozen lava lamps plugged in is negligible
Congratulations on 1 million subscribers. Very well earned. 👍🏻👍🏻
Thanks
@@iSyriux you're welcome
@@iSyriux you're welcome
you're welcome
Whoa, fancy seeing you here Paul.
Tom Scott, the genius of viral videos who’s not clickbait.
1:56 top left top line "uwu"
n o
How serious is your ADHD?
UwU
Under uwu and a bit to the left is jah
uwu
You used "uwu" give me your human rights
Yay! Someone uses lava lamps as source of randomness again!
I've actually covered them briefly in my thesis - and then proceeded to extract randomness from movement of microorganisms :D
That sounds cool
wait sorry i didn't read the replies before i said that
Cloudfare, this is the most insane idea I ve heard so far. Quite imagined randomly also. Who came up with the idea of videotaping lava lamps? That's really smart guys, keep up.
Nerds in the 90s did ...
Thanks , *I feel much more secure now*
Jumbazix hahahahaha
"pointed a camera to a basket of kittens" ..... "that would be a high maintenance" Tom.... you know there's TH-cam Live streams of baskets of kittens right.....? :P
and one of them is run by a guy from a software company !
Link????
Zelda????
You’re one of the least toxic channels I follow. Genuine. Interesting. I love it.
I like the Kitten idea better.
Yeah, lava lamps are cool, but Tom's channel needs more cats.
Fasten the lava lamps securely and let the kittens observe
Kittens are already running the internet enough.
CircsC
Fasten lava lamps to kittens them observe.
Then cat videos will literally be the backbone of the internet.
I remember reading an article back in '96 about that other lava lamp random number generator company. I always thought it was an interesting concept, and I wondered if anything ever became of it.
Step 1: get some lava lamp.
Step 2: break into Nasa and the Pentagon.
Step3: leak highly classified information
Step4: fly to Moscow
Step5: eat pant
@@williamwalworth3151 egg plant
Step 6: chug paint thinner
Done.
Now what?
"What do you do"
"I collect randomness"
Good excuse to buy some lavalamps.
Paramost d
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Hi 👋 my mmkklôp
"Hey Dave, I saw you charged 400 lavalamps to the company credit card."
"Oh... Uh Yeah... It's for, uh... Cyber...security."
"Brilliant! Dave you've done it again!"
I like how you manage to smile consistently in your videos and seem to genuinely enjoy life while I get annoyed when my dad comes in to watch the tv
This is one of the most hilarious and amazing videos I've seen on this channel.
Also the one that sounds the most like an April Fools joke.
And somewhere in future these lava lamps will be replaced by randomly selected schroedinger cats, because some mathematician accidentally makes it easier to predict lava lamps.
So you might be not that far off, Tom.
If the singapore office is recording radioactive material, they're already using the mechanism behind the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment without the needless felicide
Latooni Subota But you know, cats are bigger than splitting atoms. There are so many different cat species out there that a cat popping into existing still very random as you don’t know how big it was and it fur color. An atom is a little more predictable.
But I agree, if cats (although internet’s favorite, still manages to be difficult to manage), radioactivity is a close and good second option.
They should just use videos uploaded to TH-cam in order--that ought to be sufficiently random for anyone, I should think! :)
d2factotum except for the fact, that you could hack youtube and filter the types of video you need to create the code for you. Nobody should know, that youtube is the source for the randomness in that case.
· 0xFFF1 yeah you could film the brains of randomly selected schroedinger cats. That sounds indeed better.
I almost instantly predicted what this was about when I started the video but I was like "that can't be what they are doing, that's way too weird and ingenious to actually work" but it turns out it's done exactly the way I thought it would.
The world is a cool place...
RANDOM.ORG uses atmospheric noise, but this is more my aesthetic.
qrng.anu.edu.au/ uses the electromagnetic fluctuations created by quantum mechanical virtual particles bubbling in and out of existence in a vacuum.
Considerably more SCIENCE!, but not as a e s t h e t i c
Adam Baldwin I press numbers on my keypad to get random numbers
111 uhh 1
DogsRNice i got that reference :)
Aexis Rai Did you mean: *_ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ_*
I read somewhere that a phone can use the static of the camera to do this, so it works even with the lens covered.
There was also that machine which rolled real dice around and photographed them to generate random dice rolls, which you'd think would work pretty well for this use case too.
Wow, that's amazing. I would have never thought of that idea for generating random numbers.
Being a CloudFlare client myself for a long time now, that is something I really didn't know about.
This is just one of the reason I love this world we live in. How incredibly great humans can be!
One thing I thougth about is someone walking in front of the lamps changes it WILDLY. Also if some lamps die out (as lava lamps tend to do) it can be replaced whenever so long as a good majority are working. That also makes it harder to simulate since you don't know when a lava lamp will die.
So if someone wanted a huge wall full of lava lamps in their own home, would they be able to point a high definition webcam at it and sell the randomness to other companies which need that for their operation, in order to get back a bit of the power cost for those lamps?
I don't think that would be recommended mainly because the photos could be accessed by hackers and used to generate the same random keys. This is probably on a closed network making it very difficult to hack.
Anyone who cares enough about randomness to consider a solution like that are probably too paranoid to outsource it.
The pieces are inexpensive enough that any company that needs such setup probably already has one.
Using a lava lamp to generate and re-generate your own passwords and keys is probably smarter.
Yes they could, but, here they do it for free, so it's not gonna work.
No, because the duplication would compromise the "randomness".
Think about it. You're pointing your camera at the lava lamps, running an algorithm to get a random number - e.g. 4589237598236529870 - and then you send out that exact same number to 100 companies.
They're all getting the exact same number.
So let's say that you're getting this feed of random numbers and so am I. We both get the number 4589237598236529870 sent to us. You use it to create an encryption key. All I have to do is use the exact same algorithms as you and the encryption key I get will be exactly the same. Thus, I can break your encryption.
You can't duplicate random numbers and hand out the same numbers to different people, because that makes them perfectly predictable. Whatever number you were given is exactly the same number I was given too.
Thus, if you were doing this, then you could only sell your random numbers to a single company.
Either that, or you couldn't send out the same number twice. But that has its own problems, in that you have to obtain a random number, send it out, obtain a new random number, send it out, and so forth. You'd be limited in the amount of companies and / or the rate at which you could send out numbers, simply because of the time it takes to "round robin" through all your customers to hand them each a unique random number.
(To explain, imagine that it takes 0.1 seconds to take a picture, process it and produce a random number. You have 10,000 customers. So to "round robin" through all your customers, giving them each a unique random number would take 10,000 x 0.1 seconds = 1,000 seconds or 16.667 minutes. So one particular customer only gets 1 random number from you every 17-ish minutes. If they need a lot of random numbers for cryptography, then that rate would just be much too slow for them.)
No, if you're serious about your random numbers for cryptographic purposes, you can't source them from the same place as anyone else.
You need your own source of randomness.
Like, ooh, a big wall of lava lamps, say.
Sure, choosing to use lava lamps, that's "theatre" to generate publicity. But the fact that they own their own source of randomness like this to ensure that it's totally unique and can't be duplicated, that's perfectly sound and logical security.
PokerStars' headquarter in Australia has a laserbeam constantly shooting at a transparent mirror/glass thing. Sometimes the beam of light shoots through this material and sometimes it gets reflected and does not go through. That system is in their own words "100% random" and will decide how the cards are shuffled in every deck. Randomness is funny!
Funny how they claim that without an unbiased third party checking its legitimacy.
Years ago before this I always heard that using atmospheric weather data was the standard for a good seed/source for random number generation. This is a cool idea for an alternative though ;)
It would be, but these days, wouldn't have enough bitrate.
Thanks A LOT for all the work you put into sharing fun, strange and interesting information. I'm learning and having a lot of fun at the same time, and this has no price. Thanks again. Cheers!
Dear god Tom Scott; ten years by and I have learned a lot.
How to Destroy The Internet: Turn off all the lava lamps and when they cool down and the wax settles at the bottom you can decode EVERYTHING
The image noise
@@mbfinocchiaro42 cover the camera
@@mickys8065 still image noise
@Liam Durr can't make code
@@gurin3702 replace camera with dummy that returns 0/black
If some jerk put black cardboard over the camera, then it would mean the visual component would be the same black screen! Though I imagine Cloudlfare also uses more typical randomness functions in their algorythm and are really using the image just as part of the seed for the randomness (maybe the other part being the unix timecode), so that this kind of malfunction wouldnt straight-up result in the keys becoming the same, they would just temporarily become easier to figure out, and probably not for long enough for someone to breach it.
I wonder if they used a low quality camera on purpose that gets a good layer of extra noise in its image or something?
genjus
putting a piece of cardboard over the camera, would cause the camera to capture a lot of "static noise" ... a bunch of seemingly random dots all through the picture. Not ideal but it would still be at least somewhat random. Using a low-quality camera .... could actually be a decent solution, as it would indeed cause a lot of random colored pixels in the picture.
@@user-qy4lp8wp5c yea because the imperfection is steady - it stays the same
Hash functions. One bit changes everything.
Hash functions. One bit changes everything.
I’m lightly baked and this is blowing my mind. I love lava lamps. I find their service of guarding 10% of the internet is delightful.
Making security fun as well as secure!
This is absolutely insane. I now have 1000+ more respect for cloudflare.
So now all I need to do is hack into the video feed of their lava lamp wall and I have the seed for their encryption hashes.... w00t!!!
SpinDreams exactly my thought
Then somehow determine the algorithm used to translate physical images into hashes, after determining the data that they transcribe them.
Well sort of, they probably have multiple cameras looking at the lava lamps in different directions generating even more encryption hashes seems pretty hard to do anything with just their vid feed, you would also need their exact software to generate the "random keys"
If your camera feed was timed wrong (due to network lag, different computer, etc.) by even a a fraction of a second you may not get the same random numbers. A very small variation in speed or very small deviation from their process for generating numbers from that many continuously moving lava lamps generating that long of a number would lead to failure because a 99% correct key would be useless.
ya know there are things that you can't just "hack into" right?
Cape Canaveral used to keep an abacus in a glass case, with a notice saying "In emergency break glass"!! So much for high tech!
This seems like something straight out of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.
2:52 left side mouse coursor moving! Btw nice video!
Awesome video!!! Being a retired cybersecurity architect, I can wholly appreciate this!
TIL: The security of 10% of the internet is based on a wall of lava lamps.
0:25
-"Cloudflare is a-"
Background noices:
UUUUHHHGGGGG...
and right after: wewebsites
gachimuchi
SGI is alive and well, lavarand was weird at the time in the late 90's but well those folks at SGI would try anything once! I'd imagine most viewers have never heard of SGI, what a great place to work.
they should use edgy teens RAWR XD IM SO RANDOM
This joke is severely underrated
1. Pay a bunch of teens minimum wage to sit at a computer
2. Run a chat program and let them talk to each other
3. Add some bots (pretending to be people) to randomly change up the conversation
4. Take the hashes of their conversation
5. Profit
@@RyanTosh Why pay them?
People chat in their free time.
@@user-pc5sc7zi9j That way there's a high demand. You also can't just take it from a public chat room, or other people could access the data you use for your security protocol
@@RyanTosh R/whoooooooosh
_Accidentally knocks some over_
Whoops there goes 2% of the entire internet
but the keys are already generated
yes it would only affect new sites getting set up
@@leojenkins71 it would affect absolutely nothing
Give it to Jen
Keep in mind that original post got 283 comments. That's approximately the amount of people who didnt understand the video
This was used as a part of an NCIS episode!
so that's how my 3AM TH-cam recommendations comes
12am
I would hate to be the poor sap who assembled that shelf. Imagine having to run the nuts on either side of the boards down an entire 8 foot section of all-thread...
compressed air and lube could make this an actual fun activity...
(that's a sentence I should use more often)
Yes. I immediately thought of the 1981 Hyatt Regency Collapse, which was effectively caused by contractors not wanting to do that.
@@LordWaldema compressed air and lube can make anything a fun activity.
@@UDumFck Great reference-- applicable and evocative. (I think about that failure quite often and wish I didn't; it always makes me so sad.)
Beauty given complex functionality. That's pleasing on a number of levels.
So _these_ guys are responsible for me not being able to log into Discord today, huh?
You know this seems to be something thought up by Terry Practhet.
Anthill Inside? 😉
Tom managed to get into Unseen University for the making of this video.
Leonard of Quirm drew it in the margin of one of his notebooks.
Foul ole Ron's conscious smell cloud? Not so far off of a lavalamp.. Ratinnabun anyone?
And they kept B.S. Johnson as far away from it as possible.
I hate how interesting your videos are and how much I love them.
0:00 "Computers aren't very good" - Tom Scott, 2017
Its true
When a firewall isn't enough, the lava wall comes out
Thanks for giving good old SGI credit in the end, for a nice trip down memory lane :)
i want to see the london office with the crazy pendulum
“Who I don’t know pointed a camera at a basket of kittens”
Me: MILLION DOLLAR IDEA! DIBS
Tom just got those images which were turned into data and then used to encrypt some data, what a clever fellow
This isn't the firewall I was expecting
Plus also, it allows us to say "we generate random numbers from lava lamps" for promo purposes
I can't make sense of a single bit of this information but it made me happy and amused
Almost 1 million! :)
Tis now :D
Didn't Cloudflare just get hacked a few days back?
Either way great video.
That was a cache overflow thing over the last six months
They got so much money it was a cash overflow
This was the best video I have seen on TH-cam in over 30 days
0:28 Max Headroom attempted to hijack the video for a second there.
Horváth Gergely Found the old guy ;)
I'd love to see that wall lit up in the Darkness
I wouldn't be in the darkness then.
Wow. This really is a thing and not just something made up that I saw a while ago in a TV program.
1:58 thanks for telling me otherwise I'd have copied it to my laptop
is not even complete
3:45 SCIENCE!
Using lava lamp photos and photo static to encrypt data? That's creative!
I would love to see kittens moving around for 24 hours haha
Rodrigo Juez kittenacademy is the channel you want 😉
thanks!
1:55 you shouldve let them go nuts trying to figure out where that "key" was for
Jokes on them the key isnt being used anymore
3:28 - I was fortunate enough to have been around for the genesis of that... to think, it all started with a lavalamp set up to play itself in a game of basketball! Back in good ol' Building 15... I've got a lot of fond memories from there. Before long, there 12 lavalamps (4 in each of 3 groups, on staggered 8-hours-on, 4-hours off cycles) in a data center (in another building). Fun times!
P.S. How did I not see this video until now? Oh, I guess I wasn't subscribed... fixed!
Thanks for refreshing the memories. :)
So... each lava lamp uses a 40 watt incandescent bulb. There are 100 lava lamps shown. That's 4,000 watts to run them - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So, roughly, that wall consumes about 2,900 kilowatt-hours per month, which, in San Francisco, adds about $550 to their electric bill.
But that's not all... 90% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted to heat. So, in addition to the light, the wall produces about 12,000 BTUs/hr of heat, which, in summer at least, must be removed by the building's air conditioning system. If we assume a very efficient system rated at 12 EER, that's another 1,000 watts continuous power consumption to remove the heat, adding another 25% to their power use.
---
Seems using something like a beehive with a window to generate the random images would be far more cost efficient, less wasteful of electricity, and maybe even profitable if they sold 'encryption honey'.
You could literally put a camera anywhere and break down each frame into code, that would work even better than this if it was in a place with people
I would totally buy encryption honey.