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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:24 ADT
Carl Ellison (cme@acm.org)
Tue, 14 Jul 1998 23:44:08 -0400
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At 11:27 PM 7/14/98 +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
>My idea was to poll the mouse once every second or so, rather than 20
>times a second. This would reduce the loss of entropy because of
>predictable mouse positions without severe overhead. Even better would
>be to do it during idle processing (if you are in no hurry to get the
>entropy).
Ben,
the last time I analyzed pointing data, the real entropy source came from
high frequency components (of the mouse track, sampled frequently). If you
sample only once a second, you lose those high frequencies.
BTW, I also found that if you ask the user to do something non-mouse (e.g.,
sign his name or sign "John Handcock"), then the high frequency noise is
even greater -- over 1 bit per mouse sample.
- Carl
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|Carl M. Ellison cme@acm.org http://www.clark.net/pub/cme |
| PGP: 08FF BA05 599B 49D2 23C6 6FFD 36BA D342 |
+-Officer, officer, arrest that man. He's whistling a dirty song.--+
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:24 ADT