[Tutor] What are these things urandom() returns?

[Terry Carroll]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006, Tim Peters wrote:

> Speed and capacity, for two things ;-)  As the HotBits page says,
> their method can't create more than about 100 bytes per second.  

Yeah, I just couldn't resist.

> So even if they were willing (which they aren't) to satisfy a request
> for 1000000 random bytes (as Dick used in one of his programs), it would
> take close to 3 hours to get them.  

Actually, there's a limited number of requests you can make in a 24-hour
period; so this really isn't practical, except maybe...

> Note that a reasonable use for this service is to request a "small"
> number of random bytes to /seed/ a fast deterministic generator.

Yup.