On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 00:40, Valdis.Kletnieks(a)vt.edu wrote:
I think the basic concept there is that even without a microphone, as
you
sample, most cards won't return a steady stream of exact zeros - you'll get
back the tiniest bit of background hiss, and the low-order bits have
entropy.
Of course, doing this without filtering is a Bad Idea - the amount of
entropy coming off the always-on cheap sound card in my laptop that has
maybe 70db S/N is probably a lot higher than somebody who has a high-end
card that has 85db S/N - and if their card supports auto-muting for unused
inputs, you're basically screwed...
Detecting an auto-mute input should be quite easy, just read for a second or
two and see if there is any change in the signal. Also writing non-random
data to /dev/random is supposed to not cause any problems.
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