Hi again, Terry. Good to hear from you.

>>As I stated in a previous posting, I'm hoping that the VFP folks
>>at Microsoft decide to support the hardware generators that are
>>on a lot of the newer boards. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't
>>some of the newer processors also sporting around with hardware
>>generators on chip?
>
>Search me!

Same here. Guess I'll just have to quit being lazy and
go look it up :^). Pretty sure I remember that Intel has
one on chip when I was doing random-generator programming
while working on a move generator for my chess program.
Evidently, the P-N junction of a transistor can give off
random noise, and the Lord only knows that computers sure
use a lot of those things. :^)

>>Hmmmm. REALLY dumb idea. Get folks to start turning on their processor
>>IDs. Then use the MAC address XORed with the processor ID, and then
>>tag on a datetime timestamp. Microsoft and the NSA would surely love
>>it if everyone turned on their processor IDs. NOTE! BIG GRIN; JUST
>>JOKING; and this is a DUMB IDEA :^) :^).
>
>What a pallaver :-)

Moi? Never! :^) :^). I better shut up before I give MS and the NSA
an idea on how to get everyone to turn on their processor IDs or
something. I can see it now: "Yes. The programming world really
needs a unique ID for key generation, and they could also use the
value as a random seed and whatnot. This unique ID would also help
out in digital signing and cryptography. From now on, all the code
here at XYZSoft will only work if the processor ID is enabled."
[Some of this is tounge in cheek, though I'd be willing to bet
that we see some crapola like this in the not-too-distant future.]


Scary situation, and doing something like that would surely tick
off a lot of people. OTOH, I wouldn't doubt that MS and the governments
are going to try to push this through our court systems, especially
if the crackers (they don't deserve the hacker moniker) and
criminals don't stop screwing around with the net. Let's all
hope that the EFF and other world organizations step in and
say "no way." :^)

Later,

Randall