› added 1 week ago

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Today I learned that Cloudflare, a web cryptography company, generates billions of random numbers a day to use as seed numbers for their cryptographic algorithms by having a wall of 100 lava lamps, with a camera taking a photo of them every millisecond and analyzing every pixel of each photo

Read more blog.cloudflare.com

via reddit.com

Wk8Od TIL During the Second Opium War (1860), French and British troops reached the Imperial Palace in Peking, China. The troops looted everything in sight—including five Pekingese dogs. The dogs were taken back to England and one of the dogs was given to Queen Victoria. She named the dog “Looty"
VM01p TIL that a 14 year old boy named John once impersonated an MI5 agent online and "recruited" his best friend into the secret services. The initiation test was to murder... John. John became the first person in the UK to be convicted for inciting his own attempted murder.
woyO8 TIL a 2-time Jeopardy! champ who won $24k in 1989 is serving a life sentence for murdering his wife
rNd9y TIL the shortest-ever NHL career was 7.6 seconds, when Jorge Alves entered the game as an Emergency Backup Goalie for the Carolina Hurricanes
kdng TIL that the Nazis believed that Britain was the most “racially pure” country of all the Germanic nations, even more so than Germany.