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MisterTea
> Turns out memory can play tricks on everyone: we now know they were instead generated with the POSIX-standard drand48 random number generator.

Or he lied to obfuscate the origin.

john_strinlai
it would have been beneficial to disclose the origin.

lying for obfuscation purposes makes zero sense given what we know now.

simulator5g
Why?
therein
To demonstrate it was generated with nothing up the sleeve.
simulator5g
I don't see how this demonstrates that. The seed could have been generated at a specific point in time, resulting in a specific value, which may be useful in some way. How is it any different from just defining a seed manually?
28571611
"This helps fill out a page of cryptographic history, and reinforces our confidence in these critical cryptographic primitives."

Typical Valsorda. Even the Anthropic article states the timestamps could have been selected and the whole thing could be a "proof" that the NSA does not have a magic number up their sleeve.

McGlockenshire
What's more likely, the random calls were made at those times, or that someone changed the numbers to make it look like they were made at those times?

Only one of those requires a conspiracy theory-tainted brain to think up.