Hackers love random numbers, or more accurately, the pursuit of them. It turns out that computers are so good at following our exacting instructions that they are largely incapable of doing anything ...

Cloudflare is one of those Internet companies you use all the time, but don’t usually know it. Big websites you visit use Cloudflare to shore up their defenses against denial of service attacks. The ...

Quick! Think of a number between 1 and 10…was it 7? If it was, don't feel too bad, as human brains are notoriously bad at both true randomness and understanding probability. Even if you're too ...

The static from a old radio is a form of random interference caused by electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere (Credit: Getty Images) Our world runs on randomly generated numbers and without them a ...

The web relies on random numbers to keep data secure The data scrambling systems used by millions of web servers could be much weaker than they ought to be, say researchers. A study found shortcomings ...

Many popular random number generators (RNGs) are based on classical computer algorithms and have the advantage of being fast and easy to implement. The best examples pass many statistical tests ...

To simulate chance occurrences, a computer can’t literally toss a coin or roll a die. Instead, it relies on special numerical recipes for generating strings of shuffled digits that pass for random ...

If your name gets picked for jury duty, it’s because a computer used a random number generator to select it. The same goes for tax audits or when you opt for a quick pick lottery ticket. But how can ...

The data scrambling systems used by millions of web servers could be much weaker than they ought to be, say researchers. A study found shortcomings in the generation of the random numbers used to ...