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Randomly.

Where it comes from.

An earthquake contributes maybe 30 bits of genuine surprise. We mix it with 256 bits from your OS. Both facts are on the receipt.

10 sources are wired, and none of them is trusted alone. Each has a timeout and a circuit breaker; when one misses, the pool falls back to the kernel and the receipt says degraded rather than pretending otherwise. This dashboard reads the cache only — opening it never makes an outbound request, which is why a source shows — until something has actually drawn from it.

  • Class A · Cryptographic 3 wired

    Full-entropy bytes, safe to stand alone — and the floor every other class rests on.

  • Class B · Public beacon 3 wired

    Published openly — anyone can look this value up after the fact.

  • Class C · Observational 4 wired

    Carries only tens of bits of genuine surprise. Always mixed with the OS CSPRNG.

Sources

0 of 10 currently hold cached material · refreshed live every 5s

Class A · Cryptographic

safe alone

3 wired

  • Operating System CSPRNG — status up

    The kernel entropy pool — interrupt timings, device jitter and, on this machine, the CPU hardware RNG.

    Class A

    drawn fresh per request · never cached

    refresh instant observed — no third party involved

    The floor. Every other source on this page is mixed into this one, never used instead of it.

  • ANU Quantum Vacuum — status up

    Fluctuations of the quantum vacuum field, measured by homodyne detection at the Australian National University.

    Class A

    —

    refresh instant observed — no per-draw proof

    Unpredictable as a matter of physics rather than of difficulty — but it still reaches us over the public internet, which is exactly why it is mixed with local bytes anyway.

  • RANDOM.ORG — status up

    Atmospheric radio noise, largely driven by lightning discharges, captured by receivers in Dublin.

    Class A

    —

    refresh instant observed — no per-draw proof

    Full-entropy bytes from a service that has been running since 1998, on a daily quota we are a guest of. We watch the quota headers and stop when told to.

Class B · Public beacon

never used alone

3 wired

  • NIST Randomness Beacon — status up

    A hardware entropy source at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, hash-chained and signed every minute.

    Class B

    —

    refresh 60s observed — no per-draw proof

    A hardware source, SHA-512 hash-chained and signed — and published to the entire world sixty seconds later. Wonderful to point at; never a secret.

  • drand · League of Entropy — status up

    A threshold BLS signature jointly produced every three seconds by independent operators across several continents.

    Class B

    —

    refresh 3s observed — no per-draw proof

    A signature no single operator in the network could have produced alone, and that every one of them can read three seconds later.

  • Bitcoin Proof-of-Work — status up

    The block header hash the entire Bitcoin network spent roughly ten minutes of global hashrate searching for.

    Class B

    —

    refresh 60s observed — no per-draw proof

    Ten minutes of the whole network's hashrate, and the answer is on every block explorer on Earth. The leading zeros are the proof and carry no information, so we read the hash from the far end.

Class C · Observational

never used alone

4 wired

  • USGS Seismic Feed — status up

    Every earthquake above the detection threshold recorded anywhere on Earth in the past hour, published by the US Geological Survey.

    Class C

    —

    refresh 60s observed — no per-draw proof

    Perhaps 20–40 bits of genuine surprise an hour, and it is in the tail of the feed rather than in the headline quake.

  • NOAA Space Weather — status up

    The planetary K-index — how much the solar wind is currently disturbing Earth's magnetic field, measured by NOAA.

    Class C

    —

    refresh 60s observed — no per-draw proof

    One number on a 28-step scale, often the same number for hours. Under five bits, at best.

  • Live Weather — status up

    Temperature, wind and pressure read from a weather station somewhere on Earth, chosen at random for each draw.

    Class C

    —

    refresh 300s observed — no per-draw proof

    A temperature and a wind speed to one decimal place — a handful of bits. The choice of city is ours, and comes from the CSPRNG.

  • ISS Position — status up

    The ground track of the International Space Station, 408 km up and moving at 27,600 km/h.

    Class C

    —

    refresh 5s observed — no per-draw proof

    A published orbit puts the station within metres; anyone with the TLE can compute this for next Tuesday. What is left is the jitter in when we asked: two or three bits, and we are rounding up.

Freshness without hammering

Collected material is cached for as long as it stays fresh at the origin — a NIST pulse lives 60 seconds, and re-fetching it six times a minute would be rude and would tell us nothing new. A cache hit must never mean a repeated seed, so fresh local bytes, the nanosecond clock and a monotonic counter are folded in every time before HKDF runs. 

ikm  = material ‖ random_bytes(32) ‖ hrtime() ‖ counter
seed = hash_hkdf('sha256', ikm, 16, 'randomly.seed', salt)

The receipt credits the interesting source while the pool guarantees the cryptographic floor. Both are true, and both are printed — including cached, so a beacon that answered in 0 ms is never passed off as a beacon that is simply fast.

What we do not claim

  • A class B beacon is public. Anyone can look up the pulse or round afterwards, so it is never the only thing in a seed — and it is never presented as a secret.
  • Observational sources are flavour. They make a better sentence than they make a cipher, and the receipt says which one you got.
  • Von Neumann debiasing for observational feeds is specified but not yet built. It is not running, so this page does not animate it.
  • Latency is not charted here, because the pool records it per draw on the receipt rather than as a time series. An invented sparkline would be decoration pretending to be instrumentation.

Everything on this page is also at /api/v1/sources.