[liberationtech] TEXTCOMBINE-REV, A software for combining text files to obtain high-quality pseudo-randomness in practice (replacing an earlier retracted software)

[Steve Weis]

I don't see anything that TEXTCOMBINE is useful for with respect to
security, privacy, or liberation tech. It is not a robust entropy
extractor and I would not use it for anything.

Randomness extraction has been a research topic for 30 years. For
background reading, here are a couple introductions:
https://people.seas.harvard.edu/~salil/pseudorandomness/extractors.pdf
http://theory.stanford.edu/~trevisan/pubs/extractor-full.pdf

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Travis Biehn <tbiehn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You might question why it appears on this list, as software producers here should be mostly interested in CSPRNGs. Fumbling RNG use in privacy-oriented software usually leads to 'significant harms.'
>>
>> On Aug 31, 2017 7:01 PM, "mok-kong shen" <mok-kong.shen at t-online.de> wrote:
>>
>> An earlier software of mine, TEXTCOMBINE-SP, posted to this group was not
>> satisfactory due a bug in a function employed in its design and was retracted.
>>
>> I am posting now its replacement TEXTCOMBINE-REV which has been carefully
>> tested and has a fairly good performance IMHO. The following is extracted from its