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TSA Paid $1.4 Million For Randomizer App That Chooses Left Or Right (geek.com)
An anonymous reader writes: For those of you who have traveled through U.S. airports in recent years, you may have noticed the Transport Security Administration (TSA) use a Randomizer app to randomly search travelers in the Pre-Check lane. The app randomly chooses whether travelers go left or right in the Pre-Check lane so they can't predict which lane each person is assigned to and can't figure out how to avoid the random checks. Developer Kevin Burke submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking for details about the app. The documents he received reveals the TSA purchased the Randomizer iPad app for $336,413.59. That's $336,413.59 for an app, which is incredibly simple to make as most programming languages of choice have a randomizing function available to use. What may be even more intriguing is that the contract for the TSA Randomizer app was won by IBM. The total amount paid for the project is actually $1.4 million, but the cost is not broken down in Burke's documents. It's possible IBM supplied all the iPads and training in addition to the app itself.
A little harder, yes, but not by much.
I work on regulated casino software. And we use the Mersenne Twister rather than any sort of dedicated randomization hardware.
Some casinos are using actual quantum RNGs. For $1k I can get a USB RNG that emits one photon at a time and a polarized mirror with a perfect 50% chance to go through or reflect off of. 4Mbit/s of RNG. For $35 you can get a pretty strong opensource USB RNG that uses a combination of several quantum level electric, electro-thermal, and EM noise. http://www.bitbabbler.org/