Re:wonky definition of pseudo-random (Score 1)

Very true. On the seeding issue, note that even for events with a substantial amount of randomness inherent, like key presses or other I/O events, the high-order bits are still quite predictable. For example, the intervals between keyboard events tend to follow a Pareto distribution (power law basically). That's why the kernel only uses the very lowest few bits of data from these sources to generate entropy.

I may be wrong, but I believe that the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom is that the former only provides true hardware-generated entropy and blocks when that's not available, whereas the latter uses true entropy and cryptographically strong PRNG to generate stream of data that has a variable level of true entropy mixed into it over time. Can anyone corroborate that and/or refute that? (References a plus!)

[B.v.L]