2010 Dec 13, 11:12Used to generate publicly verifiable random numbers. For instance to pick 'xn--' for the IDN prefix from a set of prefixes, they decided on a hash, a set of stocks and a time in the future to
generate the hash from the stock values. The resulting value is random and anyone can check the work to verify that it was chosen randomly.
Although, now looking back from the future I can't verify that they didn't generate this data after the stock quotes came out. And they're using MD5...
rfc algorithm random election ietf technical
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