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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there's enough variation in how people pull the handles and push the buttons that they could be used to partially re-seed the PRNG frequently enough that it the seed can't be determined by a video?

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That's the technique Linux uses, it feeds keyboard and mouse timing events into one of its entropy pools. I can't see why they wouldn't do this for slot machines.

The article mentions newer slot machines, "whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets" - so new machines are already considered secure.

  Aristocrat, Novomatic, and any other manufacturers whose PRNGs have 
  been cracked “would have to pull all the machines out of service
  and put something else in, and they’re not going to do that.”

So they could be fixed, it's purely a financial decision.

  as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers,
  the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept
  the occasional loss to scammers.

Seems like using a radioactive decay RNG would also help, no?

sure, but are you gonna put a tiny bit of radioactive material in every slot machine? Not to forget that the RNG would have to be restocked if the material ever runs out

Pretty sure the half-life of most things that would be used is already longer than the MTBF of just about every other part a slot machine.

These kind of poker machines are regulated to limit the amount of money they're allowed to keep: usually expressed in cents in the dollar e.g. 86¢. The regulators read the code and certify it.

Could you prove that the extra entropy added to the PRNG pool would not change the limits? Bigger challenge: could you present it in a way that a regulator would agree with you?

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