Hacker News Reader

The self-inflicted degradation of the random number generator in the Debian OpenSSL packages were the main inspiration for this, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_number_generator_attack...

View on HN

The comic is from 2007. The Debian vulnerability wasn't announced until 2008.

I'm fairly sure this basic joke predates xkcd by quite a while. For example, here's a Dilbert comic from 2001 with a slight variation on it:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

This Jargon File entry listing several specific "random numbers" has the same theme:

http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html

Thanks. It came up so often during 2008 that I assumed it was inspired by this event, never bothered to check the dates.

XKCD 221 came out February 9th, 2007[1], so either Randall new about the bug before details were announced in May 2008, or it's just a joke about randomness not tied to any particular reference.

[1] Go to https://xkcd.com/archive/, hover over the title of a comic, and a tooltip will show the date

EDIT: I see 'mikeash beat me to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com