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It doesn't, it's really just an art piece.

The same could be achieved electronically with a simple circuit inside their servers, but it wouldn't look quite as good.

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Until it turns out that the NSA was involved writing said RNG and explicitly weekend it with a backdoor...

These circuits are really simple. Unless the NSA has backdoored solid-state physics it's no greater a risk than this approach. (The NSA very well could backdoor the camera you point at these pendulums).

Hmm, I had to check this and came across this thread on Reddit. NIST has a standard for it, but the exact point is that _that_ can be influenced by them.

Also, somewhere in the thread, they mention that it is probably too hard to verify how it is actually implemented in the hardware.

https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/klcx4p/is_true_rand...

I guess in security only the paranoid prevails...

Or it is indeed just a cool gimmick...

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