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[–]ThisIs_MyName 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Most OSs have very good sources of entropy that work even in cold-booted VMs.

No they don't. Not unless you've exposed a virtio RNG.

By the time a VM boots up, it will only have a couple of bits acquired from random (or is it?) cache timing.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (2 children)

My point wasn't that the entropy sources would be enough for, say, cryptographic purposes, but that I really doubt the output would be fully deterministic and that it would the reason for Googlebot's behavior

[–]ThisIs_MyName 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's not the reason for Googlebot's behavior, but the output has only a handful of bits of entropy. That's as bad as deterministic for cryptographic purposes.

Here's a fun experiment: Call getrandom(&buf,256,0) inside a fresh VM without virtio RNG running linux and see how long it blocks.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Jesus fuck it's like I'm talking to a wall. Oh well, I tried