DataSnake said:
The funniest part is that the hacker was only able to do this because Sony's "random number" function actually returns the same value every time you call it.
As in,
literally the same exact value? Or a predictable sequence?
99% of all 'random' numbers used in computing, whether it is for games, or cryptography are actually pseudo-random number generators.
That is, they create sequences of numbers based on a seed value, which is 100% predictable, but appears random because there's no obvious way to predict what number comes next from the existing numbers.
A bad PRN function has a really obvious pattern that's easy to predict, a good one pretty much cannot be identified as a predictable pattern unless you have billions of numbers in of the sequence.
But regardless, if you know the seed value for any given sequence, you can figure it out precisely anyway.
For cryptography, this is a bad thing, but usually tolerable if the sequence is hard enough to predict.
Computers can't generate real random numbers anyway unless they have specialist random number generating hardware, which most don't.
For use in games, the predictability of 'psuedorandom' functions is actually a benefit.
It allows you to create things within the game that appear totally random, but have the benefit that if you want to repeat the 'random' sequence (like, say an action replay function), all you need to store is the seed value you generated it from.
