Hi, (cc-ing Robert Withers as he seems to be working with cryptography and security... as this seems related and may have some implications, but I am likely wrong about the implications) yesterday I've encountered a very surprising behavior I executed the same script `10 atRandom` on the same image without saving it and got the same output: while true; do pharo-vm --nodisplay latest.image --no-default-preferences eval '10 atRandom' done 10 10 10 10 10 10 Not so random⦠not random at all. Apparently the default random generator uses SharedRandom pool, that is initialized only once⦠so every time you start an image you get the EXACT same random seed... I think this is stupid, and I am not sure what are the security implications of this (e.g. when opening an SSL connection⦠having fixed world-wide initial seed seems like an awful, awful idea), but whatever⦠So instead I tried to explicitly specify the Random generator⦠which I can do while true; do pharo-vm --nodisplay latest.image --no-default-preferences eval '10 atRandom: Random new' done 5 5 5 5 5 Still not random⦠what? while true; do pharo-vm --nodisplay latest.image --no-default-preferences eval 'Random new instVarNamed: #seed' done 426306047 426305545 426305546 426306010 So the seed is different but thanks to the magic of masking the seed, I always get the same first several bits⦠thus the same result for small numbers. So if I actually want what seems like a random value⦠I have to at least once run the generator⦠while true; do pharo-vm --nodisplay latest.image --no-default-preferences eval '10 atRandom: (Random new next; yourself)' done 7 3 4 9 6 7 Once I start to use it the properties of the algo kick in so it's pseudo-random⦠but I need to run it once to initialize it, which is wtf. My questions: 1) do we really want to have global fixed seed? 2) Random new should actually setup a usable seed so I don't need to first run it N times before I can use the value 3) Should we switch to what UUIDGenerator is using⦠reading /dev/urandom for the initial seed setup? Peter