Linus Responds To RdRand Petition With Scorn – Slashdot.

Torvalds’ response to whether RdRand could be compromised in the Linux kernel - Hacker News.

Linus Torvalds responds – Change.org.

This got a surprising amount of attention, mostly because of one of Linus’ classic responses. My feeling is that it’s good to question these types of things. However, making a petition against using a hardware random number generator, and including some vague concerns about the NSA probably isn’t quite the right way to go about it.

Anyway, I learned today (from a Slashdot comment) that you can simply pass nordrand to the kernel to disable RdRand if you really don’t like it. Whether or not “the NSA” is on your list of reasons is up to you.