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Your computer is a cosmic ray detector. Literally.

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Bitflipped

Your computer is a cosmic ray detector. Literally.

Brightness by Chameleon Design from the Noun Project


Cosmic rays hit computer RAM all the time. If your RAM is not ECC protected, it will likely flip a random bit. A single bit in billions of bits. Does it matter? Yes. Yes it does.

Bit flips manifest in many ways - computer clusters suddenly dying, data silently being corrupted, and even squatting on domain names that are a bit adjacent.

To start your very own bit flip detector, simply run make and ./bitflip. The source code has no dependencies and is worryingly simple.

Detection is via allocating a slice of zeroed memory, in our case a gigabyte, and then once per minute going through to ensure they're actually all zeroes. Magic!

Pro-tips:

  • Don't run this on expensive equipment as it may have ECC RAM which will ruin your fun
  • The bigger your RAM, the bigger your detector, so use a desktop's RAM if you can
  • The background radiation from cosmic rays increases with altitude, from 0.3 mSv per year for sea-level areas to 1.0 mSv per year for higher-altitude cities, so for best results use this on a plane or in outer space
  • Beware smart memory systems - the Mac will compress least unused chunks of memory when running low on RAM and zeroes would compress quite well, effectively reducing the size of your cosmic ray detector =[

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