Waiting for data corruption to happen

Many people believe that computers are exact devices. That data stored on disk will get back to you unharmed. That data you send over the network can be assumed as correct. That computers are deterministic devices. But they aren’t. Not at all. I’m talking about this quite often when talking about ZFS. Alec Muffet pointed on Facebook to a really interesting presentation that is showing errors due to corruption of data in a different context. It’s about a DNS attack without attacking something. It’s just waiting for errors to happen. It’s something like waiting for typos in DNS names made by users. Just this time the error is introduces by computers. By reserving domains that are just one bit different from the original domain. Of course the probability is really small that such an error will happen, but given the enormous amount of requests the DNS system handles every second of the day, the number of events isn’t that small as you would assume at first: “Bitsquatting: DNS Hijacking without exploitation”. Really worth a read.