Your computer is a cosmic ray detector. Literally.
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 =[
Thanks to:
- Our computers for putting up with unsafe workplaces