{"id":2070,"date":"2024-12-23T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T09:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2025-06-26T20:30:43","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T20:30:43","slug":"what-will-you-bitflip-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/what-will-you-bitflip-today\/","title":{"rendered":"What will you bitflip today?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition<\/a> is fun). And flipping bits in objects can tell us something both about the fragility, and robustness of our digital files and the applications that work with them.<\/p>\n

I had a pull-request for bitflip<\/a> accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin<\/a> and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry<\/a> for it that it reminds me of shotGun<\/a> by Manfred Thaller. The utility is exceptionally easy to use (and of course update and maintain written in Golang) and has some nice features for flipping individual bits or a uniform percentage of bits across a digital file.<\/p>\n

My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser<\/a> and its GitHub workflow to provide binaries for Windows and FreeBSD. I only needed to use Windows for a short amount of time thankfully, but it’s an environment I believe is prevalent for a lot of digital preservationists in corporate IT environments.<\/p>\n

Bitflip is a useful utility to improve your testing of digital preservation systems, or simply for outreach, but let’s have a quick look at it in action.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To infidelity and beyond<\/h2>\n

As you know, I previously harnessed the effects of bitrot<\/a> in my game Nibble in Cyberspace<\/a>. In that same blog I mentioned some outreach work I did using bitflip at Ravensburger AG to demonstrate the effects of bitrot on an old Spinnaker computer game called Weltraumkolonie.<\/p>\n