What will you bitflip today?

by @beet_keeper

I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition 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.

I had a pull-request for bitflip accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry for it that it reminds me of shotGun 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.

My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser 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.

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.

#Archive30 #Archives #Art #Binary #bitflip #bitrot #Code #Coding #digipres #digital #DigitalArchiving #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #FileFormats #GenerativeArt #GlitchArt #outreach #Ravensburger #SomethingFun #Vagabond

#clubmartes
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RT @RecordOffice@twitter.com
Aerial photos from 1867? Impossible? But not for the inSPIREd! These remarkable photographs were taken from the spire of St Martin's in Leicester and even used in the desk-based research for the remains of Richard III. #inspiration #Archive30
https://twitter.com/RecordOffice/status/1117024563202859009

RT @EU_Commission@twitter.com: Stay tuned!
We are participating in the #Archive30 challenge. Each day, we will present to you something from our #EUarchives. You get a slice of history and also a glimpse into how the science and art of archiving works!