Comment by option_greek
13 years ago
Very fascinating... if a very narrow scenario with a very low probability resulted in this, how is it that these errors are not apparent during other computer activities ?
13 years ago
Very fascinating... if a very narrow scenario with a very low probability resulted in this, how is it that these errors are not apparent during other computer activities ?
They probably are, but people are used to bluescreens and unexpected app crashes and think nothing of it.
I dunno. Something about this analysis bothers me. The basic premise is that a string the length of a domain name routinely, albeit rarely, gets corrupted by one bit, causing errant DNS lookups. Then it's reasonable to assume that a longer string is even more likely to contain corruption. But if that's so, why do I almost never see any evidence of bit corruption in my web server logs? Surely the same corruption would affect other parts of the URL, and the probability should be greater due to the length. But I can't find a single example in my logs that can't be explained by human error (typos by users or developers). If bit corruption is so overwhelmingly prevalent in hostnames, but not URLs or other identifiers, I suspect it's due to a software bug somewhere.
Presumably your web server doesn't serve quite as much traffic as fbcdn.net. The odds of such a bitflip happening are vanishingly low, so you need an incredibly large amount of traffic before you'll see such errors occurring.
3 replies →