Large binaries on Usenet are often distributed in pieces, with parity archives included to fix bitrot. Very old files often require substantial repairs, and sometimes can’t be salvaged. I’m curious about the actual mechanism by which this decay takes place: lossy copies? Encoding errors? Solar radiation? How many network hops and transfers do messages typically undergo from their pristine original state to too-far-gone? Why would a digital file “go bad”?
posted by migurski
on Mar 18, 2013 -
14 answers
Open source software is considered trustworthy because anyone can validate the source code and hold the developer accountable. Usually developers will also make compiled binaries available for convenience. How can we know that these binaries are compiled from the
same source code the developer published, and not a malicious variant of it?
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posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis
on Feb 26, 2013 -
17 answers
Russian History: Why did the Soviet military retain the traditional (western) Officer/Enlisted class binary rather than instituting some other hierarchichal structure? How did they ideologically justify maintaining two distinct and separate classes, one subordinate to the other, in an army putatively fighting for a classless society?
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posted by jjjjjjjijjjjjjj
on Nov 2, 2012 -
11 answers
Hackers of MeFi, assemble! I have an undocumented serial protocol I want to reverse engineer - help me turn some mysterious bit strings into meaningful data.
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posted by larkery
on Jan 19, 2012 -
13 answers
Exporting PDF binary blog data into an outfile with mysql. Yeah, remind me how to do that without getting corrupt files again?
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posted by bhance
on Aug 4, 2010 -
1 answer
I'm trying to disassemble an undocumented, proprietary binary image format. I'm looking for the best tools and tutorials available.
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posted by fake
on Jun 17, 2008 -
14 answers
I have a string of binary data that's well under 1k in length (so fairly short) from a proprietary source that has no documented information on its particular format. I have a general idea of what it might contain (like a month, day, year and unique id, maybe more) but no idea where to start if I wanted to discern the format and other contents of this data. I've tried googling around but I just can't come up with the right description of my task to find anything useful. Where do I start?
posted by authenticgeek
on Oct 3, 2006 -
16 answers
Are there any good tools out there for analyzing binary sensor data? I would like to create something like a timeline of data.
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posted by b1tr0t
on Apr 24, 2006 -
7 answers
How did the
Special-Use IPv4 Addresses get to be that way? In the
relevant IRCs it says what the special address ranges are, but I can't find anywhere how, say, 192.168.0.0/16 ended up reserved for private networks. Were there just a bunch of nerds sitting around one day who were like, "193...no, no, that's no good. How about 192?"
posted by jeb
on Jan 15, 2005 -
18 answers
When downloading multi-part binary posts from the VCD/SVCD groups on Usenet, there's always a zillion of them labelled only with gibberish like: "vcd-gnd1.r01" or "ctk-2.part01.rar" I know how to join and decode rar files. I just don't know what the heck's been posted, and don't want to blow 100s of megs of bandwidth to find out. I'm sure these are codes for something. Posting "clans" perhaps? Do I have to lurk on some 12-year old's IRC channel to figure out what these are?
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posted by scarabic
on Apr 28, 2004 -
16 answers
Why (in general) do you need source files? Why can't applications manipulate binary files directly? [more inside.]
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posted by grumblebee
on Jan 15, 2004 -
10 answers
