Bit Flip
84Description
Back in 2003 Belgium was holding a national election. One of their first where the votes would be cast and counted on computers. Thousands of hours of preparation went into making it unhackable. And when the day of the vote came, everything seemed to have gone well. That was, until a cosmic chain of events caused a single bit to flip and called the outcome into question.
Today on Radiolab, we travel from a voting booth in Brussels to the driver's seat of a runaway car in the Carolinas, exploring the massive effects tiny bits of stardust can have on us unwitting humans.
This episode was reported and produced by Simon Adler and Annie McEwen.
Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.
And check out our accompanying short video Bit Flip: the tale of a Belgian election and a cosmic ray that got in the way. This video was produced by Simon Adler with illustration from Kelly Gallagher.
United States
I thought bit flipping from cosmic Rays was not surprising! NASA uses special ram to avoid this problem don't they? Ram that ensures data integrity when a single bit is flipped? I've known about this since I started my CS degree, stuff like this was mentioned in programming 1!
There's an excellent episode of Revisionist History that covers the topic of the "faulty" Toyota cars. It's called Blame Game. It tells a very different story to that told here.
as an IT guy this episode is complete BS and should be ignored. there is an entire subject in software development called Data Integrity that stops this from happening. to nontech people this story is very misleading. couldn't they just stop the car by putting it on neutral? Electrical engineers generally don't know software assurance design or SIS so you are asking the wrong guy.
TURN THE CAR OFF
Kinda messed up you played a 911 call of the last moments of four people's lives without any kind of heads up.