4 ms·

I agree with most of your points, and I agree that end-to-end integrity is important where information is critical. But my first assertion is not wrong. You are

I agree with most of your points, and I agree that end-to-end integrity is important where information is critical. But my first assertion is not wrong. You are assuming that the flip of a single bit from a photo or video is catastrophic, both in the rendering of the file, as well as the resulting harm done to the user/individual. The reality is that most people don't value >99.999999% accuracy, and are fine with the current state of data storage. Out of 1,000,000 photos, will the user notice/care if 1 jpeg has a 16x16 block that is a different colour?

luckydude 10y ago
For photos, sure, it's not that big of a deal. But not all files are independent like that. A single bit flip in an executable can be a huge deal. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
pdog 10y ago
Flipping a single bit of an encrypted file renders the whole thing useless.
- rubatuga 10y ago
  No it does not. Errors shouldn't propagate more than a block
  - pdog 10y ago
    Yes it does.
acdha 10y ago
There are other places bits flip which break photo or video decoding outright. More importantly, however, is that this isn't a reliably random process but often a highly-correlated one. Many users won't have a problem but the people who do often have many files affected. I've seen multiple cases where that wasn't noticed until after their backup software, cloud service, etc. had copied the corrupted bits, not to mention cases where data was corrupted on a RAID array which wasn't regularly scrubbed and so the corruption wasn't noticed until the other disk failed, long after the invalid data had been written to tape as well.