That's the physical and link layer's fault for not possessing alignment information. You shouldn't have a bit stream, you should already have a byte stream, oth

That's the physical and link layer's fault for not possessing alignment information. You shouldn't have a bit stream, you should already have a byte stream, otherwise you are dealing with data forensics. The physical part of disks and networks usually have things like preambles, correlators, phase-locked loops, Gray codes, and self-clocking signals which can be used to deduce bit and byte boundaries, which is why in software, we almost always deal with information which we already know is correctly aligned.