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Can I point out that this explanation did not identify a root cause? How was the corrupt message originally produced?

If they know how it happened, it's not reflected in this article. The solution they describe addresses the detection of and recovery from future mysterious occurrences rather than identifying, understanding and eliminating whatever bug or condition caused this one.

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Memory corruption.

Right, it likely wasn't a bug if it is a single bit and this only happens once in a blue moon. A machine can only transmit perfect 1's and 0's for so long before getting one wrong.

But they're adding checksums right? Anyone see any holes in that?

Do you mean this?

> we're adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state messages

I dobut that means they're actually adding them together, they're adding checksums to the process to ensure data corruption has no effect. Or am I misunderstanding you?

They use MD5 in other areas, but not that particular message. So now they will. Do people call hashes "checksums" in a colloquial sense? no one actually uses a "check sum" literally any more do they?

Right, that's what I meant, 'adding checksums to the process'.

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