[hayst4ck]

There are many places that memory exists. Your processor cache is memory. Registers are memor-ish. Hard Drives have memory. If a bit flip happens in your hard drives memory before being written to disk, then it's not unreasonable to think that the bitflip would persist, even through reboots.

I have run queries at large companies and found mistakes most easily explained as bitflips in domain names written to disk. Imagine an environmental variable configuring the use of a proxy without proper whitelists and it's not unimaginable to me that a production machine would be able to speak to machines on the internet at large.

I am open to the idea that what I think is happening might not be the mechanics of what is happening, but I find the talk believable, not based on theory, but actually seeing persisted (and non-persisted) bit flips in domain names queried from data warehoused logs at world scale companies.

[BearOso]

That was the gist of the response, as far as I remember. It was repeated access from the same set of machines, so it was more likely that one bit flip persisted in a config and was subsequently rolled out to others. So the study grossly overestimated the number of actual bit flips occurring by like 20000x or something.