Datamosh, pixel sorting and databending explained
Glitch art is not a filter. Each technique reproduces a specific decoder failure, which is why the results look like broken files instead of effects.
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Notes on broken files
How formats actually fail, why most corrupters do not work, and what to do with a deliberately broken file once you have one.
File carving: recovering data when the filesystem is gone
Carving ignores the filesystem entirely and reads raw bytes, hunting for headers and footers. It recovers a great deal, and it is defeated by exactly one thing.
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Validating file uploads properly
Extension checks are trivially bypassed, Content-Type is attacker-controlled, and magic bytes alone fall to polyglots. What actually works is parsing, isolating and renaming.
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From a corrupted file to a fuzzing harness
A handful of broken fixtures finds the obvious bugs. Coverage-guided fuzzing finds the rest. Here is how a seed corpus becomes a real AFL++ or libFuzzer run.
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Your backup is a hypothesis until you restore it
Backups that have never been restored fail at the worst possible moment. A restore drill against a deliberately damaged archive turns an assumption into a measurement.
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Silent data corruption, and the filesystems that catch it
Most filesystems return whatever the disk hands back. ZFS and Btrfs checksum every block and verify on read, which is the difference between noticing bit rot and backing it up.
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CRC32, MD5 and SHA-256: which one catches what
Three checksums, three different jobs. One detects accidental bit flips, one is fast and cryptographically broken, one is tamper-evident. Picking wrongly is how corruption goes unnoticed.
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Magic bytes, and why a file extension is not a file type
The name after the dot is a hint, not a fact. Signatures, libmagic and content sniffing decide what a file really is, and the gap between them is a security problem.
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How archive repair tools actually work
Recovery records, local-header scanning and external parity all attack the same problem differently. Knowing which redundancy an archive carries tells you what is recoverable.
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Why a corrupted video stops after two seconds
MP4 is a tree of boxes, and the moov atom is the index. Where it sits in the file decides whether a damaged video plays briefly, streams at all, or fails instantly.
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How a PDF finds its own pages
A PDF is an object graph indexed by a table at the end of the file. That design is why Acrobat can silently repair damage that would destroy any other format.
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Why a file tool should never upload your file
Most online file utilities upload to a server for no technical reason. The File API has been able to do this work locally for over a decade.
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