Data corruption refers to computer data that when transmitted, arrives at its destination as different than when it was transmitted from the source. This difference often makes the data unusable at its destination. A computer is a device or machine for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) was established in 2002 by Bono (Paul Hewson) of the Rock band U2, and Bobby Shriver, along with activists from the Jubilee 2000 Drop the Debt Campaign, as an organisaton focused on Justice, not charity. ...

This corruption can have a wide variety of causes. Some causes include interruption in the transmission of data, where the data has holes in it or is incomplete. Environmental conditions can often interfere with data transmission, especially when dealing with wireless transmission methods. Heavy clouds can sometimes block satellite transmissions. Wireless networks are susceptible to interference from devices such as microwave ovens.

Data corruption can also occur during storage as well as during transmission of data. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

In cases where data corruption behaves as a Poisson process, where each individual bit of data has independently some low probability of being corrupted, data corruption can generally be detected by the use of checksums. This relies on the checksum being evaluated at intervals over which there is a negligibly small probability of multiple bits being corrupted in a way which has no net effect on the checksum. The longer the checksum, the smaller this probability becomes. The simplest form of checksum is a single parity bit, which can detect a single flipped bit in a given set (typically a byte) but not detect two (or any even number of) bit-flips. It has been suggested that compound Poisson process be merged into this article or section. ... This article is about the unit of information. ... A checksum is a form of redundancy check, a very simple measure for protecting the integrity of data by detecting errors in data that is sent through space (telecommunications) or time (storage). ... Look up Parity on Wiktionary, the free dictionary Parity is a concept of equality of status or functional equivalence. ... A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. ...

In the event that data corruption is detected, it can hopefully be re-transmitted (as occurs in the TCP protocol) or re-copied from backups. A special case is disk RAID arrays, where parity bits are commonly evaluated and stored (summed over the disk set for each given offset), and can be used to reconstruct the corrupted data in the event of the failure of a known single disk. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. ... Backup in computer engineering refers to the copying of data for the purpose of having an additional copy of an original source. ... In computing, a redundant array of independent disks, often incorrectly known as redundant array of inexpensive disks (more commonly known as a RAID) is a system of using multiple hard drives for sharing or replicating data among the drives. ...

Therefore, if appropriate mechanisms are employed to detect and remedy data corruption, the effects can be minimized. This is particularly important in banking, where an undetected bit-flip in a highly significant position could drastically affect an account balance, and in the use of encrypted or compressed data, where a bit-flip can make an extensive dataset unusable. For other uses, see Bank (disambiguation). ... In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge. ... In computer science, data compression or source coding is the process of encoding information using fewer bits (or other information-bearing units) than a more obvious representation would use, through use of specific encoding schemes. ...