[Alan Anderson]

CRC stands for Cyclic Redundancy Check. It's a way to take a large chunk of bits and come up with a small number that can be used to verify that those bits haven't been changed after being copied from one place to another. The "Cyclic" in the name refers to the specific algorithm being used, which involves bit shifts and exclusive or operations with feedback to the shift input. The process can be time-consuming, which is why many implementations use a precomputed table of values to trade off memory space for execution time.

A CRC is like a checksum, but it detects strings of errors better.