Its rare to find devs anticipating Unicode control characters showing up in user input. And the most fun when unanticipated is the Right-To-Left Override character U+202E. Unicode characters have an implicit direction so that for example by default Hebrew characters are rendered from right to left, and English characters are rendered left to right. The override characters force an explicit direction for all the text that follows.
I chose my Twitter display name to include the HTML encoding of the Right-To-Left Override character #x202E; as a sort of joke or shout out to my favorite Unicode control character.
I did not anticipate that some Twitter clients in some of their UI would fail to encode it correctly. There's no way I can remove that from my display name now.
Try it on Amazon.
"A mass shooting has been reported at TK, where TK people are believed to be dead."
Journalism on the shooting beat http://ow.ly/SWwPn
Watching ST VOY. Cool to foreshadow Year of Hell in Before and After, but why
don't they recognize the Krenim from Kes' report?
We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops.
Fantastic reporting by @cfarivar http://ars.to/1LShUdc
The joys of bug bounty programs: someone reported that port 21
was open on http://ftp.mozilla.org
David Risney
@David_Risney :An interesting way to use the report-uri feature of CSP to detect if a user is logged into Google, Facebook etc.
@youtube - How DNA Changed the World of Forensics | Retro Report | The New York Times
RT @PeerProd In Europe, encrypted traffic went from 1.47% to 6.10%, and in Latin America, it increased from 1.8% to 10.37%
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/sandvine-report/ #NSA
A reminder that those Doritos you love are trash:
Shortly after Disneyland opened in 1955, the founder of Frito-Lay got permission from Walt Disney to open a restaurant in Frontierland with a Mexican-ish theme. “Casa de Fritos” was, unsurprisingly, all about the Fritos. Customers got free Fritos, and Fritos were incorporated into many of the dishes. Fritos were dispensed by an animatronic vending machine that featured the terrifying “Frito Kid”asking his assistant “Klondike” to bring the bag up from a mineshaft. I guess the conceit is that Fritos were mined by Forty-Niners?
Casa de Fritos contracted their tortilla production to a company called Alex Foods. One of the salesmen from Alex Foods, making a delivery to Casa de Fritos, noticed stale tortillas in the garbage and gave the cook a little tip: fry them and sell them as chips instead of throwing them away. Casa de Fritos began making these fried, seasoned chips to enormous success, but didn’t report this new menu item to the Frito-Lay company.
Eventually Frito-Lay found out what they were doing with the chips, packaged them, and sold them by the truckload. See, dumpster diving works out sometimes!
The Wall Street Journal was first to report that The Federal Communications Commission will propose new open Internet rules this Thursday that will allow content companies to pay Internet service providers “for special access to consumers.” Under the new rules, service providers may not block or discriminate against specific websites, but they can charge certain sites or services for preferential traffic treatment if the ISPs’ discrimination is “commercially reasonable.” Bye-bye, Net Neutrality, and the internet as we know it.
Redmond finally joins Google, Mozilla, by offering cash rewards for security flaws.
Good news everyone! Of course Microsoft employees are not eligible but that’s probably for the best.
As Hammond explained what he did, the critic became agitated. Times are tough enough in journalism, he said, and now you’re going to replace writers with robots? “I just looked at him,” Hammond recalls, “and asked him: Have you ever seen a reporter at a Little League game? That’s the most important thing about us. Nobody has lost a single job because of us.” At least not yet.
First hand account of security researcher reporting security issues to Google and details on the security issues.
FTA: “Nick Bilton put the FAA’s claims regarding Kindles and airline avionics to the test. The result? They emit less EM interference than planes are required by law to withstand.” Much less, apparently.
“TechCrunch and others are reporting that a program called “Carrier IQ” that comes pre-installed on Sprint phones has some pretty amazing spyware capabilities, right down to keylogging everything you do on the phone.”
From the document: ‘Appendix B. Implementation Report: The encoding defined in this document currently is used for two different HTTP header fields: “Content-Disposition”, defined in [RFC6266], and “Link”, defined in [RFC5988]. As the encoding is a profile/clarification of the one defined in [RFC2231] in 1997, many user agents already supported it for use in “Content-Disposition” when [RFC5987] got published.
Since the publication of [RFC5987], two more popular desktop user agents have added support for this encoding; see http://purl.org/
NET/http/content-disposition-tests#encoding-2231-char for details. At this time, only one major
desktop user agent (Safari) does not support it.
Note that the implementation in Internet Explorer 9 does not support the ISO-8859-1 encoding; this document revision acknowledges that UTF-8 is sufficient for expressing all code points, and removes the requirement to support ISO-8859-1.’
Yay for UTF-8!
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