I don't know if this is a bug, or just the way the world works now. Several of the people who live in my phone use artistic black and white headshots. They look very cool. But my Android phone shows their image with inverted colours - so they look like pure shite. Here's what my very real human girlfriend looks like when I ring her to go for brunch: Come the evening, my phone switches to Dark Mode™ - so this is what she looks like when I ring her for a late-night booty call: What's c…
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Google Books is one of many projects that Google has forgotten about. There's no support available and, of course, it's impossible to send them a bug report. The best anyone can do is write a ranty blog post and hope it gets noticed. When I search for my name in Google Books, it returns books I have reviewed. These aren't books that I've written. They don't mention, quote, or cite me. My reviews don't appear on the dust-jacket. Google has got confused. Here's an example. Go to the Google…
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I received this weird bit of mojibake in an email. Here's the raw text view: ------=_NextPart_001_009E_01D4D8BF.D0737E10 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable =E6=8C=A8=E2=8E=92tml xmlns:v=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o=3D"= urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-c= om:office:word" xmlns:m=3D"http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml= "…
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Facebook rewrite URLs with Unicode in the path - this is not best practice and could be dangerous. It is possible to create a URL like http://bit.ly/😀 - the Unicode characters are valid in the path. The URL Encoded representation is : bit.ly/%F0%9F%98%80 Facebook mangles these URLs in such a way that it might be possible to redirect a user to a malicious site. Here's what's happening. When Facebook sees the "😀" character in text, it rewrites it to the "" character (󾰀). That's a …
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Take a look at the following text, looks normal enough doesn't it? "Harry ".draziw a si Potter Now, try to select the text and see what happens. WHAT WITCHCRAFT IS THIS?! If you examine the source code for this page, you'll see that I'm using the Unicode Bi-Directional characters. "Harry ‮".draziw a si ‭Potter These characters are useful when writing text that includes, say, English and Arabic - but they can also be used for malicious purposes. On a more mundane level, the…
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My wife likes to set reminders for herself in Google Calendar. Recently, she added a note to her personal Google Calendar reading "Email alice@example.com to discuss pay rise" and set the date for a few months from now. She'd had a discussion with her boss, Alice, and they'd agreed to talk about salary later in the year. A few moments later, Alice sent her a "Meeting Accepted" email. What... The...? Although pretty embarrassing, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been "Email…
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Did you know that you can to link to a specific Tweet on Twitter? The URL looks like this: https://twitter.com/#!/edent/status/197967209459499008 Pretty obviously, that's the user's name and the ID of their tweet. Simple, right? Not really, click on that link and you'll see this: That's my name in the URL bar - but the Number 10 Press Office's tweet on the page. What's Going On? Have I retweeted that status? Nope! Am I a 1337 h4x0r who has hacked Number 10? No sir! Is the screenshot a…
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The Twitter Engineering Team have a set of text processing classes which are meant to simplify and standardise the recognition of URLs, screen names, and hashtags. Dabr makes use of them to keep in conformance with Twitter's style. One of the advantages of the text processing is that it will recognise that www.example.com is a URL and automatically create a hyperlink. Considering that dropping the "http://" represents 5% saving on Twitter's 140 character limit for messages, this is great. …
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