Needlenose has found something odd:
For those of you using Windows, do the following:
1.) Open an empty notepad file
2.) Type “Bush hid the facts” (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want.
4.) Close it, and re-open it.
Weird. Really Weird.
for those of us not running windoze, what’s the weirdness?
*Spoiler*
It comes out: 畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴
The funny thing is, if i go to Google Translator and translate that gibberish from
Chinese to English: Liu Benren got Tou motorized patrol videos seized
Japanese to English: 畂 桳 栠 摩 琠 敨 projection 捡 獴
So maybe something about “The protected videos have been seized by a man named tou riding a motorbike”
Ok.. Ima steppin back out of the twilight zone now before i end up in a foetal position sucking my thumb!
Carly, 😀
Furthermore, when I saved it as Bush hid the facts.txt, it did not show up in file explorer. But I could find it in the file open dialog. Also, if I open it in TextPad, it opens with the text shown properly. Strange indeed.
SKS
Just tried it in Vista, no issue at all.
But when I saved I noticed that it asked me the charset encoding. My guess is that this is by chance hitting a bug in the charset inference code for XP.
“Rove did the leaks” and “Cvti ije uif gbdut” exhibit the same behavior. It’s the character pattern, not the message. A little more information:
Notepad is the primitive text editor bundled with Windows. The weird characters — I see boxes on my XP system, where another commenter saw questions marks — are Notepad’s way of saying that it doesn’t know how to display the text. You would see a lot of these if you tried to open a binary file such as JPEG.
When you save the text initially, it’s stored exactly as you typed it (“Bush hid the facts”). Any other editor (e.g., TextPad) will read it correctly. However when Notepad loads the file, it decides that it’s not really a simple ASCII file and displays the I-don’t-know characters. When you then save this file under a new name, Notepad prepends the hex characters “FF FE” (you need some kind of hex editor to see these), which seem to mean that the file is unicode, which it is not. Now all text editors will be confused.
You get the same behavior when you substitute other typewriter characters, leaving the spaces. But change, e.g., the “u” to u-umlaut and you don’t. Nor do you if the complaint is lengthened, e.g. to “Bush hid the facts and trashed the constitution”. The person who first published this joke must have understood all this and had some fun coming up with the Bush text.
“You get the same behavior when you substitute other typewriter characters, leaving the spaces. But change, e.g., the “u” to u-umlaut and you don’t. Nor do you if the complaint is lengthened, e.g. to “Bush hid the facts and trashed the constitution”. “
I’ve just been experimenting to see what other annomolies it has, and it appears that any 4444 333 333 55555 word combination triggers it, Such as… This app can Break
After looking it up the conclusion is if you open it in a hex editor, you will see that two bytes have been prefixed to the file: FF FE. The FF FE characters at the start of the file signify that the file is a UTF-16 little-endian encoded file.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16
Unicode uses 2 bytes instead of 1 bytes like ASCII. The phrase “this app can break” is 18 characters long (include the spaces), which explains why we are seeing 9 Asian or 9 block characters.
Regards, Carly.
You can have as many multiple three letter parts as you want. For example,
“this mes sag eis hid den fro mcops” -> 桴獩洠獥猠条攠獩栠摩搠湥映潲洠潣獰 ->
“Rafter Jiaoceon Hui officer of the Mini Mount daub Hui Ren Tu Ying Min fierce-looking officer for what reason” (translate.google.com, chinese->english)
Very odd indeed.
When I tried it on mine, I got –
“You can bet your ass he did.”
“You can have as many multiple three letter parts as you want. For example,
“this mes sag eis hid den fro mcops” -> 桴獩洠獥猠条攠獩栠摩搠湥映潲洠潣獰 ->
“Rafter Jiaoceon Hui officer of the Mini Mount daub Hui Ren Tu Ying Min fierce-looking officer for what reason” (translate.google.com, chinese->english)”
Yes i agree, the bug is strange and i “kind of” understand why it’s happening however when converting it back to English it’s very very odd what you get back.
That bit i fully do not understand, i’ve mucked around with different “bug” keyword combos since i read this here and some of the translations are simply put… Bizzare!
Carly,