You are NOT ALLOWED to write, "Bush hid the facts"!

This is creepy, most likely a technical glitch, but possibly a virus, reported by Cannonfire's blog. Try writing that sentence in Notepad, and see what happens. I'll let Cannofire explain it:

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/

Paranoia, anyone?
Hey, kids! If you suspect that your own computer is spying on you, you may want to try this fun-n-easy experiment. Requirements: You MUST be using Windows. (I'm using XP, but the trick probably works on other versions.) And you MUST use Notepad. (Go to Start>All Programs>Accessories.)

1.) Open an empty Notepad file
2.) Type "Bush hid the facts" (without the quotes)
3.) Save it as whatever you want. (I saved it to my desktop under "Hi.")
4.) Close it, and re-open it.

See what happens to your message. Weird, huh? As Ed Sanders used to say: Ooooo-EEEE-ooooo....

Now try the exact same steps with other messages, such as "Bush is a dope" and "Cheney is the real prez." Save under the same file name, if you wish. When you re-open the .txt file, your message will appear as normal.

But "Bush hid the facts" -- well. That's diffo.

(I'm told that there is a technical explanation for this -- something about unicode and ANSI and the way Notepad works. On the other hand, the phenomenon may have something to do with that krove.exe virus that's been going around...)

but it works with any 4 letter word followed by "hid the facts".

Nevermind!

Thanks to the Bush administration.

"asdf hid the facts" saves as "asdf hid the facts" for me; "Bush hid the facts" goes all unicode on me.

:-)

tried Thom hid the facts and that got scrambled too.

Same file length, and both look as they should when you use 'type' from a Command Prompt (this is Windows 2000). Somehow, Notepad is interpreting the 'Bush' file as 9 characters of Unicode rather than 18 characters of ASCII.

but if you leave the quotes in it's there, so yeah, I would say it's a notepad glitch.

trying to keep my tinfoil hidden :)

Also works also if you type
"This app can break" without the quotes.
any variation of the string works:

abcd efg hij klmno

:shrug:

checked it several times.

dp

i put periods at the end out of habit.

w/out puctuation, it doesn't display again.

okay, i see the glitch.

dp

OMG! This is so fucked up!

Weird glitch.

Open it up in a real text editor like Emacs and it appears fine. At first it looked like it inserts some control character in front of the "B", but I used a hex editor and it doesn't.

Then I wrote "Bush hid the facts" using Emacs, and Emacs could reopen it without a problem. Then I opened that same file in Notepad and it had the same unicode problem.

Then I ran "strings" on notepad.exe and grepped for each word in the phrase individually, and none of them were there, so if there's a deliberate check for that, it's subtle.

Then I went back to a Real Operating System and lamented all the years and money wasted on having Windows in the first place...

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/06/14/631016.aspx

The problem, as with so many Windows unicode problems, is in the funciton IsTextUnicode, which returns true because the string "Bush hid the facts" can map to CJK ideograms (so can "this app can break" or "aa aaa aaa"), so the library assumes the text is Unicode, so notepad assumes it's unicode.

Microsoft's shoddy unicode support set back software internationalization by decades...

I tried "Buxx xxx xxx xxxxx" (same pattern of letters, same 2 bytes starting the sequence), and, sure enough, that then displays as if it's 9 characters of valid Unicode - so the 2 bytes combinations for 'Bu', 'xx' and ' x' seem to be valid Unicode characters. But then I tried "Buxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" - ie still only using those 2 byte combinations from before - and Notepad decided that was an 18 characters ASCII file.

I can't see what their algorithm for deciding Unicode is, but it must be weird.

Despite having just turned 64, Paul McCartney is dead.

OMG!!

it's a pretty universal old Beatles joke. didn't mean to alarm you. I feel like shit now. Used to be a contigent of people that theorized that Paul had died in the 60's and was replaced by a look alike. They took this from "clues" they apparently heard in songs and saw on album covers.

n/t

again i'm sorry for alarming you. <http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/3674/pid.html>

with four letters, three letters, three letters and five letters, and get the same result. It's a software thing, not a political thing, and has been aired out on numerous websites.

The combinations are quite subtle.