“bush hid the facts” An old windows flaw

   Reading 2600 today, I was reminded of an old flaw in Windows operating systems.  Some people used to think it was a conspiracy between Bill Gates and our government.  This flaw still exists in Windows versions, 2000 and XP.  In Vista you have to force it to work.

    Basically it is this, open the notepad editor.  Type the words “ bush hid the facts”. Save, and close notepad.  Now reopen. In XP or 2000 you will see 10 small squares.  If you had a Chinese language pack installed for some reason you will see Chinese characters.

    In Vista, open notepad. Then chose “open” from the file category in the header. Click the saved file but at the bottom it will have an encoding choice. Choose Unicode and it will display.

   Years ago this freaked out a lot of people.  Most likely the type of people who subscribe to these kind of conspiracy theories anyway.  However it was quite a “meme” for it’s day.

    This can be explained although it’s kind of geeky.

Paraphrased from Wikipedia:

Bush hid the facts (sometimes also this app can break) is the common name for a bug present in the function IsTextUnicode of Windows NT 3.5 and its successors, which causes a file of text encoded in Windows-1252 or similar encoding to be interpreted by applications that uses it (such as Notepad) as if it was UTF-16, resulting in mojibake.

While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence that is most commonly presented on the Internet, it does not exclusively occur with that phrase. The bug can be triggered by many sentences with alphabetic characters and spaces in a particular order (4-space-3-space-3-space-5), as well as other combinations that can be parsed into valid (if nonsensical) Chinese characters in Unicode.

The bug occurs when the ANSI string is passed to the Win32 charset detection function IsTextUnicode with no other characters. Because of this bug, IsTextUnicode will return TRUE, which means that applications that uses it will incorrectly interpret it as UTF-16.

 

Basically, the word string of 4-space-3space-3-space-5 ( you can use any words or even numbers) triggers the computer into thinking that characters represent something else in programming code.

 

  Just another old school “Easter egg”..

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