Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Hexed headline
Clearly the spirit of Halloween put a Hex on this headline in a local TV station's website:
I wonder if something new is going on in the hacking department. I've never seen this type of computer glitch before, and it's hard to imagine how it happened. When text goes wrong at the HTML level, it's usually a Unicode or codepage problem, showing characters from the wrong part of the ASCII list. You'll see something like ¡Û Á¤È¸¿øÀº ¼ÒÁ¤ÀÇ È¸ºñ ³³ºÎ¿Í³³ºÎ´Â 2014³â ¿ù 1¸¸¿ø ÀÌ»ó.
This looks more like a direct memory dump expressed in hex.
Similarly, the recent bank error that placed $4,040,404,040,404.04 in several accounts. This is not a data entry problem, or a bad binary arithmetic operation translated to decimal, even if you assume that banks are using BCD instead of strict binary. This looks more like a flag register that got treated as a BCD numeric value. (Apparently there's a way to make this happen in COBOL.)
¶ 5:43 AM 
I wonder if something new is going on in the hacking department. I've never seen this type of computer glitch before, and it's hard to imagine how it happened. When text goes wrong at the HTML level, it's usually a Unicode or codepage problem, showing characters from the wrong part of the ASCII list. You'll see something like ¡Û Á¤È¸¿øÀº ¼ÒÁ¤ÀÇ È¸ºñ ³³ºÎ¿Í³³ºÎ´Â 2014³â ¿ù 1¸¸¿ø ÀÌ»ó.
This looks more like a direct memory dump expressed in hex.
Similarly, the recent bank error that placed $4,040,404,040,404.04 in several accounts. This is not a data entry problem, or a bad binary arithmetic operation translated to decimal, even if you assume that banks are using BCD instead of strict binary. This looks more like a flag register that got treated as a BCD numeric value. (Apparently there's a way to make this happen in COBOL.)
¶ 5:43 AM
