266145 - A mix of right to left and left to right fonts gives scramled text.

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Mathias Wittlock]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

Now, I'm not sure if this is actually a bug in Firefox or the webserver
(somehow). But watching the text on this page
<http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=8855524> with Firefox 1.0PR will show you
text that seems very scrambled. The same page in IE6 looks ok and both browsers
got a source that corresponds to what's being displayed. The spoky parts comes
when you copy the text into notepad (from Firefox -> completely normal) and if
you paste it into Word and blow up the fontsize you can see the differences in
the obfuscated parts.

Of course, this is a spam, so I'm guessing it's a technique used to confuse spam
filters, but I thought it might be interesting to see this, especially as it
might possibly be abused in some way (that I cannot think of). I can't see
anything in the source that would cause this, so I have no idea how it works
(the obfuscated parts isn't enclosed in their own tags or anything).

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
View enclosed link.
Actual Results:  
Scrambled / obfuscated text

Expected Results:  
Not sure what I'd expect. Unobfuscated text? Indication that text has been
obfuscated? Ignoring the text completely.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.