Unexpected Chinese Strings in Logs

[Yoanndp]

Brief description of your issue

I found unexpected Chinese strings appearing in the logs of System Informer. When translated, they seem to have real meaning rather than being the result of a character encoding issue.

The full string is here: suspicious-strings.txt

Steps to reproduce (optional)

1. Open System Informer and enable notification logging
2. Check the logs (tried using klogg, CMTrace and Notepad++)

Expected behavior (optional)

The logs shouldn't display unintended strings

Actual behavior (optional)

The logs include Chinese strings that appear to have a coherent meaning when translated (seems to be sexual in meaning though). These strings are unexpected and unrelated to my actions in the application.

Environment (optional)

System Informer version: 3.0.5520 (b4c6ea5)
Operating System: Windows 10 (build 19045.5247)
Language/Locale settings: French (Belgium)

[dmex]

I can't reproduce any issues with the logging 🤷‍♂️

[RatinCN]

It's scrambled characters, not Chinese.

[diversenok]

This looks like ASCII being interpreted as UTF-16. You can tell by the 0A0D character. And no, the text doesn't mean anything, online translators will readily invent meaning for any random sequence of Chinese characters.

[Yoanndp]

I understand that this is not related to the Chinese language. Nevertheless, further investigation might be necessary. I will keep this issue open for six months to allow for additional feedback or reports from other users who may be experiencing similar problems.

[jingyu9575]

suspicious-strings-translated.txt

Here is your suspicious-strings.txt "translated" from UTF-16 to UTF-8. Looks like normal logging, just with different encoding.

[dmex]

@jingyu9575

Thanks for the help.

The logs include Chinese strings that appear to have a coherent meaning when translated (seems to be sexual in meaning though). > These strings are unexpected and unrelated to my actions in the application.

@Yoanndp

The log files are UTF-8 and either transferring the file to a different system or using a editor without UTF8 support would be the issue known as Mojibake: "garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake