Unintentional Glitch Art

June 19, 2012 8:58 AM

Weirdest Firefox problem ever. Some text, across different sites, appears scrambled -- or, more accurately is rot-2. Uninstalling, deleting profile and re-installing did not help. WTF?

It affects some text, but not all. I checked the character encoding but switching between Western and Unicode doesn't affect it. If it's an add-on, it's one I can't seem to find/disable.

When I copy the rot-2 text and then paste it, what's pasted is transformed to what the text should have been.

Here are a few screenshots:

The add-ons screen
On Facebook
On Tumblr

Anyone run across something like this before or know what's going on?

posted by rottytooth to technology (6 answers total)

Sounds almost like a prank. Are you using someone else's internet?
posted by dozo at 9:25 AM on June 19, 2012

No, it's my connection (although that upsidedown text prank is pretty funny). Also, doesn't affect IE or Chrome.
posted by rottytooth at 9:37 AM on June 19, 2012

Could be some kind of man in the browser malware.
posted by Blake at 10:07 AM on June 19, 2012

This looks like a related problem. Perhaps try the solution proposed there?
posted by firesine at 10:25 AM on June 19, 2012

Others have suggested it could be the result of a corrupted font on your system (e.g. Helvetica in these examples)
posted by firesine at 10:31 AM on June 19, 2012

Yes, it's a corrupted font: apparently Lucida Grande (bold). Thanks!
posted by rottytooth at 10:53 AM on June 19, 2012