Have I been hacked by the PLA?

April 8, 2014 2:52 PM

Why did my Safari start screen change to China/Chinese favorites when I upgraded to iOS 7.1?

After I upgraded my T-Mobile (US) iPhone 5 from iOS 6 to iOS 7.1, Safari now looks like this.

Why is it displaying popular China sites in Chinese instead of popular US sites in English?

I am located in California, I did the upgrade while in California, and I've never traveled to China with this phone. I do have Chinese keyboards added on my phone, but they are not the primary keyboards that I use. Under International settings, my region format says United States and my language says English, and under Date & Time my time zone says Cupertino.

When I asked a Genius Bar guy at the Apple Store about this, he said he's never seen that before.

posted by Dansaman to Technology (4 answers total)

Mine looks exactly like that. Think it might be a default if you have added the Chinese keyboard.
posted by pravit at 3:18 PM on April 8, 2014

This Apple forums page has a few solutions but the one that looks likely to is deleting the Chinese keyboards (from Rhonda227, close to the bottom of the page).
posted by doctor_negative at 4:23 PM on April 8, 2014

Check your browser's language preferences. If Chinese is before English you're likely to get the wrong page delivered to you.
posted by devnull at 5:10 AM on April 9, 2014

Here's one of many pages that show you the browser request headers, including what languages your browser asks for:

http://www.reliply.org/tools/requestheaders.php

If you see a "zh" code, such as "zh-CN" or "zh-TW" in the "accept language" field, your browser has been switched to Chinese.

The favourites may be part of the browser itself, though. This link has something that looks very much like your screenshot:

http://blog.duncanworthy.me/misc/ios7-safari-chinese-bookmarks/

and suggests fixing the favourites in the bookmarks section (changing "zh" to "en" for some of them).
posted by effbot at 11:05 AM on April 9, 2014