What windows app could this be? Do you recognize the characters?
May 28, 2020 11:53 AM
Going through my wife's computer, we found this weird looking app name on the Windows "Startup Apps" list (in the Control Panel). Does anyone recognize that from somewhere? Or the characters in there (I could not figure out what alphabet they are from)?
I don't believe it is malware, since I have run three different software to scan the computer, and there have been no flags. I have also gone through both the Startup tab in the Task Manager, and have looked through all startup process using AutoRun. There is nothing suspicious showing up in the processes or startup programs in either of those two apps. I am familiar with a majority of the ones listed and those I am not familiar with, I googled each one to eliminate them (most of them were system dlls).
So, I'm thinking it is actually one of the normal apps, but that somehow the "text" name got corrupt. However, I haven't been able to isolate what it is. And having googled a bunch, I have not been able to identify what the first two characters are. They look like one of the Asian languages, but I am not sure what language. The last character is latin.
None of it makes sense to me, so I'm looking for assistance.
I don't believe it is malware, since I have run three different software to scan the computer, and there have been no flags. I have also gone through both the Startup tab in the Task Manager, and have looked through all startup process using AutoRun. There is nothing suspicious showing up in the processes or startup programs in either of those two apps. I am familiar with a majority of the ones listed and those I am not familiar with, I googled each one to eliminate them (most of them were system dlls).
So, I'm thinking it is actually one of the normal apps, but that somehow the "text" name got corrupt. However, I haven't been able to isolate what it is. And having googled a bunch, I have not been able to identify what the first two characters are. They look like one of the Asian languages, but I am not sure what language. The last character is latin.
None of it makes sense to me, so I'm looking for assistance.
As a native Korean speaker, I can tell you that the second character (the one before d) is fake Korean.
posted by tickingclock at 12:23 PM on May 28, 2020
posted by tickingclock at 12:23 PM on May 28, 2020
The weird mix of unrelated languages suggests that you're right about the data being corrupted, and Windows is trying to read arbitrary data as if it was a multibyte Unicode string.
Part of the problem here is the general uselessness of the new Windows "apps" for every thing, and the fact that it won't tell you what that program actually is. If you go back to Task Manager's Startup tab, you should be able to right-click on that name (if it appears that way there) and do Properties or Open File Location to find out what EXE it is tied to.
posted by CyberSlug Labs at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2020
Part of the problem here is the general uselessness of the new Windows "apps" for every thing, and the fact that it won't tell you what that program actually is. If you go back to Task Manager's Startup tab, you should be able to right-click on that name (if it appears that way there) and do Properties or Open File Location to find out what EXE it is tied to.
posted by CyberSlug Labs at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2020
The unicode for that second character is U+B4B1 (뒱). It is part of the Korean unicode character set, but is not actually a valid character in the Korean language.
posted by tickingclock at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2020
posted by tickingclock at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2020
Looks like Mojibake. Would you have some app that might be from a country that isn't majorly English? What happens with some old things is that they were developed before the wide spread of unicode, like back in the days when on windows you had to worry about Code page. When one of those old things gets interpreted as being unicode, you get random garbage.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2020
posted by zengargoyle at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2020
Latin alphabet is not the same as Latin language.
Dž is used in Serbo-Croatian languages.
posted by Sharcho at 10:19 AM on May 29, 2020
Dž is used in Serbo-Croatian languages.
posted by Sharcho at 10:19 AM on May 29, 2020
To be fair, your Dž:
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D
LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON
dž:
LATIN SMALL LETTER DZ WITH CARON
The capitalized form is DŽ:
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DZ WITH CARON
Take it up with the Unicode Consortium as to whether or not Dž or any other glyph that is a mixture of upper/lower case that it treated as a single entiy should exist or not on the same level as the both bits upper and both bits lower get their own codepoint in the Unicode specification.
OP merely looked up things and it said 'LATIN CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER'. No Harm No Foul.
If you want to figure out what this says... you need to get the get the text/bytes of the actual thing and brute force through something like iconv until you get something recognizable out on the back end without errors. It's like breaking cryptographic secret codes. Those bytes are most likely valid text in some encoding that didn't get converted and show up as mojibake. (Or it's some horrible malware hiding behind a name you can't type).
posted by zengargoyle at 4:49 PM on May 29, 2020
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D
LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON
dž:
LATIN SMALL LETTER DZ WITH CARON
The capitalized form is DŽ:
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DZ WITH CARON
Take it up with the Unicode Consortium as to whether or not Dž or any other glyph that is a mixture of upper/lower case that it treated as a single entiy should exist or not on the same level as the both bits upper and both bits lower get their own codepoint in the Unicode specification.
OP merely looked up things and it said 'LATIN CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER'. No Harm No Foul.
If you want to figure out what this says... you need to get the get the text/bytes of the actual thing and brute force through something like iconv until you get something recognizable out on the back end without errors. It's like breaking cryptographic secret codes. Those bytes are most likely valid text in some encoding that didn't get converted and show up as mojibake. (Or it's some horrible malware hiding behind a name you can't type).
posted by zengargoyle at 4:49 PM on May 29, 2020
Thank you all for the answers. I decided to use the process of elimination to try to figure out what it is. First I tried the Task Manager Startup tab, but all of the apps there were already listed in the control panel, so the weird characters ended up being the odd one out.
Then I remembered that CCleaner also has a utility to edit Startup apps. So I installed CCleaner, and finally figured it out! It was actually the latest celebrity app: Zoom. For some reason it looks like the installation seemed to have botched up the 'startup' entry. There was an entry for Zoom, but no command line to accompany it. Deleting that in CCleaner deleted the weird entry in the Control Panel.
The biggest benefit of this exercise? I did not know "mojibake" was a thing, so at least I learned a new term. Thank you zengargoyle for the vocabulary lesson!
posted by tuxster at 1:42 PM on May 30, 2020
Then I remembered that CCleaner also has a utility to edit Startup apps. So I installed CCleaner, and finally figured it out! It was actually the latest celebrity app: Zoom. For some reason it looks like the installation seemed to have botched up the 'startup' entry. There was an entry for Zoom, but no command line to accompany it. Deleting that in CCleaner deleted the weird entry in the Control Panel.
The biggest benefit of this exercise? I did not know "mojibake" was a thing, so at least I learned a new term. Thank you zengargoyle for the vocabulary lesson!
posted by tuxster at 1:42 PM on May 30, 2020
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posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 12:18 PM on May 28, 2020