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March 19, 2006
First Flickr Virus?
Lots of people on Flickr today reporting an outbreak of strange Japanese characters in photo comment sections. As quick'y as it was ubiquitous (the phrase apparently translated as "hello", or "good afternoon"), it has already largely disappeared. The first Flickr virus? A runaway comment bot? One wonders.[Update] As Stewart Butterfield of Flickr makes clear in a response to this post, there is no new Flickr virus or runaway comment bot. Instead it was some cheery text inadvertently left in by Flickr folks doing software testing.
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Hey Stewart --
Ah, I see. Well, you obviously have very happy testers at Flickr HQ if they're prone to leaving such upbeat messages in the code!
We were testing a fix for a bug which split double byte characters when truncating long descriptions and some of the testing text was accidentally left in the template. No virus :)