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The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#131

Post by crazygringo »

tl;dr: a certain GIF would crash a Chrome tab, but only when the desktop version of Grammarly was installed. (Not a Chrome extension.)

That's insane!

Can anyone think by what possible mechanism the installation of Grammarly could affect whether a .gif file would crash Chrome?

The company seems to be on Macs since they report that the problem doesn't surface in Safari.

Is there some kind of dynamically-linked GIF decoding library used by macOS that Chrome relies upon, and Grammarly somehow installs one that takes precedence for all applications? I didn't think this would be possible -- I thought image decoding was done natively in the browser and not outsourced to the OS, for security reasons.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#132

Post by CobrastanJorji »

ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

I have to wonder whether Grammarly's "Enterprise" tier and its underspecified "advanced security features" involve installing it on-site and offering am "all of your company's words don't get sent across the Internet to another company" feature.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#133

Post by Retric »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #125
mardifoufs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels. Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.

That’s definitely outdated. Literacy rate of my “third world” country is %16 higher than US atm.

Be careful trying to compare countries or even historical numbers when standards vary. The US has a 99% literacy rate based on some metrics, but as often happens when metrics become useless the people tracking them raise the bar.

Thus the US’s “Level 1” literacy rate, which represents being able to follow basic written instructions, was 92% in 2014. But in 2020 the standard changed yet again to: “54% of adults in the United States have English prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.” Noticeably being literate in a non English language suddenly doesn’t count, the prose at 6th grade level is also higher than it’s been in the past.

Or as Wikipedia puts it: In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#134

Post by Muromec »

natbennett wrote: post #105
ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

There are a lot of people whose professional outcomes are meaningfully constrained by their ability produce clear business English. I know a guy who used to get inexplicable feedback about his communication that boiled down to “write better.” This limited his ability to get promoted. He runs all his comms through ChatGPT and asks it to “make this more professional” and doesn’t get that feedback anymore.

I suspect it all started with two Ukrainian who got tired of checking how much of "a" and "the" they forgot to sprinkle into their texts.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#135

Post by robocat »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #100
robocat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added to all pages in a single-page-web-app after discovering some bug or other with Chrome screwing up the page. Apparently the new incantation to fix an app (can be applied to an element) is (ugly: I presume it isn't CSS to avoid supporting dynamically changing it): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att... Every now and then I would look at the meta tags for a major single page app and disc…

I know what you mean, but this caused me a second of "wait, what?" > all pages in a single-page-web-app

Good point. This was the Elizabethan days when computers ran on coal: IE when we were explorers of The Internet.

We were bleeders, but there still existed a vestigial login page, and some other evil cthulic pages (I know whence they were begat for I was their father).

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#136

Post by akira2501 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #113
ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office setting…

It's odd to read the story of an adult who believes they're a poor reader, still to this day apparently, because of what happened to them 30 years ago. Odder still that the article leaves itself the only conclusion of going all the way back to grade school and trying an entirely different strategy and hoping that just "works out" in the end.

The lack of "continuing education" in the era of the internet is baffling to me.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#138

Post by jonathrg »

robocat wrote: post #73
cyco130 wrote: post #43

The weirdest one I saw was this: User claims that the wording of the info they enter into a certain form changes when they save. At first I suspected someone else editing the same form at the same time unbeknownst to each other but it wasn't the case according to the logs. And I saw the correct wording on my own computer. Then I noticed in their screenshots that some of the menus had weird wording too. Turns out they…

I added to all pages in a single-page-web-app after discovering some bug or other with Chrome screwing up the page. Apparently the new incantation to fix an app (can be applied to an element) is (ugly: I presume it isn't CSS to avoid supporting dynamically changing it): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att... Every now and then I would look at the meta tags for a major single page app and disc…
I first read this as "translate to Norwegian"

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#139

Post by toddmorey »

Once my college professor was working on her research paper and told me she was struggling get text to stay underlined. Assuming a simple user error, I expected to help her out in 5 minutes.

Over three hours later, we discovered that the combo of her specific video card driver version along with her specific printer driver version would keep text from printing out underlined.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#140

Post by saulpw »

chatmasta wrote: post #129
computerfriend wrote: post #16

If they can figure it out, they're sitting on potentially a very valuable exploit.

Yes, I too would like to read more details about this. It's a great writeup from an engineer who got stuck debugging this. But I hope some experts in security or reverse-engineering can replicate it and take a closer look. There's definitely a more interesting story here, probably regarding the localhost bridge between Grammarly extension and desktop. (Grammarly has a bug bounty btw... and their chrome extension has…

It wasn't the Grammarly extension, it was the desktop app.
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