Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, November 2, 2021 edition of the Sandstone Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and then I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida.

A research paper entitled Trojan Sauris Invisible War on Belize by two researchers at the University of Cambridge has gotten

a lot of breasts yesterday, and the gist of the paper was that with Unicode you have the option

for bidirectional text or short bide, which essentially allows you to not only have text

running left to right, but also right to left.

And the issue here is that if this type of encoding is used in source code, the source code that a user sees

may be different from the source code that is actually being compiled by a compiler.

So the problem here is really the interface between user and code.

How do we display code to the user the way the compiler sees it?

And these bytey character codes are getting in the way because compilers are essentially ignoring

them, but editors that are displaying Unicode may actually see them and then display the text

differently than the compiler would interpret it.

The paper lists a number of languages as susceptible

as C, C++, C Sharp, JavaScript, Java, Rust, Go, and Python. One that's interestingly

missing is Apple's Swift, which actually advertises as a feature that it does support full Unicode. So, for example, you may use Unicode

characters as variables. And of course, historically, programming languages have been

heavily centered around English and have sort of adopted the English conventions for, for example, variable names

and the like. But then again, there are other languages, and the people who code in these

other languages may want to use variable names in their native language and using their native

script. The researchers are recommending that the simplest option here is to essentially tell

editors and compilers to just ignore those bidecodes and not allow the direction of the text

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