Five Question Marks: An Encoding Bug and the Plausible Wrong Answer

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:04:51 +0200

Someone types äöüÄÖÜß into a text field in Netscape Navigator 3, running under System 7.6.1. What arrives on the server is ?????? . Seven characters in, seven question marks out. The explanation seems obvious — and the obvious explanation is wrong.

This is a short account of an encoding bug in ClaudeBridge 2.0, and of the detour taken while fixing it. The detour is the interesting part: the wrong fix looked like progress.

Encoding on Defender TD5

Five Question Marks: An Encoding Bug and the Plausible Wrong Answer