3 ms·

Could this be a hash collision?

• twainefold 8y ago
  What you’re referring to (hash collisions causing unrelated content to be linked to otherwise unrelated user accounts, due to hash lookups across distributed systems, reminiscent of a bug where some guy saw his Google+ profile transformed into one belonging to a teenage girl from another country) is not the class of bug that would cause a problem like this. The bug is happening on the individual’s phone, within an isolated Android process, targetting personal data (contacts & texts) presumably before attempting network contact with some remote distributed system (likely some flavor of search, indexing and analytics). This is more likely a frisky regex gone wild, and the activation strings are validated by the regex (return true for a match), and proceed to activate some other process (usually auto-complete is one reason for pattern matching, but since this is a bug, the odd behavior is unexpected/unplanned and obviously confusing, maybe bad, maybe not terrible).