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Google Camera randomly changes some QR code URLs on Android 12
- floatingatoll 5y agoOP, I can't view this. Can you post a copy of the page to archive.xyzzy or whatever their current URL is?
- sodality2 5y agohttps://notes.matthew.science/share/pixel-qr-error https://notes.matthew.science/share/pixel-qr-error
- dang 5y agoWe've changed to a third party article about what I presume is the same issue. The submitted URL was https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?passive=1209600&osid=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fissuetracker.google.com%2Fissues%2F215215744&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fissuetracker.google.com%2Fissues%2F215215744 https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?passive=1209600&osi....
- Naga 5y agoThis link is behind a Google account wall so I can't access it. Is there a summary available, or an alternative link?
- quercusa 5y agoThe camera app in Google Pixels running Android 12 tries to "fix" some URLs encoded QR codes, resulting in wrong URLs being shown and opened by the browser if the user clicks on the suggested link.
- bentcorner 5y agoMore specifically, it appears to truncate new generic TLDs to two characters. From the issue tracker: It also affects the newer generic TLDs. Some examples: .apple becomes .ap .amex becomes .am .army, .arte, .art, and .arab become .ar .audi, .audio., .auto, .and autos become .au .bet and .beer become .be
- mcescalante 5y agoHere is a screenshot of the issue as of time of posting. Forgive the zoom, the UI has a iframe scroll which isn't very capture friendly. https://i.imgur.com/hS8jBzw.png https://i.imgur.com/hS8jBzw.png
- johannes1234321 5y agoThis German it site has a story on it. Probably a translation service does a good enough job on it https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Googles-Kamera-verfaelscht-Links-in-QR-Codes-6332669.html https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Googles-Kamera-verfaelscht-...
- dang 5y agoWe've changed to a third party article about what I presume is the same issue. The submitted URL was https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?passive=1209600&osid=1&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fissuetracker.google.com%2Fissues%2F215215744&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fissuetracker.google.com%2Fissues%2F215215744 https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?passive=1209600&osi....
- csnweb 5y agoThanks, I wasn't sure which link I should post. I read the German version on heise: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Googles-Kamera-verfaelscht-Links-in-QR-Codes-6332669.html https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Googles-Kamera-verfaelscht-.... But a German article doesn't really fit here. So I thought the original source might be good, didn't realize it was behind a Google login, since I was logged in already.
- WolfRazu 5y agoDirect link to the issue: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/215215744?pli=1 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/215215744?pli=1
- akersten 5y agoWhat a horrible response by the dev investigator. The thread has all the info you need: the QR scanning functionality truncates TLDs to 2 characters. And provides a list of a dozen examples. The dev replies with "hi, thanks for the bug report, please provide a memory dump and a screen recording." How about they just try it out? Do they not have phones?
- johnny-fun-time 5y agoThis is almost certainly a scripted/automated comment (source - triaged external bug reports as a Google eng for several years). Difficult to use human touch when dealing with >>> thousands of bug reports.
- akersten 5y agoI get it's a canned message, but surely part of that external triage would be "is there enough info here that we could reasonably just assign this to an intern to try out before needing to even ask for a crash dump [and insert corresponding "we're looking into it" message]." Unless it's a purposeful barrier to entry, which I also cynically understand.
- nikanj 5y agoMakes sense. Google goes to incredible lengths to avoid having one person do a job well, when a microservices-based machine-learning hyperscale blockamothing can do it incredibly poorly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- darknavi 5y ago> How about they just try it out? Do they not have phones? Not sure what this has to do with Diablo Immortal /s
- mkl95 5y agoWell, it may not be up to the dev. I bet some manager created some "process" to control how devs interact with people.
- titzer 5y agoLooks like it is hooking up AI-powered suggestions to something that doesn't need it. One super-annoying thing I hit often: the Contacts app on a Samsung phone suggests autocompletes of phone numbers in the edit/add contact flow. Do I now need to explain to stupid computer that I am entering a new number that it does not yet know, ffs? I mean, seriously, something deep in the OS just sees "oh a phone number goes here? Let me supply one from Contacts...". It's trying to be smart, but in a completely oblivious and counter productive way. It's been like that for years. Does no one use these apps?
- teruakohatu 5y agoAlong those lines a friend was complaining about Samsung's contacts app search results. I took a look and soon deduced it was searching on "sounds like" rather than the actual string, so an exact match is way down the list of partial matches that sound like the search string. It is madness, like Google refusing to do exact matches only worse.
- lockyc 5y agoThe contacts situation from everyone is abysmal, only really good for light personal use. As soon as you are trying to keep your contacts organised or light work use everything turns to shit
- na85 5y agoYou touched on the reason I refuse to buy Samsung phones. In fact I'm mystified as to why Samsung devices remain so popular. When my wife and I were engaged she had one of the early Galaxy devices and it was awful. You don't get the stock File Manager, you get the Samsung File Manager. The window manager is the Samsung Window Manager, or Launcher, or whatever. Hers even had a rebranded browser called "Internet", if I recall correctly. All those Samsung-specific apps are (or at least were) objectively worse than the stock Android alternatives.
- notreallyserio 5y agoI've avoided using or recommending Samsung phones since this error started showing up in my developer console: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24809580/noclassdeffounderror-android-support-v7-internal-view-menu-menubuilder https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24809580/noclassdeffound... That their engineers and managers still to this day prefer to write their own apps instead is using stock or close to stock tells me they haven't learned from that mistake.
- oh_sigh 5y agoAh...I thought this was going to be a "camera turned my QR code into a different QR code" like the fake-news "iPhone camera made my friends face a leaf" story. But in fact it just seems like after the QR code is converted to a URL, the app tries to normalize the URL and isn't familiar with a bunch of new TLDs, so it truncates them(for some reason).
- alpaca128 5y agoTLDs like .co and .net are not new.
- oh_sigh 5y agoDoes the bug report mention that .co and .net links are affected by this bug? I was only able to look at the screenshots in this thread
- alpaca128 5y agoAfaik .co and .net are not confirmed to be affected TLDs, but they are affected in other parts of the address. For example if the QR code contains the URL `foonet.uk` Google's autocorrection would change it to `foo.net.uk`.
- awinter-py 5y agoI turned off web services in google photos on a droid phone and 'lens' (their image scanning app) died, along with QR code scanning fennec (f-droid firefox) has a QR code button if you tap the URL bar
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
- dang 5y agoPlease omit swipes and snark from your comments here. It's against the site guidelines because it leads to dumber, nastier threads. Your comment would be fine without that last bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- paxys 5y agoPerfect case of optimization where no optimization is needed. A developer encodes a URL, a user scans it. What is the rate of errors in this scenario? Is it really large enough to warrant "fixing" the end result in any way?
- alextheparrot 5y agoQR codes even have error correction so the developer can tune error rate…
- numpad0 5y agoI think I've seen some ex-Googler rant from few years back that performances are measured by impacts, excitements, endorsements rather than objective engineering measures, which he claims overvalues destructive product launches and undervalues necessary maintenance or improvements. I long lost the pointer to the rant but that has been very consistent with my user side experiences. This change destructs obsolete QR Code reading feature[that needed no change], is impactful[in negative sense], and fixes erroneous URLs[as if there are many]. If you drop negative expressions in brackets it fits a lot of bills.
- gsich 5y agoGoogles pet peeve with URLs in full effect.
- slig 5y agoIt's not just a pet peeve. They want to undermine it.
- taylorfinley 5y agoOh my god... It's like AOL Keywords all over again. They want us to Google for things instead of following links.
- duxup 5y agoHow does this not fail when tested? Or how do you start manipulating urls and not just realize this is inevitable / words have these strings inside them…?
- thirtyseven 5y agoBy not having test cases for those specific domains, and by passing your input through some general purpose internal URL handling library that does more than you thought it did [1]. Neither is (very) surprising. [1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/12/24/mkdir/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/12/24/mkdir/
- duxup 5y ago‘You know words have “co” in them’ seems like an easy thing to think of.
- nneonneo 5y agoThere is no reason to autocorrect a QR code scan. QR codes come with built-in error correction, so there’s a vanishingly small chance of a successfully-scanned QR code containing an error. It seems like Camera here might be treating QR code URLs as manually entered URLs or OCRed URLs and applying autocorrection logic.
- usrusr 5y ago...and if the blocks did happened to be misread in a way that deceived the autocorrection, it would be an entirely different string and not something fixable on string level. Single char differences in qr code input tend to be huge. This can only be explained by the QR result getting passed through a pipeline intended for OCR results. An almost depressingly boring explanation. It kind of seems like something that would likely happen in big organisations from disconnect between those deciding and those with their fingers in the code, but it could also happen to a solo.
- zapdrive 5y agoIt is more likely trying to autocorrect the url entred during the QR code creation process. Which is stupid. Don't people usually test their QR codes after printing?
- larschdk 5y agoOr, it is incidentally applying the same error correction it would normally apply to human input.
- iSnow 5y agoFrom the article, it seems this is simply a side-effect of some changes in mobile chrome that spilled over into the camera-app
- MisterBiggs 5y agoI would be happy if the google lens on my Pixel 5a would actually scan the QR code instead of just giving me google image results for similar pictures.
- readams 5y agoThis seems to work for me just fine on Pixel 6 Pro on Android 12. I created a QR code for several of the examples and then scanned it. I wonder if the reporter's QR code creation app was doing the correction and not Google Lens? Edit: oh I see it's only if you do it through the camera app
- defulmere 5y agoDecided to check the QR codes in the image at the top of the article: - never - gonna - give - you - up Rickrolled by QR!
- choward 5y agoFun fact: that was the original use case for QR codes. Disclaimer: I just made that up
- verytrivial 5y agoSigh. There is literally nothing I like about the changes in Android 12 versus 11. This seems like yet another shoe-horning in of "cleverness" when it wasn't invited and in this case appears to be outright broken. After disabling every single assistant or enrichment option I could find, Android is still putting auto-reply prompts into any notification that has a reply button. GO AWAY!
- shitlord 5y agoIf I knew Android 12 would be this ugly and annoying I wouldn't have installed the update. What bothers me the most is that I can't opt out of the Material You UI, and it's barely customizable.
- grishka 5y agoB-b-but the update notification says it offers new customization options?.... /s
- noah_buddy 5y agoI've got to agree with you. I feel like my experience with phones over the last decade has been thrashing between Android and iPhone when I'm finally fed up with one enough to go back to the other. I still miss my Windows phone despite the lack of many apps.
- grishka 5y agoThe "material you" redesign is just such a ridiculous waste of space, too. They changed all the things that worked just fine. But I guess a feature-complete operating system must still receive a major update every time the planet completes a lap around its star because the marketing department said so? https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107327145271362804 https://mastodon.social/@grishka/107327145271362804 Google seems to LOVE taking a working, great product everyone enjoys, and mutilating it to make everyone miserable. There are many examples. And I know at least one person who updated their phone to android 12 and found it so off-putting they downgraded back to 11 (thankfully you can do that). I just stay on 11 to begin with.
- omoikane 5y agoI can't reproduce the text mangling mentioned in this article. For example, if I try generating a QR code for "https://fooco.at https://fooco.at": https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chl=https://fooco.at&cht=qr&chs=256x256 https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chl=https://fooco.at&cht=... I see that when scanned, I get the same "https://fooco.at https://fooco.at" string back, as opposed to "foo.co.at"
- pks016 5y agoInteresting. When I scanned I got foo.co.at. I'm on Pixel 5, Android 12.
- readams 5y agoIt's only when viewed in the Camera app and not in Lens or other readers. I made the same mistake :-)
- slyall 5y agoDefinitely broken for me. Running Andriod 12 on a Pixel 4a. I get the same for fooco.nz , foonet.nz, foodmil.nz and foogov.nz . But not the more obscure foogen.nz and fooiwi.nz. .nz only did 3lds for a long time. 2LDs are only about 5 years old.
- joshspankit 5y agoPulled out an Android 12 Pixel 3 to test, and also got ‘foo.co.at’
- noah_buddy 5y agoThe Pixel 3 particularly has been mangled by updates. Someone previously mentioned something along the lines of: if a company bundles security issues and UI changes together, they don't actually care about security, they're just using it as a stick to keep you on the planned obsolescence treadmill. It doesn't even have to be intentional acts to degrade a phone, just make each patch consume more resources (under the auspices of "feature development") and you'll eventually strangle out any old devices once they're not powerful enough to run. Meanwhile, my phone app on my pixel has gotten increasingly buggy and unstable, sometimes breaking outright, over the years.
- spondyl 5y agoTechnically speaking, adding a period at the end of a URL is valid in that it implicitly exists for all URLs in the context of DNS. Your browser doesn't care however and while not exactly niche, I don't think it's widely known either. Funnily enough, typing a URL" "correctly" such as https://amazon.com https://amazon.com. (make sure to include the trailing dot!) can actually cause some load balancers to freak out and serve no or even garbled content! It's pretty neat and this is definitely a tangent. Either way, you don't want your camera mucking with the contents of a QR code
- aaronharnly 5y agoYeah, it seems this just isn’t recognizing the “end” of the domain part correctly :)
- numpad0 5y agoIt's not period at the end, article claims it modifies domain names and subdomains, e.g. www2.example.edu into www.2.examp.le.edu, supposedly when it could match `www` or a second level domain.
- jamesfinlayson 5y agoMy QA found this out recently - he'd accidentally typed a . at the end of the URL for one of our test servers which ended up breaking CORS - it certainly took us a while to figure that one out.
- kuschku 5y agoNginx and Apache handle this just fine, as does Google's, Microsoft's and Facebook's infra. It's only hipster services such as traefik and caddy that can't handle this. There's a long standing bug on the caddy bugtracker for this, which got closed as wontfix: working as intended.
- AaronFriel 5y agoThat's really unfortunate, the trailing dot indicates that it is a fully qualified domain name and I've used this when writing tests, for example, to ensure that a hostname either resolves to some internally served DNS label _or none at all_.
- djbusby 5y agoAges ago, while debugging some zxing oddness I came across a routine in there called 'isProbabllyURL' which was mangling some of my non-URL data into URLs. It was keyed off of a '.' in the decoded text, like basically a regex of /\w+\.\w+/
- sebastien_b 5y agoI’m just surprised it doesn’t turn them all into AMP links.
- joshspankit 5y agoFeels like that’s going to be next. Or one of those tracking links from the Google search results.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoBetter double check your crypto addresses before use!
- gundmc 5y ago> article describing in great detail the conditions and circumstances where the behavior exists I don't think they understand what "random" means.
- nhf 5y agoSo far, I've been able to reproduce a few transformations: * www[0-9].example.tld -> [0-9].example.tld, e.g. www1.nyc.gov -> 1.nyc.gov * example[ac|co|gov|edu].tld -> example.[ac|co|gov|edu].tld e.g. exampleac.uk -> example.ac.uk My guess, as someone else further down the comments mentioned, is that some URL handling library is doing more than expected to its input. I filed an internal bug report referencing some of the public reports from a dev build of Android 12, so hopefully this will get triaged soon if someone hasn't already done a similar reproduction. (I work at Google, but on nothing remotely related to Android.)
- nneonneo 5y agoThanks for confirming the report. I'm curious - if you hand-wrote a URL on a piece of paper (or printed it out from a printer/displayed it on a different screen), and then scanned it with the camera, would the camera pick it up? Would the camera corrupt the URL?
- nhf 5y agoInteresting question! However the OCR functionality in the camera (through Google Lens) runs a separate pipeline. Other bug reporters said Lens didn't have the issue when scanning QR codes so I doubt it would surface there.
- xiphias2 5y agoI was working on Linkdoctor at Google, it's part of the spelling team now, but a separate service (FixURLRequest).
- nikau 5y agoBing.com -> Google.com
- Brian_K_White 5y agoI always feek like I'm the only one at work with a "ten commandments" that includes "Thou shalt not F with the data!" Everyone is always munging the data for "user convenience". Drives me nuts. And I'm over 40 so it doesn't matter what I say.
- alpaca128 5y agoI'd add "don't screw with the inputs" I hate it when an app assumes I'm an idiot producing typos half the time, and fighting the autocorrect then wastes more time than it could ever save. Just implement undo and leave me alone.
- smcl 5y agoiOS autocorrect is rapidly approaching the point where it is more of a hindrance than a help. I'm really shocked at the decline over the last couple of years, the most frequent issue is that it appears to be looking at the context, incorrectly understanding it and flipping it's/its, well/we'll, ill/I'll. It is insistent too, so if you hit delete a couple of times and re-type what you wrote it'll perform the same transformation.
- wruza 5y agoIt's so bad that I installed Gboard instead recently (never was an Android fan, but used it for a while). But I'm not sure if it's better, e.g. typing code snippets on it is pain. And there is a little detail in this that I'm questioning my sanity sometimes. The "fact" is that maybe iOS changed the detection point of a tap at some old release, because I was able to type perfectly on iOS 4..6, but then with 7 suddenly started to make typos everywhere. On Gboard now I can't type few words without making a mistake in every one of them. As if it was made to show me that I'm unable to type and need it so bad.
- lbriner 5y agoHasn't it been said before that it is inevitable in a company with 100K+ employees that to get noticed and promoted, it is not acceptable to accept what you already have is decent enough, you have to think of something new and then convince everyone that they haven't lived until the camera corrects your URLs for you? There is an amount of vanity in a company having mad numbers of employees seemingly unecessarily but who is the person who decides that we can cut 5000 jobs and split the work up between the other people you already have? The CEO? Why bother? You have bucket loads of cash so the status quo is easier any maybe once in a blue moon, someone actually comes up with something really clever.
- MrDresden 5y agoTo see Google have what appears to be a regex 101 bug in parsing the string, along with making the classic programmer error of making fundimental assumptions based only on their own context .... frankly doesn't surprise me. Google's software has long since started to be hit and miss for me. It has almost become as bad as Microsoft in that regard. I have lost count of how often I am suggested to change my email's TLD from its proper Icelandic ending .is to .it or .io. To be fair, this is not Google related but universal. If you dear reader do not do anything else today then to read up on the many falsehoods[0] we as humans can fall into (that then infects our software solutions) it would be a day well spent. [0]https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
- IshKebab 5y agoThis is clearly nothing to do with regexes. Pretty obviously a mistake.
- dfghdfhs 5y agoAnother example of google going downhill?
- weltensturm 5y agonothing is true; everything is permitted
- skinkestek 5y agoNews at 11. Same company that has an assistant that suggest one should call the boss at 0400 instead of opening the audio book one was started yesterday or even opening HN as I use to do while I enjoy my first cup of coffee in the morning. Same company that thinks a married man with small kids needs to se ads for shady dating sites and hardly any other ad for 10 years. These days it is somewhat more varied but with a heavy dose of pay-to-win war games with female protagonists who can barely fit their b00bs inside the uniform. Same company that mangles my searches, doing these kind of "corrections" transparently with no working way to opt out. Why why why try to insult my intelligence and my wife at the same time? I'm not in a position to short anything meaningful for 5 years but the thought has struck me.
- moralestapia 5y agoTo add, Gmail/Gsuite's spam detection algorithm is utter crap now. People with whom I've been in touch for YEARS, are labelled as spam all the time, disregarding how many times I clicked the "Not Spam" button. All while VERY obvious nigerian-prince tier emails arrive straight to my inbox everyday. How could you possibly mess up something that you already had figured out?
- gvb 5y agoFWIW, you can use the gmail filter feature to whitelist addresses Setting (gear) > "See all settings" (top button) > "Filters and Blocked Addresses" Click "Create a new filter" (centered in the middle of the form) - fill out the "from" etc. then click "Create filter". [X] Never send it to Spam
- tinus_hn 5y agoSo does this work on device? Or does it send everything you scan to a Google service for correction?
- matchbok 5y agoAndroid's dev team really does surprise me with how bad they are at building an OS. Every single part of the platform is a disaster.
- lbriner 5y agoThat's a bit unfair, seeing as millions of people use Android every day. That said, I find that my Samsung S8 has got progressively slower to start apps, particularly, and in that time, nothing else has noticeably changed. I understand obsolete hardware when a load of bells and whistles are added and the old hardware can't do it but I can't see anything noticeably different from 10 years ago. On the other hand, I can also understand why people don't want to support 10 year old operating systems, which is why I had to bin my perfectly working Macbook Pro once it wasn't allowed to update the OS any more.