Who changed my Firefox spellchecker dictionary?

mgushee · 2011-10-23 04:26:55

Well, tonight I finally found the answer to something that's been puzzling me for months ... but that answer raises a further question.

Some time ago, I noticed that when I posted to Facebook, my writings were getting spellchecked for what appeared to be British English (oh, BTW, I'm American). For example, if I typed "color," or "aluminum," the word would be red-squiggly-underlined, but not so for "colour" or "aluminium." I thought it was a Facebook feature (or bug), but tonight I noticed the same thing was happening with my e-mail. So I realized it must be something on my system. So I checked my environment variables, and found:

$ echo $LC_ALL

$ echo $LC_MESSAGES

$ echo $LANG
en_US.utf8

... pretty much as it should be. Then I went to about:config in Firefox, and lo and behold, spellchecker.dictionary was set to en_ZW. Oh. Zimbabwean English?! And supposedly, this was a "user set" value. So I'm wondering how this might have happened. Yes, it's conceivable I might have done it--that I was just playing around one night. But I have no memory of having done so. And, yeah, I'm 50 years old and usually don't get enough sleep, so who knows? But I certainly have no good reason to use Zimbabwean English, and as far as I can recall it never occurred to me until tonight that such a dialect existed.

So if it wasn't me, then who? My wife certainly wouldn't have known how to do that, nor would it be like her to play a joke like that. My 11-year-old son? Hmm. I could see him doing that kind of thing, but I don't think he knows how.

Okay then, maybe somebody hacked into my system? Not impossible, but it would be kind of strange if they hacked in just to change my dictionary setting. Remember, this has been happening for several months, and I haven't noticed anything else unusual.

So, my question is, other than me or someone impersonating me logging into my system and changing that parameter, is there any other way it could have happened?

jasonwryan · 2011-10-23 04:51:21

Sounds like the work of the Zimbabwean English Liberation Front...

My money is on late-night tinkering

karol · 2011-10-23 04:51:50

http://www.archlinux.org/news/initscrip … -required/ maybe? Not that I see how it would be possible but if Zimbabwe invaded US ... ;-)

Last edited by karol (2011-10-23 04:54:03)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-10-23 04:26:55

Who changed my Firefox spellchecker dictionary?

#2 2011-10-23 04:51:21

Re: Who changed my Firefox spellchecker dictionary?

#3 2011-10-23 04:51:50

Re: Who changed my Firefox spellchecker dictionary?

Board footer