Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

Lennox · 2015-04-03 16:34:13

Hey guys.
So this issue I'm having is weird. Unfortunately, I can't really tell when it started. It was probably like 2-3 months ago, perhaps less.

Some websites I visit display characters/words in arabic (At least I'm guessing that it is). I have never installed any arabic locale or anything.
This happens on : grooveshark.com, house.net and probably a few other sites.

Example screenshot

As you can see in the left bottom corner, the options PLAY, NEXT, PREVIOUS, ... are in arabic.
I don't think this is of any relevance, but I am accessing grooveshark through a firefox addon proxy. I don't use it for house.net though.

I have no idea what could be causing this. And that's also why I don't know what information to provide that could be of help to you.
I checked /etc/locale.gen and the only lines uncommented are the ones I do need (locale -a shows me nothing out of the ordinary). Haven't found anything on the internet to help me out either and that's why I am here.

Any help would be appreciated

Last edited by Lennox (2015-04-05 14:59:57)

xodbox · 2015-04-04 11:55:27

It might not be your system settings, but your browser settings. So check your browser language settings.

Browsers will send HTTP header when requesting a page like so:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: bbs.archlinux.org
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch
Accept-Language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6

Pay attention to the Accept-Language header, which will contain a list of prefered languages.

Some web servers will respond with different languages based on your HTTP headers or Geo IP address information. Depending on whether or not the web developers have added locale/culture functionality to their site. This is why you might find some websites are giving you different languages, and some are giving you english.

And you can verify your browser is sending out the correct preferred languages by:

Visiting a site that will print out your http headers for you; for example: http://myhttp.info/
Enabling browser developer tools, press F12, look at the network tab.

Last edited by xodbox (2015-04-04 12:13:43)

Michael Catanzaro · 2015-04-04 15:53:48

After following the instructions in the previous post to make sure your HTTP headers are fine (they probably are; you'd remember changing that setting to Arabic) then I would suspect "I am accessing grooveshark through a firefox addon proxy" as the cause of the problem. If the proxy is set up in the middle east, some dumb sites are going to send you Arabic text. Sites should not do this -- they should check the languages specified in the HTTP header instead -- but such is life.

Really annoying if you've ever traveled internationally, to find you have no way to read certain sites that ignore your browser's language settings and just assume you know the language of the country you are in.

Lennox · 2015-04-04 17:11:47

@xodbox
Thanks for the reply!
I checked the header and everything looks alright on that end.

Accept language en-US,en;q=0.5

@Michael Catanzaro
Thanks for the reply!
I at first thought of the proxy as well. But I visit house.net without it and have the same issue.
I also use NoScript and Adblock, but I can't really think of any way one of the two could possibly be causing it.

EDIT :
It's definitely not system-wide. I can see the proper website when I use another browser (midori).
Using another proxy (tor) and not the addon however did show me the same arabic characters in Firefox. So it's not the addon.
Just Firefox itself????? How and why lol?

Last edited by Lennox (2015-04-04 17:27:24)

xodbox · 2015-04-05 03:01:46

Lennox wrote:

EDIT :
It's definitely not system-wide. I can see the proper website when I use another browser (midori).
Using another proxy (tor) and not the addon however did show me the same arabic characters in Firefox. So it's not the addon.
Just Firefox itself????? How and why lol?

I guess the next thing to try, is find out what your public ip address is, and check geo ip address database information.
You mentioned that you were using a proxy or two, so I'ld definately check out what your public ip addresses are for each of those proxies.

DDG will tell you both your public ip address and geo location.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+ip … &ia=answer

If you cannot use an IP address within a region of native tounge, then you can politely ask grooveshark to change their broken website, as their valued user, I'm sure they would love to hear from you.

(And I did just try gooveshark website with ar-EG, and it was still all in english, so I assume they use geo IP lookups.)

mpan · 2015-04-05 04:56:56

Lennox:
What you're experiencing is most probably not a misconfiguration of your browser, but a result of a new trend among some webdevelopers: replacing icon-like images with custom fonts that contain the images, and enforcing the use of that font on their website. If for some reason the font does not load — either because errors in CSS, server failure, intentional disallowance of running fonts¹ or the user has choosen to use their own font — the user ends up with random characters all over the page, as they're displayed with non-custom fonts.
____
¹ As an example: per NoScript in Firefox

Lennox · 2015-04-05 14:58:29

mpan wrote:

Lennox:
What you're experiencing is most probably not a misconfiguration of your browser, but a result of a new trend among some webdevelopers: replacing icon-like images with custom fonts that contain the images, and enforcing the use of that font on their website. If for some reason the font does not load — either because errors in CSS, server failure, intentional disallowance of running fonts¹ or the user has choosen to use their own font — the user ends up with random characters all over the page, as they're displayed with non-custom fonts.
____
¹ As an example: per NoScript in Firefox

Finally fixed it
It was just as you said. I enabled the option "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above" in the Advanced Fonts&Colours Menu and voila, everything's back to normal. Beautiful^^

Thanks a lot!!!
I kinda feel stupid for not trying that out in the first place...

Last edited by Lennox (2015-04-05 15:18:42)

Arch Linux

#1 2015-04-03 16:34:13

Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

#2 2015-04-04 11:55:27

Re: Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

#3 2015-04-04 15:53:48

Re: Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

#4 2015-04-04 17:11:47

Re: Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

#5 2015-04-05 03:01:46

Re: Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

#6 2015-04-05 04:56:56

Re: Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

#7 2015-04-05 14:58:29

Re: Websites falsely displayed in arabic [SOLVED]

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