"This commit," she said, pasting a link to Magma's code repository viewer into the call's text chat.
-Jake's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the associated code change as modifying a regex—a [regular expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression), a sequence of characters specifying a pattern to search for in text. This one was used for logging requests to the Multigen service; the revised regex would now extract the client's IP as a new metadata field.
+Jake's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the associated code change as modifying a regex—a [regular expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression), a sequence of characters specifying a pattern to search for in text. This one was used for logging requests to the Multigen service; the revised regex would now extract the client's user-agent string as a new metadata field.
That much was true. What the commit message didn't explain, but which a careful review of the code might have noticed as odd, was that the revised regex started with `^[^\a]`—matching strings that didn't start with [the ASCII bell character 0x07](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character). The bell character was a historical artifact from the early days of computing. No sane request would start with a bell, and so the odd start to the regex would do no harm ... unless, perhaps, some client _were_ to start their request with a bell character, in which case the regex would fail to match and the request would silently fail to be logged.
"Exactly!" said Chloë. "_Who knows what it was thinking?_ That's what I wanted to talk to you about!"
-"Uh ..." Jake balked. If he hadn't been found out, why _was_ someone from risk evals talking to him about a faulty regex? The smart play would be to disengage as quickly as possible, rather than encourage inquiry about the cause of the bug, but he was intrigued by the possibility that Chloë was implying what he thought she was. "You're not suggesting Code Assistant might have introduced this bug on purpose?"
+"Uh ..." Jake balked. If he hadn't been found out, why _was_ someone from risk evals talking to him about a faulty regex? The smart play would be to disengage as quickly as possible, rather than encourage inquiry about the cause of the bug, but he was intrigued by the possibility that Chloë was implying what he thought she was. "You're not suggesting Code Assistant might have written this bug on purpose?"
She smirked. "And if I am?"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff