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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

XML entities and "Copy of" go on the air

I've been an XM subscriber for a number of years. It all started when I bought a used car which had an aftermarket radio installed which apparently had several months of service left. That "free trial" was enough to get me hooked.

Leaked HTML or XML entity

Over the years, I've noticed a couple of oddities in their data stream. It looks like they use some kind of XML encoding somewhere along the way, but they picked a strange place to truncate things to 16 characters. Given that the original receivers only show 16 chars of artist and title each, I assume they aren't sending that angle-bracket mess over the air. Obviously, this should have been an ampersand.

"Copy of" leaked into filename

So then there's this. I forget which version of Windows started doing this, but at some point, when you dragged files a certain way, you'd have "foo" and "Copy of foo" in the same place. It seems that one of these escaped into their on-air system, since it made it all the way to one of my devices.

This one should have said "Prayer for the Dying". The whole ALL CAPS thing is also dubious.

It could be worse. They could have replaced every song on the 80s channel with a rickroll.