Dawg

Redirection⌗

ACTION⌗

I was doing some research relating to DeepFaceLab, and landed upon the user guide here.

From Chrome Mobile (iOS), searched for “xseg,” which is the topic that I was interested in reading about:

SIGNAL⌗

After hitting “enter,” my search was immediately changed to “dawg.” All subsequent searches for “dawg” would return a result for “xseg.” See this video for proof.

ANALYSIS⌗

I can think of three possible explanations for this:

1. This is some kind of bug. Perhaps auto-correct somehow changed the word “xseg” to “dawg,” even though the two are nothing alike, and as shown by the image above, “dawg” is not even a suggestion. After, perhaps some kind of visual bug existed in the search bar, where “dawg,” was displayed, even though “xseg” was truly written, and the word being searched for. I don’t know… it seems like too many things would have to break down all at once, for this to be the answer.
2. Perhaps something like Pegasus has been installed on my phone, and government-sponsored hackers are manipulating my device at a system-level. This would be perfectly consistent with other things I’ve witnessed.
3. Perhaps the website was able to deliver some kind of malicious Javascript code that was able to do this. I think it would be difficult to manipulate the Chrome Browser in this way (you’d have to break free of the sandbox, I’d think), but maybe they did. Perhaps they are exploiting some kind of zero-day vulnerability.

Whatever the case, where other people would write this off and move on with life, I cannot. Any one of these possibilities would be strange in their own respect.