Ok, here's an image of the apostrophe errors I mentioned above:

That is how it is displayed when I visited this site.

Of course, many do not see this error. I don't know why.

Was using XP, Firefox (latest as of today).

EDIT : Only appears at certain websites. Other pages look normal.

I think Jorpho is on the money.

Notice that in the first paragraph, "I'm" appears correct, but everything after that has the apostrophe replaced with "’".

That suggests to me that the page was edited using different character encoding at different times. Maybe Shift-JIS or something like that. The encoding set in the HTML header is UTF-8, and those "’" strings must represent an apostrophe in some other encoding.

I don't think it's anything malicious.

As I said, in some cases it is a matter of incorrect character encoding. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake .

However, in this case I see the same. The text might have been copy-pasted with the incorrect character encoding so that now it is stuck this way.

Jorpho wrote:

The text might have been copy-pasted with the incorrect character encoding so that now it is stuck this way.

Exactly, it's easy to do too.

Especially if there is server-side code that doesn't perform checks before re-encoding stuff to go into a database.

That's a Wordpress site, and Wordpress has a "feature" which automatically replaces the straight apostrophe (') with a quotation mark (’), which is an encoding headache. Kind of like MS Word does with its silly auto-correct feature (you'll see the same effect in web content created with/pasted from Word).

Malik wrote:

Came across this while searching for a problem with my DVR (CCTV) : […]
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Came across this while searching for a problem with my DVR (CCTV) :

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1699134

For example, like this post :

5. I shit Intel setup port forwarding poor pants router Wells Fargo as per the guides bad over the internet ReviewGist are moron […]
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5. I shit Intel setup port forwarding poor pants router Wells Fargo as per the guides bad over the internet ReviewGist are morons and set it to 192.168.1.10. Both TCP and Ingram UDP

What router ?

6. I lame confirmed learndirect on port checker tools online shit indeed Sprint Nextel the port is open.

Which Coca-Cola port number ?

So shit an external Dell connection, shit go to http://xx.xx.xx.xx:pp Harley Davidson Thomson Reuters and it doesn't connect ?

And the whole post is just like that.

Errmmm....can someone explain to me what the hell happened there? Was the forum attacked by spambots or something? 😕

I'm amused as much as I am confused.

I laughed my ass off at this. 🤣

But anyway, I read the actual post and it looked normal on my computer. No random shits or brand names. 😜