I'm naive to the translation tech space but is this sort of thing unique to languages like Chinese? I figured all this stuff was mostly solved. Like I wouldn't expect dflhglsdhfgalskjdf to have Google Translate output some grammatically valid Spanish output.
Wow I didn't realize what implicit trust I put in their translation output. Indeed I just tried some other Chinese -> English translation sites and they vary widely on what they output. Is it gibberish chinese characters these translators just guess on? Either way thanks for the insight I clearly put too much assumed faith in their quality/accuracy.
I hadn't looked into that story before so was following the rabbit hole of articles and gists and stuff and saw that some referenced a kill switch via env variable, so I just tossed it into that CyberChef online tool using its "magic mode" and ticked the "intensive mode" box and it was the top result. Just commented because I hadn't seen it elsewhere and figure it might be a little easter egg of sorts.
Random aside to the other commenter's linked articles, I find it a bit coincidental that the supposed "kill switch" environment variable, yolAbejyiejuvnup=Evjtgvsh5okmkAv, decodes from UTF-16LE to UTF-8 as 潹䅬敢祪敩番湶灵䔽橶杴獶㕨歯歭癁 which google translates to "You can't do it without a soul."