If you are looking at the UTF8 flag in application code then your code is broken. Period.

The flag does NOT mean that the string contains character data. It ONLY means that the string contains a character > 255 either now or could have, at some point in the past.

For strings that contain characters > 127 < 256, you have no idea whatsoever about whether the string contains characters or bytes regardless of what the UTF-8 flag says. (For strings with only characters < 128 there is no difference whether they are ASCII or binary, …

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

I’ve decided this is so important to me that I’ll no longer attend or speak at conferences that don’t adopt and publish a code of conduct. I’ll also be using whatever clout I’ve got to encourage conference organizers to adopt and publish anti-harassment policies. […] So why, given the issues [with codes of conduct that] I outlined above, do I take this so seriously?

He makes the point, but does not emphasise it enough in my opinion: the code of conduct is not there to communicate to attendants how or how not to behave (in which capacity it is superfluous with the well-behaved majority and ineffective with perpetrators): it is there to reassure members of minorities that they will be heard and their concerns are understood.

AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean:

Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons.