I should probably respond to the rest of the post as well, but...:

On Nov 26, 2011, at 11:52 AM, exarkun@twistedmatrix.com wrote:

including the bytes in a page with a content type of "text/html".

It's pretty much always wrong to give a page the content type of "text/html".  Browsers will then guess the encoding based on wonky heuristics about the page, which in certain obscure cases can lead to security problems (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-7#Security>).

So, in addition to whatever other fix is done here, the encoding on the error page should be adjusted to be explicit about its character set.

-glyph