Boolean values are being stored as strings 'true' and 'false'

I have run into a scenario where $info['ismobiledevice'] = 'false'. Its a string false, not a boolean false, so any IF statement that is expecting a boolean value will break since 'false' evaluates to TRUE.

Looking into it a bit further and it appears that all boolean values are being stored as string 'true' and 'false' in the serialized 'data' column in the database.

This is only happening when testing on a site hosted on amazon. I have MAMP running locally and this problem doesn't happen. I have not been able to determine what exactly is causing it, maybe a different version of mysql?

Here is the database version I'm using on amazon which is having the issues:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "%version%";
+-------------------------+--------------------+
| Variable_name           | Value              |
+-------------------------+--------------------+
| protocol_version        | 10                 |
| version                 | 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.6 |
| version_comment         | (Ubuntu)           |
| version_compile_machine | i486               |
| version_compile_os      | debian-linux-gnu   |
+-------------------------+--------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

here is a related issue: #919578: browscap_is_crawler is broken