diff -r 464eed5ddb2e Doc/library/sys.rst
--- a/Doc/library/sys.rst	Mon Aug 19 10:03:11 2013 +0300
+++ b/Doc/library/sys.rst	Wed Aug 21 14:52:36 2013 +0200
@@ -1059,6 +1059,8 @@ always available.
      is interactive (that is, if its :meth:`isatty` method returns True), the
      console codepage is used, otherwise the ANSI code page.  Under other
      platforms, the locale encoding is used (see :meth:`locale.getpreferredencoding`).
+     The error handler of the encoding is ``surrogateescape`` (see the
+     :pep:`383`).
 
      Under all platforms though, you can override this value by setting the
      :envvar:`PYTHONIOENCODING` environment variable.
@@ -1082,6 +1084,10 @@ always available.
    :meth:`~io.BufferedIOBase.detach` method and can raise :exc:`AttributeError`
    or :exc:`io.UnsupportedOperation`.
 
+   .. versionchanged:: 3.4
+      The error handler of the encoding is ``surrogateescape`` (see the
+     :pep:`383`).
+
 
 .. data:: __stdin__
           __stdout__
diff -r 464eed5ddb2e Python/pythonrun.c
--- a/Python/pythonrun.c	Mon Aug 19 10:03:11 2013 +0300
+++ b/Python/pythonrun.c	Wed Aug 21 14:52:36 2013 +0200
@@ -1085,7 +1085,7 @@ initstdio(void)
     Py_DECREF(wrapper);
 
     encoding = Py_GETENV("PYTHONIOENCODING");
-    errors = NULL;
+    errors = "surrogateescape";
     if (encoding) {
         encoding = _PyMem_Strdup(encoding);
         if (encoding == NULL) {