
Apple releases 100 new emoji, replaces gun with waterpistol - davb
http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2016/08/apple-emoji-gun-waterpistol/
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RIMR
So they're using the same character space, and just changing the graphic to a
squirtgun?

That'll go over well.

"Hey, after school we should sneak up and [squirtgun] John, Mary and Pete!"
sent on an iOS devices will turn into "Hey, after school we should sneak up
and [handgun] John, Mary and Pete!" on other devices.

One of these statements implies a prank. The other implies murder.

Maybe Apple should work with the Unicode Consortium to declare additional
emoji, such as a squirtgun, so that they can drop the handgun emoji from their
keyboard and replace it with the squirtgun.

As it stands now, they're just swapping the graphic of a lethal weapon with a
children's toy and crossing their fingers that no horrific misunderstandings
occur...

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UnoriginalGuy
I agree with you, it adds ambiguity to the meaning. Can you imagine a court
interpreting two completely different meanings based on sender/receiver device
graphics?

The original definition is actually "PISTOL" (U+1F52B) with alternative
definitions as "GUN." Apple isn't making the world a safer place by pretending
guns/pistols aren't a reality.

What next, remove the word "pistol" from their spellchecker?

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Freak_NL
> What next, remove the word "pistol" from their spellchecker?

That, and any other ungood words. Helps prevent crimethink.

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protomyth
So, Orwell was a bit off and Newspeak is actually going to be emoji based.

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berberous
I really detest how much people are messing with Unicode standards. So much
room for misinterpretation as people send emojis that look totally different
on their phone as compared to what shows up on the recipient's phone.

~~~
chriswarbo
Oh no you don't!

One of the reasons that putting Emoji into the Unicode character set is silly
is that anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they
want. If the meaning of a message changes because of the font being used, then
the sender (and, by proxy, their OS's developers) shouldn't have used text for
such things in the first place.

Making short-sighted engineering decisions doesn't give anyone leverage to
dictate how I display text on my devices.

On a related note, the whole business around "racist" or "sexist" emoji is
just as ridiculous. Unicode dictates things like "Construction Worker"; if you
want that to display as male, female, black, white, cat, dog, alien or
whatever then just select an appropriate font (or blame the OS/font developer
for gender/race bias). The answer is _not_ to add white-male-construction-
worker, black-male-construction-worker, white-female-construction-worker, etc.

The idea of race/gender modifiers is better, but at that point you might as
well make a paint program with a colour picker and a "flood fill" tool.

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StavrosK
> anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they want

Yes, and you could make a font to render the "a" character as "g". It doesn't
mean that the Man is oppressing Apple by making them render "a" as "a" in
their devices, and neither is Apple free to render any letter as any other, as
they see fit. Standards are standards for that exact reason, and that's what
Unicode is.

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chriswarbo
Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from
rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols.

Plus the fact that the only 'meaning' of characters like "a", "g", etc. is to
represent themselves as distinguished from the other characters (which is
taken to its logical conclusion in binary: each symbol represents itself as
distinguished from the other one). Hence replacing an "a" with a "g" is to
entirely replace the complete meaning of the symbol.

What Apple's done may, possibly, somewhat change some of the, already
ambiguous, meaning of the gun symbol.

BTW, I wasn't trying to imply that Apple may be 'oppressed' by "the Man". I
just don't want to see a future change to the Unicode standard mandating that
particular symbols be rendered into particular arrangements of pixels, which I
could certainly imagine the likes of Apple et al pushing for in order to work
around their self-induced problems.

~~~
RIMR
>Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from
rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols.

It's actually referred to as "REVOLVER".

If they replaced the car emoji with a helicopter, would you defend that since
they represented a vehicle symbol with a vehicle?

A water gun and a revolver are about as different as a sedan and a
helicopter...

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omginternets
Political correctness is reaching new heights of absurdity.

Surely our children are safer now /s

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retox
This is just a PR exercise.

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omginternets
Even so, it's indicative of the current political climate, and it's just as
disheartening.

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rbcgerard
Bomb is ok though...

I'm surprised they're not changing the eggplant emoji as well...

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Ironchefpython
If you outlaw gun emoji, only outlaws will have gun emoji.

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dhagz
I don't see how changing the handgun to a squirtgun could possibly end well.
With the ability to push through Pride and gender-equality related emoji - not
to mention shutting down the rifle emoji - you think Apple would be able to
get the Unicode Consortium to add in a new codepoint for a squirtgun and then
just drop the handgun from their keyboard.

As a PR move, though, it's pretty smart.

~~~
hexane360
Well, if they went about it the sensible way, some articles might be written
as "Unicode saves the day and solves gun violence" instead of "Apple saves the
day and solves gun violence".

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Isamu
Please note that the Unicode standard does not precisely specify the design or
rendering of glyphs. It establishes mapping, encoding, etc.

This is a feature. Otherwise you would not be able to subtitute a new font to
render your Unicode glyphs.

Vendors are free to create new glyph designs, and you are free to hate them
for it.

~~~
Freak_NL
The Unicode standard does specify explicitly that U+1F52B stands for _pistol
(handgun, revolver)_ , so while you are free to replace it with whatever you
want, replacing it with a water pistol means you are purposely creating
ambiguity where non existed.

For a vendor of operating systems that is not very responsible behaviour.

~~~
Isamu
I disagree. Again I say that the description is deliberately brief, to allow
some latitude on the part of the implementer.

> you are free to replace it with whatever you want

No, with a pistol.

You seem to be arguing that a "water pistol" is not a "pistol". I agree not
all pistols are water pistols, it is also true that not all pistols are
revolvers.

If you choose to depict a pistol that is NOT a revolver, I think we would
agree this still satisfies the standard. I think that a water pistol is a
pistol, I think it is stretch to argue otherwise.

> not very responsible behaviour

That is a stretch.

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koolba
I'm used to the government (trying to) taking away our guns but having a
private corporation do it feels like a level worse. Sure it's just a bunch of
pixels that is the cousin of a poop symbol but it feels wrong.

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petetnt
That article opened up first a modal prompt from "mega viral something
something" and then redirected me to a page that urged to download some
critical update to my iPhone.

I love drive-by ads on usually somewhat trusted sites.

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mrseb
Hi. Do you have any more info on that? A screenshot maybe? And ideally the URL
that's being called. Will help us find the bad ad (if there is indeed one).

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petetnt
I sent you email to the email found on your site
[http://www.mrseb.co.uk/](http://www.mrseb.co.uk/)

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spdustin
Seems a little disingenuous to call out Apple on the gun emoji in the
headline. You have to read all the way to the end before you see:

> _Microsoft 's pistol emoji is also a toy gun, but the icon remains lethal-
> looking on other platforms including Google's Android._

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jbb555
I consider unicode dead. We wanted a simple way to expand characters from 7
bit to 16 bit and instead got a horrendous mess, complete with childish toy
icons in.

The whole thing needs scrapping and doing properly

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onion2k
When you state "The whole thing needs scrapping and doing properly" you should
probably remember that Unicode didn't just magically appear one night. A lot
of very distinguished and hard-working people have put in a great deal of
effort to build a standard that works, and is supported extensively.

You may believe you could do a better job, but I suspect you're only looking
at the technical implementation rather than the politics of what it takes to
define a standard everyone supports. The things you think makes unicode a mess
are almost certainly the results of many compromises that, if they hadn't been
made, would mean there wouldn't be a standard. That would be _far_ worse.

