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Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

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Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#171

Post by tekkk »

Fricken wrote: post #146
factsaresacred wrote: post #50

In a way it's a good thing that China is revealing its petulant nature to the world. Not that they hid it all that well, but until recently everybody was too busy enjoying cheap electronics to notice the monster they were feeding. China—the people and country—are spectacular. China—the Party—is an malevolent force obsessed with self-preservation. Such is the nature of autocratic regimes. A quote from Czech dissident…

The two top priorities for any institution are first to hold on to the power they have, and second to expand those powers. This is as true for the neighbourhood gardening club as it is for the Communist party of China.

Okey.. But the gardening club won't try to censorship all information out there that it views displeasing? I'm not sure what you are suggesting with your rhetoric, but there are differences when the organization at hand is either authoritarian or non-authoritarian. And I'd argue that some gardening clubs aren't even seeking for any "expansion of their power" at all. They are simply clubs to hang out and talk about gardening. You suggesting that they both share the same, ominous intent is kinda dishonest.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#173

Post by munificent »

jaynetics wrote: post #79
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is showing the ability to control one of the world's largest, and most advanced companies. It isn't petty–it is scary. The U.S. and others have sold their soul to the devil for $299 flat screen tvs.

> The U.S. and others have sold their soul to the devil for $299 flat screen tvs. This seems to suggest the populace is at fault, wanting and buying cheap gadgets no matter what the consequences are? In truth, I think most people are simply unaware of the many problems caused both by consumerism, and the moral spinelessness of pretty much all large corporations and how that is brought about by market forces. Even in…

> I think most people are simply unaware of the many problems caused both by consumerism, and the moral spinelessness of pretty much all large corporations and how that is brought about by market forces.

I believe this is one of the fundamental flaws and challenges of capitalism. Corporations are great usability wise because serve as an abstraction for accessing a product. You put some money in and you get a widget out, without having to worry or know about where that widget came from.

But the consequence of that is that you are insulated from all of the negative externalities involved in creating that widget. You just wanted some cheap eggs, and you didn't realize you were inadvertently causing chickens to be raised in inhumane factory settings. You wanted a bottle of water and you didn't realize it was being pumped out of a national park.

It's like using some really nice, convenient API and only discovering later that every time you called getFoo(), the backend went out and killed a kitten.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#174

Post by milankragujevic »

jrockway wrote: post #172
milankragujevic wrote: post #3

Hmmm. Would I get banned by the GFW for these two characters? 0x1F1F9 0x1F1FC...? (🇹🇼)

The last time I was in China, HN was already banned.

I mean, AFAIK my blog isn't. Yet. I get visitors from China on my post about controlling the world's cheapest quadcopter from a PC via arduino and nrf24l01+...

edit: I just checked, it's accessible from mainland China, though quite slow.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#175

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

dirtyid wrote: post #82
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is showing the ability to control one of the world's largest, and most advanced companies. It isn't petty–it is scary. The U.S. and others have sold their soul to the devil for $299 flat screen tvs.

Multinational companies conforming to local laws and customs isn't scary, it's status quo. (Most) Companies sell products and services not ideology. Sometimes prexisting ideology comes preloaded in because regionalization and cultural competence cost extra. Mostly that's an economic bug that people have conflated as a soft power feature because non-western markets were too small to advocate for themselves. It's compl…

> Multinational companies conforming to local laws and customs isn't scary, it's status quo.

You are missing my point. The fact that it is status quo is the scary part.

I do not accept that companies should be let off the hook for empowering and enriching oppressive reigns because of "local laws and customs". I do accept that companies should be let off the hook for destroying environments and ecosystems because of local laws and customs.

What should a country have to do for a person / corporation(group of people) to stop supporting it? I don't expect everyone to have the same answer, or even that my answer is better than another, but if you are in a privileged life-situation you should think of your personal line and decide if it has been crossed.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#176

Post by blotter_paper »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #85
blotter_paper wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As if the US hadn't sold their soul already? :/ I'm not trying to downplay the horrors of China, but let's not act like the US had clean hands before importing bulk electronics.

I'm not sure the average American benefited as directly to the atrocites of the past. The U.S. simply cannot change course without a serious alteration of the the ethos of the country.

The atrocities of the US are not strictly in the past, though our biggest and boldest known atrocities are. That being said I would say that we have benefitted from the atrocities of the past; the land I live on was once populated by people that my government participated in the genocide of. More importantly, I said nothing about people. Does the average Chinese citizen benefit directly from the atrocities of the Chinese government? Is the answer to that question even relevant to whether your prior condemnation of China was fair? Why shift to examining citizens in the case of the US but not in the case of China?

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#177

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

jrockway wrote: post #167
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is the only country in the world that requires Google Maps servers to be ran on Chinese government data centers by non-Google employees.

Korea has similar regulations: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/one-thing-north-k... If you zoom in on South Korea you'll notice that the map tiles are raster-based instead of vector-based like the rest of the map. At certain zoom levels, South Korea looks like it has no roads or cities, compared to the much more industrious North. It's kind of hilarious.

Korea is different. South Korea actually does require mapping servers to be ran on SK soil, but it does not put requirements on the data center owner or the workforce running the services.

I'm sorry if this comes off as nit-picky as it is not my intention, but comparing the mapping services requirements of China and SK are worlds apart. The intent of each policy is important to think about.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#178

Post by derefr »

erk__ wrote: post #158
dirtyid wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to the original discussion, I wonder if there's a story behind how Taiwan got a emoji flag in the first place. Unicode Consortium referenced ISO 3166 for eligibility. Taiwan and a few other disputed regions didn't the cut until 3166-2 revision. The maintenance agency consists of representative from only western agencies. Interesting politics.

I beleive that the unicode consortium have chosen not to say much about witch flags are there pretty much for this reason. They don't want unicode to get mixed in with international politics.

It goes beyond that; technically, there are no flags in Unicode.

Instead, there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol — an symbol-alphabet where any pair of successive symbols from the alphabet are meant to be considered a ligature (so, a space of 36^2 = 1296 possible ligatures), where a subset of these ligatures are considered valid representations of a locale from the Unicode's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository.

Unicode doesn't say that you should render these CLDR-valid locale meta-codepoints as flags, though. It just says they're locales. In other words, it's up to a given font to decide whether to draw these as flags, and which of them to draw as flags.

With this move, they've abdicated the political determination over to, mostly, the OS manufacturers (since right now most OSes just have one OS emoji font that gets used for the graphical-pictograph-rendering process, rather than allowing user-installed emoji font-families.)

Personally, I like this choice. No matter what any government says, Taiwan is its own locale—it has its own time zone, clock and currency display formats, etc. Locales are locales no matter who declares ownership over them. Having "locale icons" rather than geopolitical-region flags is probably the most stable arrangement we can have, even if it means that some OSes will just render a particular locale-icon as nothing.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#179

Post by Apocryphon »

oconnor663 wrote: post #36
degenerate wrote: post #6

The degree that China goes to censor things reminds me of kindergarten. Pull the shades down, and kids won't want to go outside? Is it simply a reminder to their people of who's in charge, at this level of pettiness?

Imagine that the war of 1812 had resulted a complete British/Canadian conquest of the US, which lasted for the most of the 19th century. Then imagine that Florida had successfully seceded from the US after WWII and joined the Soviet Union, along with all of Canada. Then finally imagine that the Soviet Union won the Cold War and has been the sole world superpower for the last thirty years. How would we feel, in that w…

This is an incredibly tortured alternate history metaphor.

A much simpler real world analogy would be the DPRK forcing censorship of the South Korean flag, or the ROK doing the same to North Korea. Or something involving Israel and Iran. Or India and Pakistan.

Re: Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong

#180

Post by robocat »

briffle wrote: post #137
pradn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inside Microsoft, there's a whole database of geopolitically-sensitive issues that have been accrued over the years. You can see all sorts of border disputes and differences in language that you had to take into account when working on global products. On a related note, now you have movies with different scenes in China. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the_extra_looper_scenes_y https://kotaku.com/why-many-in-china-hat…

You have movies where the country of the 'bad guys' was changed in post-production to North Korea to appease China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn_(2012_film)

Fawlty Towers when dubbed in Spain changed Manuel (a dumb waiter from Barcelona I think) to be Mexican.
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