Microsoft Swaps Toy Gun Emoji For Revolver -- Days After Apple Does the Opposite (arstechnica.co.uk) 331
The pistol emoji has become a heated topic of debate among people. Apple's decision to replace the gun with a toy pistol is getting a mixed response. Amid all this, Microsoft has announced it is replacing the toy gun emoji with a symbol for a real revolver. ArsTechnica reports: This emoji change is part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which is rolling out now. The move has surprised some, as Microsoft and Apple had been seen as allies in an effort to dial down violence in emoji generally. In June it emerged that the two had successfully lobbied to have a sports rifle removed from the latest collection of emoji, as it was felt that two firearm symbols would be too many.Microsoft says it is only trying "to align with the global Unicode standard." The issue is that despite Apple's thought on the matter, when an iPhone (or iPad or a Mac) user sends a water pistol emoji, people with devices running non-Apple OS are only going to see a regular pistol. The article adds: Analysts had been worried that without standardisation between platforms, intent for violent emoji could be misunderstood. For instance, if someone sent an acquaintance a message using their iPhone offering to come around with some friends and some waterguns, that acquaintance might well misunderstand the thrust of the message if they were using an Android phone and saw a series of pistols.Emojipedia, an emoji reference website has a good suggestion: Apple: Don't change the pistol emoji. At least not today. Hide it. Unicode does not depreciate emojis, but there is no requirement to show all approved emojis on the keyboard. The pistol emoji could be removed from the iOS emoji keyboard without causing any cross platform compatibility issues.
B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!! (Score:4, Insightful)
"We must take away your rights because I don't like them!"
The cry of the SJW!
Your rights are subordinate to weakling's feelings!
Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!! (Score:5, Funny)
Come on now, everyone knows that seeing a cartoonish depiction of a gun in a text message will turn a person into a violent psycho :)
Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!! (Score:5, Funny)
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Emoji guns don't kill people. Emoji bullets do.
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Indeed.
Stupid Justice Whiners have nothing better to do.
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Totemism! It's OK when we do it.
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This has literally nothing to do with rights, or whiney SJW types. It's just two companies making decisions.
And just who the hell do you think is driving such decisions?
Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's lawyers, you godamn partisan idiot.
And what is motivating Apple's lawyers to care? You can throw up any number of proximate causes, but the root cause is people freaking out about guns being scary.
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No, it's just liability as there is established legal precedent for damages from failing to report threats, and Apple is avoiding the backlash. Idiot.
Cite one case. Just one.
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I get far more asinine emoji shit from older people than younger ones. The kids just don't care while the adults find it 'cute'.
This makes as much sense as putting in a censor to replace the WORD gun with ***. Because you know, all the major terror threats and such were emoji filled, and if we banned emoji those threats could never be made.
Parents get upset, parents sue? Simple solution: toss the case out without merit, and nail the family with costs of both sides and the court. Seriously, if
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While we're at it, remove that nuclear family one, that's harassment of split families and orphans. Might accidentally send it to a kid with two dads and it taken as homophobia. Or a mixed race kid and be racist 'purism' taunting. Remove the sun emoji too, that's a threat to torture albinos. Think the cookie emoji might contain nuts...that's a d
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And the root cause of people being scared of guns is guns killing so many people.
"So if guns kill people, pencils misspell words, cars drive drunk and spoons make people fat" - I have no idea who wrote that but I think they have a point.
Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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This has literally nothing to do with rights, or whiney SJW types. It's just two companies making decisions.
No, it's the SJW whiners within companies making decisions.
Re:B-b-b-but GUNZ is SKEEERY!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Arrggggg Emoji politics. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really the fact that we have Emojis is bad enough having news stories about them is just too much to take.
Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics. (Score:5, Funny)
Then of course we have design by committee emoji's, each trying to reflecting a political interpretation of the emoji, justified by possible idiot interpretations of a pictograph. These people must live in some pretty sheltered places, because they have apparently not yet conceived of idiots powerful enough to misinterpret just about any emoji in a fatally mistaken way. We know these idiots exist, we see them every day. Usually in traffic.
I think we should simply remove weapons and weapon words from the english language. This should surely create a safer society.
The game is control (Score:2)
Bread and Circuses work pretty well, but you have also have to keep the service angry with each other or they turn on you. This is well known strategy dating back as far as we know. Plato and Aristotle hinted at it a bit, but "The Prince" laid it out in plain view. The politics of graphics is simply a narrative to keep the peons busy.
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Just have blank squares and then the users can draw whatever they like in those squares. Custom pictograms instead of some so-called "standards" organization constantly trying to update to the ever changing fashions. The other benefit is that it's faster to draw a detailed picture than to find the emjoi you want while scrolling through the millions that will soon be available.
Mhy other suggestions is about sending smells over the phone, but that's a topic for another thread.
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I think we should simply remove weapons and weapon words from the english language. This should surely create a safer society.
That's actually a great idea. Can't ban something that you can't refer to in legislation! :D
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Can you point to examples of them actually being used to communicate useful ideas, other than just being ways to punctuate other test in strange ways? What about medium ideas, like "I'll meet you at the lawyer's office at 3:30"? Or complex ideas, like "the relative speed of the object combined with gravitational constant and the radius of the earth indicates it will miss the batter's box resulting in a 0.002 reduction his batting average, thus forfeiting the chance for inclusion All Stars game."
What is th
Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics. (Score:5, Interesting)
Do people really use emoji's instead of words and expect to be clearly understood?
I would think that the intent of emoji's (like the name sort of implies) is to convey emotional content and not literal content.
If you are typing "Come over this weekend, bring (pistol emoji) and we will have fun" then you are doing it wrong. You have left a key part of your instructions open to interpretation.
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Do people really use emoji's instead of words and expect to be clearly understood?
Yes, many people do that. But we still need to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. There is no need for Emoji's containing assault weapons or IEDs. Emoji's should be declared "critical infrastructure" and placed under the jurisdiction of the DHS.
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Re: Arrggggg Emoji politics. (Score:2)
I would imagine that if you are in the middle of a murder trial of a pig farmer who may have sent a threatening text... That they've got more than just that on the accused.
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The fact that the defendant is, in fact, a pig farmer, is overlooked in the capital murder trial.
That was a really bad example. The worst serial killer in Canadian history was a pig farmer [washingtonpost.com] - and he was feeding the women he killed to his pigs.
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He never used a gun though.
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He may have used a water pistol, it's not clear.
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Re:Arrggggg Emoji politics. (Score:5, Funny)
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I for one can't wait to see how our language evolves with emojis. Smiley face, wink, smiling turd.
When Craig Federighi of Apple was showing-off the ridiculous amount of non-textual SMS enhancements in iOS 10 (and macOS Sierra?) during the 2016 WWDC Keynote (at Time-Index 1:26:06 [youtube.com]), one of which allows for easy substitution of Emojii in a Text Msg, he half-jokingly quipped something like "Children of the Next generation aren't going to have any idea about the English Language."
I'll bet he got called on the carpet for that afterward; but he's right.
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This makes me sad (Score:2, Funny)
My best friend was killed by a gun emoji.
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he noncompliant with the cop emoji, had it coming
slashdot massacre (Score:3)
ðY" ðY"! ðY"ðY"ðY"!
ðY"ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY"ðY"!
ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY"ðY" ! ðY"ðY"ðY"
ðY"ðY" ðY" ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY"ðY" ðY" ðY" ðY"!
ðY"ðY"ðY"! ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"ðY"!
ðY"!
Windows 10 (Score:2, Funny)
If you use windows 10 you probably want a gun close.
Emojis part of unicode to begin with (Score:5, Insightful)
TL;DR I hate emojis and everyone that uses them.
Re:Emojis part of unicode to begin with (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been done to death, even on /. and even by old guys like yours truly who don't use them much themselves. :-) and suchlike. The thing is, coding them as three characters that have fuck all to do with its semantics is insane (why has also been done to death here), hence the need for emoji. They're symbolic, discrete, or at least discrete enough, meaningful, usually part of plain text, so they should be in Unicode. /.) but not having emoji in Unicode at all is a non-starter.
There are essentially three intertwined reasons.
1 - Unicode, seeking transcoding compatibility with dingbat fonts includes a lot of dingbats. Although there are many of these, there are somewhat standardised collections and inclusion of standard dingbats in Unicode is useful.
2 - Unicode, seeking transcoding compatibility with (mainly) Japanese mobile phone character sets, includes many of their legacy characters. This is important because Unicode must support them if it is to be adopted and achieve its goal of improving international text interoperability.
3 - Text has always missed some side channels. We ourselves of course know this, otherwise we wouldn't type
That doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything emoji-related (nor with their over-reporting on
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However, I remember Unicode as saying they didn't want any jurisdiction over the actual glyphs used. I don't know what the emoji's Unicode name is, but if two entities display them differently that should be just fine.
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It's ironic that Unicode does so much to support Japanese emoji, but so little to support the actual written language.
Unicode has largely failed in East Asia, because it just doesn't work. A Chinese airline will never use Unicode, because it can't encode their Japanese and Korean customer's names, and even some Chinese ones.
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Agree. http://imgur.com/a/JpsM2 [imgur.com]
Re: Emojis part of unicode to begin with (Score:2)
lighten up, Francis.
besides, people have been adding tiny drawings to their written text for centuries, until the adoption of the printing press, which made it largely impractical for various technical reasons.
technology is catching up and people are using tiny drawings again - its not such a huge deal and certainly not something to spend your hate on. 8-8
How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence? (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell are gun emojis tied to violence? I'm a pretty liberal guy, but this is liberalism going crazy. Removing characters from our language is not going to make the world more or less peaceful (and I'm sorry, but now emojis for better or worse, are part of our language). This is some crazy 1984 New Speak stuff.
I am seriously frustrated by this, same as you. When I read "dial down violence in emojii" I thought I was caught some sort of Kafkaesque tyranny of the perpetually offended. I mean seriously, the fact that people get worked up over this is about as laughable as people getting worked up over the old Looney Toons bits with Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote or with Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny (that one usually featured an actual firearm, <GASP>).
An emojii is literally a cartoon depiction. The world has much bigger problems. For example, real violence.
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Obviously gun emojis don't cause violence. But there are lots of people willing to make violent threats on the Internet. We don't need another semi-cutesy way for douchebags to say "maybe I'm threatening to kill you but I dare you to prove it".
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No one can shoot you through the internet. Free speech, on the other hand, if a fundamental right that is quite important on the internet.
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But threats are not free speech.
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Credible threats are not free speech. We already have laws for that, and it's orthogonal to pistol emojis. I get it, you hate guns and want to censor everything you don't like. Fortunately, on both counts, we haven't quite given up all our rights yet.
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Wrong. I like guns a lot and censorship not at all. Freely choosing not to add new ways to threaten people is not censorship. If Apple wants to add 1000 gun emojis, they should feel free to do that. I support their decision not to though, because Internet threats are a problem and they're helping to avoid making it worse.
When people act responsibly, like Apple is doing, it shows how governments shouldn't be empowered to censor because it's a power they simply don't need.
I don't think we should have poli
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You have an amazingly thin-skinned idea of "new ways to threaten people" if you think a freaking emoji rises to the level of threat where censorship makes sense. And if it somehow did, how would a water pistol, or any number of other emojis, not work just as well - if we're being that thin skinned? Is it somehow different from just linking a picture of a gun?
Why create this new potential problem when you can just decide not to?
I just fail to any any problem here. I don't see any marginal harm, or ability to threaten, over what the platform already provides.
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You can't imagine ways to threaten people with gun emojis? Other people can. Still others can decide there's a threat when no threat was intended. Emojis are unclear that way.
And no, I don't think people who issue threats of violence should be censored. I think they should be arrested and charged. But not by accident because some government people overreacted to some emojis -- that's why we're better off without new ambiguously threatening symbols.
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You can't imagine ways to threaten people with gun emojis?
Quite the reverse - if you already have eleventy ways to threaten someone, maybe let's not get so worked up over way eleventy-one.
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Child-proof the world, eh? I suppose you feel similarly about violent video games. Apple can do whatever, it's their walled garden, but I'm going to criticize them for reducing freedom no matter how much profit it brings them.
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I'm completely failing to see what using a different glyph for a Unicode code point has to do with reducing freedom. The Second Amendment doesn't cover the right to use more dangerous-looking emoji, and the First doesn't include a right to have your writings reproduced exactly as you like them.
sapir whorf (Score:2)
The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was.
But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals.
Go forth and kill!
May the blessings of Zardoz be upon you.
As noted by other japes above, we also need a penis emoji. And a big flying stone head one. U+1F5FF doesn't cut it.
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http://kweapons.wikia.com/wiki/Glorious_Murder_Cube
War is the way of Man. Man is the means of War. You allow us War. Our worship is our readiness.
It is proper to adhere to our nature, Aggression is natural, We are meant to be aggressive.
Through war we are purified, Through slaughter we are enlightened, I cast thee, Nex Alea, May fortune find strength in me, So that my weaknesses be absolved.
Saluto Nex Alea.
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Making threats easier to make increases the number of threats
Some points:
A - The purported purpose is to reduce violence, not reduce threats.
B - How does a gun emoji make it "easier" or encourage people to make threats when they can just type "gun", or "I'm gonna shoot you"?
C - Even assuming there is a link (which I don't think there is), how can that possibly be more important than censorship?
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this is about preventing issues arising from careless misuse of encapsulated messages with legal implications.
So we have to limit language in order to prevent people from using it "carelessly"? This is censorship in it's clearest form.
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are you pushing to ban violent words and words for weapons too?
You SJW types are not part of the normal human race, a life of leisure in front of a keyboard and screen has detached you from the realm of normal humans.
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You have not a shred of proof that "threats in common usage" lead to violence on the internet. Logic fails you, you do not have the common sense of a normal human. Nor was Apple's decision in any way related to " careless misuse of encapsulated messages with legal implications", you made that up.
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I side with Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
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Funny. You speak like this has not already happened.
We have seen cases of people in private businesses being forced out not because of how well the run the company, but because of their private political view.
We have seen schools censor the "wrong kind" of political speech. This extends not only to students, but also to professors.
Thoughtcrime is a real crime these days. You have to fit in with the majority or you are ostracized.
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The only standard that works is whether the person making the statement or doing an act intended it to offend. Unfortunately, this is hard to prove since you can't see what's going on in a person's head, and (if we ban ac
Standards and Definition (Score:5, Informative)
Unicode defines [unicode.org] the glyph (U+1F52B in the "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs" block) as "pistol" with the keywords "gun, handgun, pistol, revolver, tool, weapon." This is unambiguously not a symbol for a toy. Apple is in the wrong here for not adhering to standards, but being wrong and not adhering to standards has never stopped them before, so this shouldn't really be a surprise.
Why are emojis so important? (Score:2)
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I still can't figure out why they are so important. I have never used one myself. I don't see how they add any value to a conversation.
They can be useful when people who don't speak a common language too well still communicate. I had to explain aubergine to someone who knew it as eggplant, so I put the emoticon in the text. (And received "eeewwww, Barney's penis?" back, but that's beside the point)
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I still can't figure out why they are so important. I have never used one myself. I don't see how they add any value to a conversation.
They can be useful when people who don't speak a common language too well still communicate.
I could see that being useful, but how did you get that person's phone number if you don't speak their language? What were you hoping to talk about on the phone?
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They are sort of a hassle to use as well.
Sometimes I will get an emoji "suggestion" after I type a word... what use is that? So that I can say the same word twice? By the time I type the word, I don't need the shortcut of the emoji any more.
Also, to sort through the list of available emojis is just dumb. I can type what I want to say much faster.
It's time for the NRA to create some emojis (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps at some point Unicode might realise the fucking lunacy allowing emojis into their system in the first place.
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Any anyway, where's Klingon?
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I am frankly surprised the world has gone on so long without a goat.csx emoji.
Hieroglyphics (Score:2)
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Don't worry. I am sure we will get there as soon as we have direct brain-to-brain communications. Words are just so damned inefficient.
When Are We Getting the AK-47 Emoji (Score:2)
For when you are feeling really anti-social!
In a standards-based world shouldn't we have an icon for the most numerous gun-type on the planet?
This is what ruins emoji (Score:3)
You find a nice Emoji you want to send only to come to realize person receiving is likely to see something completely different than what you intended assuming it will even render properly on the target device at all.
They change between operating systems and even within versions of the same operating system. What looked awesome or conveyed an idea on earlier versions of Android looks like shit in later versions of Android. What looked awesome on Android looks like shit or barely even legible on iPhone or WP receiving it.
Emoji smileys all look like bloated gummy turds as is. Between PC BS and constant reskinning to go with "design language" of the day I don't see any hope or future in Emoji. Given the current trajectory there will be some embedded reference that takes over from Unicode and with it an end to death by committee.
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Yep.
I got a sad looking one from a lady friend. She sent me a screenshot of a surprised one. Completely bonkers honestly. What's the point in having some standard if it changes so frequently between phones and operating systems?
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So emoji, which arguably ought to be pixel-perfect, are being subject to local interpretation. HTML, which was originally conceived of as being subject to local interpretation, was pressed into pixel perfection by the web design community.
The solution? Web over emoji, and emoji over HTML. Get cracking, coders.
Tim Cook says (Score:2)
Hear that? (Score:2)
*snicker*
Don't use emoji if meaning is important (Score:2)
All the emoji have this problem. My wife and I were comparing the emoticons as they appear in different messaging apps on our phones. There are subtle differences in emoji art that made us interpret the messages differently. Is that emoji confused or frustrated? There's another grin with teeth showing that could mean "Super happy and proud" but a slight artistic change makes it look shiftier, meaning "whoops..ehhh...ummm... I did it anyway. Oh well!"
In the immortal words of the comic book guy: "There i
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Garr'dock!
Still no emoji/unicode on Slashdot (Score:3)
And yet I still can't post Emoji here because Slashdot doesn't support Unicode, even after SoylentNews led the way showing how to do so for the same software over a year ago.
If I post a pistol emoji, it looks like this: ðY"
Emoji may not be something most of us like, but they make a great test for seeing if a site supports unicode or not.
Or just respect peoples' intelligence... (Score:2)
...and let them choose their own damn emojis.
Dueling slogans (Score:3)
Apple: Aim Different.
Microsoft: Who Do You Want to Shoot Today?
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In terms of what the future will be like, the Jetsons is far more realistic than Star Trek.
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Are those in the "global Unicode standard"?
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They definitely should be!
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They are emojis.... it doesn't matter what the picture is... they are all used in a playful manner...
Who has a serious conversation in emojis? I would say it is impossible unless both people are already in the same phase of life and/or are good friends.
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Speak for yourselves, when I get a text from my G's and I bring a water pistol to a gun fight, I'm going to briefly be pretty damn mad.
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So does saying "let's go to the mall and have some fun - bring your gun" or "let's go shoot people" or simply "I'm going to kill you".
How do you suppose we solve that "problem"?
Word substitution, of course! Doh!
Which is why we get gems like "buttbuttination" and "slippery Asian".
We can certainly do s/gun/waterpistol/g too - what could possibly go wrong?
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*Ahem!*
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!
wow, that's just... awful. disregard. (Score:2)