Hey Apple, Get out of Gun Control!
“Apple’s new suite of operating systems appears to replace its pistol emoji, which was an image of a six-shooter, with a squirt gun,” Jonathan Zittrain writes for The New York Times. “Apple hasn’t said why it would be making this change, but this summer, along with Microsoft, the company lobbied Unicode, the nonprofit consortium that decides which emojis should exist, against adding a separate rifle. For those emojis Unicode has already approved, like gun, it’s up to each company to create a picture for it.”
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“Apple’s change is ill considered because it breaks the conceptual compatibility that Unicode is meant to establish. Anyone with an iPhone ought to be able to send a message to someone with another company’s products — like Google or Microsoft or Samsung — and have what’s delivered communicate the same idea as what’s sent,” Zittrain writes. “But with this change, a squirt gun sent from an iPhone will turn into a handgun when received by an Android device, and vice versa.”
Full article here.