Re: Invisible characters must be specified to be visible in security-sensitive situations

[Eli Zaretskii via Unicode]

> Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:33:12 -0500
> From: Oren Watson via Unicode 
> 
> https://securelist.com/zero-day-vulnerability-in-telegram/83800/
> 
> You could disallow these characters in filenames, but when filename handling 
> is charset-agnostic due to the
> extended-ascii principle this is impractical. I think a better solution is to 
> specify a visible form of these
> characters to be used (e.g. through otf font variants) when security is of 
> importance.

Emacs has a special function that searches a given region of a buffer
of text or of a text string for characters whose Bidi_Class property
has been overridden by RLO or LRO.  Emacs application programs can use
this function to detect and flag such regions of text, and prevent
such malicious attacks.

Re: End of discussion, please — Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Anshuman Pandey wrote:

> I think it’s a good time to end this conversation. Whether ‘nonsense’ or not,
> emoji are here and they’re in Unicode. This conversation has itself become
> nonsense, d’y’all agree?

No.  Other than the part about emoji being here and in Unicode.

> The amount of time that people have spent on this discussion could’ve been
> directed towards work on any one of the unencoded scripts listed at:
>
>  http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_work_and_no_play_makes_Jack_a_dull_boy

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Phake Nick via Unicode]

2018-02-16 10:46, "James Kass"  wrote

Phake Nick wrote,

> By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
> themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
> voice recording for all the purposes. →_→

Not for me, I can still type faster than I can talk.  Besides, voice
recordings are all about communicating by stringing words together.


There are thousands of situations where one would want to express something
in text form instead of voice form other than to be fast. Voice
communication isn't just about communicating "string of words" together.
Emotion and any other rhibgs are also transferred. That's also why carriers
are supporting HQ Voice transmission over telephony system for better
clarity in this aspect.


>> These are rhetorical questions.
>
> Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
> voice based transmission system
> And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
> still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
> just to attend all different sort of meetings.

At least, that's what they tell their accountants and tax people, right?

Then why do those people who pay for their own trip still do so?

> […]

2018-02-16 11:27, "James Kass via Unicode"  wrote:

If someone were to be smiling and shrugging while giving you the
finger, would you be smiling too?

Heck, I'd probably be laughing out loud while running for my life!
So, poor example.  OK.  A smiling creep is still a creep.

This is an example of extravocal communication. If the person was sayong
thankyou with smiling face while giving you a middle finger, it would be
totally different context from a regular thank you goven by other people.


Suppose for a moment that you and I are pals in the same room having a
face-to-face conversation.  I advise you that, due to unforeseen
events, I'm a bit financially strapped and could use a spot of cash to
sort of tide me over until my ship comes into orbit.  You smile and
nod your head while saying "no".  Which response applies?

Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.

Then, what would be the feeling of the listener if he onky hear you say no
but didn't know about your facial and body reaction? They might not be able
to grasp the pevep of no you are giving out, and you would want to use some
rather lengthy description to explain to the person why you want to reject
him. Why do that when a simple non-verbal expression is enough?

An inability to communicate any essential feelings and overtones using
words is not a gross failure of either language or writing.  It's more
about the skill levels of the speaker, listener, author, and reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication


As for the thread title question, perhaps the exchanges within the
thread offer insight.  Emoji exist and are interchanged.  Unicode
enables them to be interchanged in a standard fashion.  Even if
they're just for fun, frivolous, silly, and ephemeral.  Even if some
people consider them beyond the scope of The Unicode Standard.  The
best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.

I would like to add that, if Unicode didn't include emoji at the time, then
I suspect many more systems will continue to use Shift-JIS instead.
Individual mobile phone carriers will continue to use each of their own
provate codepoints and app/platform developers either have to find a way to
convert between code point between different emoji being used (remember
implementation by each carriers don't strictly correspond to each other),
or invent yet another private use font to correspond to each of all those
emoji within their platform.

End of discussion, please — Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Anshuman Pandey via Unicode]

> On Feb 15, 2018, at 10:58 PM, Pierpaolo Bernardi via Unicode 
>  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 4:26 AM, James Kass via Unicode
>  wrote:
> 
>> The best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
>> 2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.
> 
> But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
> nonsense to what we already have got.

I think it’s a good time to end this conversation. Whether ‘nonsense’ or not, 
emoji are here and they’re in Unicode. This conversation has itself become 
nonsense, d’y’all agree?

The amount of time that people have spent on this discussion could’ve been 
directed towards work on any one of the unencoded scripts listed at:

 http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

As many have noted during this discussion, the emoji “ship has already sailed”. 
I’d’ve jumped aboard sooner, but this metaphor is now also quite tired. 

All my best,
Anshu

+1 (was: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?)

[Doug Ewell via Unicode]

Philippe Verdy wrote:


If people don't know how to read and cannot reuse the content and
transmit it, they become just consumers and in fact less and less
productors or creators of contents. Just look at opinions under
videos, most of them are just "thumbs up", "like", "+1", barely
counted only, unqualifiable (there's not even a thumb down).


+1 is actually a convenient shorthand when all that needs to be said is 
"I agree" or "me too" (especially now that the latter has taken on a 
highly charged meaning in the U.S.). It is especially popular in the 
IETF. It is not intended for situations that require explanation or 
details.


--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org 

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Pierpaolo Bernardi via Unicode]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 4:26 AM, James Kass via Unicode
 wrote:

> The best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
> 2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.

But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
nonsense to what we already have got.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

If someone were to be smiling and shrugging while giving you the
finger, would you be smiling too?

Heck, I'd probably be laughing out loud while running for my life!
So, poor example.  OK.  A smiling creep is still a creep.

Suppose for a moment that you and I are pals in the same room having a
face-to-face conversation.  I advise you that, due to unforeseen
events, I'm a bit financially strapped and could use a spot of cash to
sort of tide me over until my ship comes into orbit.  You smile and
nod your head while saying "no".  Which response applies?

Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.
An inability to communicate any essential feelings and overtones using
words is not a gross failure of either language or writing.  It's more
about the skill levels of the speaker, listener, author, and reader.

As for the thread title question, perhaps the exchanges within the
thread offer insight.  Emoji exist and are interchanged.  Unicode
enables them to be interchanged in a standard fashion.  Even if
they're just for fun, frivolous, silly, and ephemeral.  Even if some
people consider them beyond the scope of The Unicode Standard.  The
best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Phake Nick wrote,

> By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
> themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
> voice recording for all the purposes. →_→

Not for me, I can still type faster than I can talk.  Besides, voice
recordings are all about communicating by stringing words together.

>> These are rhetorical questions.
>
> Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
> voice based transmission system
> And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
> still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
> just to attend all different sort of meetings.

At least, that's what they tell their accountants and tax people, right?

> Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
> ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
> pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
> out.

Yes, it's a done deal.  For better or for worse.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 6:19 PM, Phake Nick via Unicode
 wrote:
>
>
> 2018-02-16 04:55, "James Kass via Unicode"  wrote:
>
> Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,
>
>> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
>> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
>> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.
>
> There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
> 'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
> emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
> was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
> novel.
>
> By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
> themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
> voice recording for all the purposes. →_→
>
>
>> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
>> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
>> bandwidth for, but which written communication
>> typically fails miserably at.
>
> Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
> telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
> at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
> and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
> These are rhetorical questions.
>
> Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
> voice based transmission system
> And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
> still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
> just to attend all different sort of meetings.
>
>
> For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
> age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
> themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
> they don't read much.  Sad!
>
> Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
> ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
> pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
> out.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Phake Nick via Unicode]

2018-02-16 04:55, "James Kass via Unicode"  wrote:

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
novel.

By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
voice recording for all the purposes. →_→


> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
> bandwidth for, but which written communication
> typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
voice based transmission system
And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
just to attend all different sort of meetings.


For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
they don't read much.  Sad!

Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
out.

Origin of Alphasyllabaries (was: Why so much emoji nonsense?)

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 21:49:57 +0100
Philippe Verdy via Unicode  wrote:

> The concept of vowels as distinctive letters came later, even the
> letter A was initially a representation of a glottal stop consonnant,
> sometimes mute, only written to indicate a word that did not start by
> a consonnant in their first syllable, letter. This has survived today
> in abjads and abugidas where vowels became optional diacritics, but
> that evolved as plain diacritics in Indic abugidas.

OK.

> The situation is even more complex because clusters of consonnants
> were also represented in early vowel-less alphabets to represent full
> syllables (this has formed the base of todays syllabaries when only
> some glyph variants of the base consonnant was introduced to
> distinguish their vocalization;

The only syllabary where what you say might be true is the Ethiopic
syllabary, and I have grave doubts as to that case.

I hope you are aware that most syllabaries do not derive from
alphabets, abjads or abugidas.

> Indic abugidas with their complex
> clusters where vowel diacritic create contextual variant forms of the
> base consonnant is also a remnant of this old age):

I see no reasons to regard consonant-vowel ligatures as going back to
an earlier system without dependent vowels.

> the separation of
> phonetic consonnants came only later.

Old Brahmi stacked consonants are generally very clear compositions.
Opaque ligatures are a later development.  Writing consonants linearly
is a later development; is this what you are referring to?

Richard.

Re: Invisible characters must be specified to be visible in security-sensitive situations

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

The suggested filename has no real importance, it could be garbage,
Displaying it exactly has no importance. What is important is to display
the MIME type (which is transmitted separately of the filemane, and
frequently as well without the filename, a browser trying to infer a
suitable filename from the URL, but it should respect the MIME type).

The acceptable MIME types (and especially here when they are executable
like here a javascript), should be clearly identified, and then the
file-extension removed from what is displayed when it matches the MIME
type. With these, the user would not be confused by the presence of a Bidi
override control
So.
  "photo_high_re"++"gnp.js"
becomes the text field (to embed in an isolate like )
  " photo_high_re"++"gnp (text/javascript)"
rendered as
  "photo_high_regnp" (text/javascript).
The browser may also be smarter by describing it as an executable script.
But here in an alert box, where it detects a potential harmful content, the
suggested filename to display should be simply filtered from these Bidi
controls, and the suggested file extension removed and replaced by the
default extension for the MIME type outside the isolate). The user would
then see;
  "photo_high_regnp.js" (text/javascript)
where the suggested filename was altered (in such alert, the suggested file
names should also be truncated to a maximum limit and an indication of the
truncation before the replaced extension, such as:
  "photo_high[...].js" (text/javascript)





As well the generic icon used is not enough descriptive and counter
productive as the user may think the icon is a preview of a PNG image,
that's why the MIOME type should be clearly exposed.


2018-02-15 23:33 GMT+01:00 Oren Watson via Unicode :

> https://securelist.com/zero-day-vulnerability-in-telegram/83800/
>
> You could disallow these characters in filenames, but when filename
> handling is charset-agnostic due to the extended-ascii principle this is
> impractical. I think a better solution is to specify a visible form of
> these characters to be used (e.g. through otf font variants) when security
> is of importance.
>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Philippe Verdy wrote,

>>> And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy
>>
>> Um, no. And not even literacy, either. ;-)
>
> Oh well the 1 to 2 T is a minor English typo (there's 2 T in French for the
> similar word family, sorry).
>
> But I included "IMHO", which means that even if it's not official, it has
> been the motivating reason why various members joined the project ...

In this case the punctuation emoticon tacked onto Ken's message
apparently did little to diminish the sting of his correcting both
your spelling and your opinion.

Unicode's stated mission is more along the lines of ensuring that
computer text can be universally interchanged in a standard fashion.
As a tool, Unicode can be used to promote either literacy or
illiteracy.  It can be used to exchange messages of joy and love, or
hatred and despair.

I completely agree that promoting literacy and preserving texts has
been a motivating factor for many people supporting the project.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

Oh well the 1 to 2 T is a minor English typo (there's 2 T in French for the
similar word family, sorry).

But I included "IMHO", which means that even if it's not official, it has
been the motivating reason why various members joined the project and try
to put an end to the destruction of written languages and loss of our
written heritage which is still the essential way to communicate for the
humanity (much more than oral languages that are all threatened of rapid
death and being fogotten if it's not written). Written languages easily
cross the borders, the generations, the cultures, with it you can extend
your own language and culture, and get more ideas, more inventions, you
better understand the world, and you have the mean to be more creative, and
not follow only what the most visible leaders are saying. Everywhere,
literacy is improving people life and offers more means of living. And it
really helps preserving your own personal memory (you do that with
photos/videos or audio which are almost impossible to organize without
attaching text to it)!


2018-02-15 23:41 GMT+01:00 Ken Whistler :

>
>
> On 2/15/2018 2:24 PM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
>
>> And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy
>>
>
> Um, no. And not even literacy, either. ;-)
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organizations_promoting_literacy
>
> --Ken
>
>
>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

[James Kass via Unicode]

I'd not've thought "I'd've" was proscribed.  Who woulda guessed?

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 2:35 PM, Shawn Steele via Unicode
 wrote:
> Depends on your perspective I guess ;)
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Unicode  On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham 
> via Unicode
> Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 2:31 PM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription
>
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:19 +
> Shawn Steele via Unicode  wrote:
>
>> I realize "I'd've" isn't
>> "right",
>
> Where did that proscription come from?  Is it perhaps a perversion of the 
> proscription of "I'd of"?
>
> Richard.
>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Richard Wordingham wrote,

>> Klingon and Ewellic.  [winks]
>
> But wasn't that using a supplementary standard, the ConScript Unicode
> Registry?

The code points registered with CSUR were used for the interchange.
But, to clarify, CSUR is not an official supplement to The Unicode
Standard.  Of course, any exchange of PUA data requires an agreement
between senders and recipients.  CSUR offers character mappings which
private individuals may agree to use for data exchange.

Re: Invisible characters must be specified to be visible in security-sensitive situations

[Nelson H. F. Beebe via Unicode]

A list poster reported this story today:

https://securelist.com/zero-day-vulnerability-in-telegram/83800/

For a view from the co-father of the Internet, see this recent article:

Desirable Properties of Internet Identifiers
Vinton G. Cerf
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/ic/2017/06/mic2017060063.html

---
- Nelson H. F. BeebeTel: +1 801 581 5254  -
- University of UtahFAX: +1 801 581 4148  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCBInternet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233   be...@acm.org  be...@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USAURL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
---

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 2/15/2018 2:24 PM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy 


Um, no. And not even literacy, either. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organizations_promoting_literacy

--Ken

RE: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

[Shawn Steele via Unicode]

Depends on your perspective I guess ;)

-Original Message-
From: Unicode  On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham via 
Unicode
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 2:31 PM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

On Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:19 +
Shawn Steele via Unicode  wrote:

> I realize "I'd've" isn't
> "right",

Where did that proscription come from?  Is it perhaps a perversion of the 
proscription of "I'd of"?

Richard.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 17:49:05 -0800
James Kass via Unicode  wrote:

> I've personally exchanged text data with others using the PUA for both
> Klingon and Ewellic.  [winks]

But wasn't that using a supplementary standard, the ConScript Unicode
Registry? 

Richard.

Invisible characters must be specified to be visible in security-sensitive situations

[Oren Watson via Unicode]

https://securelist.com/zero-day-vulnerability-in-telegram/83800/

You could disallow these characters in filenames, but when filename
handling is charset-agnostic due to the extended-ascii principle this is
impractical. I think a better solution is to specify a visible form of
these characters to be used (e.g. through otf font variants) when security
is of importance.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:19 +
Shawn Steele via Unicode  wrote:

> I realize "I'd've" isn't
> "right",

Where did that proscription come from?  Is it perhaps a perversion of
the proscription of "I'd of"?

Richard.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

2018-02-15 22:38 GMT+01:00 Shawn Steele via Unicode :

>
> I don't find emoji to necessarily be a "post-literate" thing.  Just a
> different way of communicating.  I have also seen them used in a
> "pre-literate" fashion.  Helping people that were struggling to learn to
> read get past the initial difficulties they were having on their way to
> becoming more literate.
>

If you just look at how more and more people "communicate" today on the
Internet, it's only by video, most of them of poor quality and actually no
graphic value at all where a single photo of the speaker on his profile
would be enough. So the web is overwhelmed now by poor videos just
containing speech, with very low value.

But the worse is that this fabulous collection is almost impossible to
qualify, sort, organize, it is not reusable, almost not transmissible
(except on the social network where they are posted and where they'll soon
disappear because there's simply no way to build efficient archives that
would be usable in some near future: just a haystack where even the
precious gold needles are extremely difficult to find.

If people don't know how to read and cannot reuse the content and transmit
it, they become just consumers and in fact less and less productors or
creators of contents. Just look at opinions under videos, most of them are
just "thumbs up", "like", "+1", barely counted only, unqualifiable (there's
not even a thumb down). Even these terms are avoided on the interface and
you just see an icon for the counter: do you have something to learn when
seeing these icons?

I fear that those in the near futuyre that won't be able to read and will
only be able to listen the medias produced by others, will not even be able
to make any judgement, and then will be easily manipulated.

And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy because it
is necessary for preserving, transmitting, and expanding the cultures, as
well as reconciliate peopel with sciences instead of just following the
voice of new gurus only because they look "fun".

RE: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Shawn Steele via Unicode]

For voice we certainly get clues about the speaker's intent from their tone.  
That tone can change the meaning of the same written word quite a bit.  There 
is no need for video to wildly change the meaning of two different readings of 
the exact same words.

Writers have always taken liberties with the written word to convey ideas that 
aren't purely grammatically correct.  This may be most obvious in poetry, but 
it happens even in other writings.  Maybe their entire reason was so that 
future English teachers would ask us why some author chose some peculiar 
structure or whatever.

I find it odd that I write things like "I'd've thought" (AFAIK I hadn't been 
exposed to I'd've and it just spontaneously occurred, but apparently others 
(mis)use it as well).  I realize "I'd've" isn't "right", but it better conveys 
my current state of mind than spelling it out would've.  Similarly, if I find 
myself smiling internally while I'm writing, it's going to get a :)

Though I may use :), I agree that most of my use of emoji is more decorative, 
however including other emoji can also make the sentence feel more "fun".  

If I receive a  as the only response to a comment I made, that conveys 
information that I would have a difficult time putting into words.

I don't find emoji to necessarily be a "post-literate" thing.  Just a different 
way of communicating.  I have also seen them used in a "pre-literate" fashion.  
Helping people that were struggling to learn to read get past the initial 
difficulties they were having on their way to becoming more literate.

-Shawn

-Original Message-
From: Unicode  On Behalf Of James Kass via Unicode
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 12:53 PM
To: Ken Whistler 
Cc: Erik Pedersen ; Unicode Public 
Subject: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another major hole in 
> written communication -- the need to convey emotional state and 
> affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which 'speak for 
themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that emoticons were invented for 
much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's novel.

> This is the kind of information that face-to-face communication has a 
> huge and evolutionarily deep bandwidth for, but which written 
> communication typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for telephone 
or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics and hand 
gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate age.  We 
already have people in positions of power who pride themselves on their 
marginal literacy and boast about the fact that they don't read much.  Sad!

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
novel.

> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
> bandwidth for, but which written communication
> typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
they don't read much.  Sad!

Re: Unicode of Death 2.0

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

That's probably not a bug of Unicode but of MacOS/iOS text renderers with
some fonts using advanced composition feature.

Similar bugs could as well the new advanced features added in Windows or
Android to support multicolored emojis, variable fonts, contextual glyph
transforms, style variants, or more font formats (not just OpenType); the
bug may also be in the graphic renderer (incorrect clipping when drawing
the glyph into the glyph cache, with buffer overflows possibly caused by
incorrectly computed splines), and it could be in the display driver (or in
the hardware accelerator having some limitations on the compelxity of
multipolygons to fill and to antialias), causing some infinite recursion
loop, or too deep recursion exhausting the stack limit;

Finally the bug could be in the OpenType hinting engine moving some points
outside the clipping area (the math theory may say that such plcement of a
point outside the clipping area may be impossible, but various mathematical
simplifcations and shortcuts are used to simplify or accelerate the
rendering, at the price of some quirks. Even the SVG standard (in constant
evolution) could be affected as well in its implementation.

There are tons of possible bugs here.

2018-02-15 18:21 GMT+01:00 James Kass via Unicode :

> This article:
> https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/iphone-text-bomb-ios-
> mac-crash-apple/?ncid=mobilenavtrend
>
> The single Unicode symbol referred to in the article results from a
> string of Telugu characters.  The article doesn't list or display the
> characters, so Mac users can visit the above link.  A link in one of
> the comments leads to a page which does display the characters.
>

Unicode of Death 2.0

[James Kass via Unicode]

This article:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/iphone-text-bomb-ios-mac-crash-apple/?ncid=mobilenavtrend

The single Unicode symbol referred to in the article results from a
string of Telugu characters.  The article doesn't list or display the
characters, so Mac users can visit the above link.  A link in one of
the comments leads to a page which does display the characters.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Christoph Päper via Unicode]

James Kass via Unicode :
> Martin J. Dürst 
>
>> The original Japanese cell phone carrier emoji where defined in the
>> unassigned area of Shift_JIS, not Unicode.
> 
> Thank you (and another list member) for reminding that it was
> originally hacked SJIS rather than proper PUA Unicode.

Japanese telcos were also not the first to use this space for pictographs and 
ideographs. Look at Sharp electronic typewriters from the early 1990s for 
instance (which can also be considered laptop computers), e.g. WD-A521 or 
WD-A551 or WD-A750. They already included much of what later became J-Phone / 
Vodafone / Softbank emojis.