The following story was forwarded to me. The "offending" characters in question are, I take it, the left-facing and right-facing swastika symbols, often used in Tibetan, found among the Chinese ideographs at U+534D (yung-drung-chi-khor) and U+5350 (yung-drung-nang-khor).
I hope that this story is not true.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=582&e=1&u=/nm/20031212/wr_nm/tech_microsoft_swastika_dc
I also hope it isn't true.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I find myself thinking that the swastika, THE Nazi swastika, right-facing, tilted 45Â, proper ratio of stroke-thickness, the whole deal, should be encoded in Unicode. As a matter of history: it *is* a symbol of profound significance in the history of the world. If we have U+262D HAMMER AND SICKLE and U+262E PEACE SYMBOL and all the various crosses and crescents and whatnot, the swastika should be there as well.
And me, an Orthodox Jew, whose extended family was decimated in the Holocaust. Like I said, it's embarrassing.
In the meantime, I'm wondering if/when hate groups online will discover U+5350 and if they'll use it (being, as it is, a product of another culture). I did a Google search on it a few weeks ago and found no use (yet) by such groups.
~mark
