9 ms·

In the Latest Version of macOS, Macs Sold in China Cannot Display Taiwanese Flag

122 points by miles 8y ago

josteink 8y ago
Seems like someone is about to be “liberated”?
CompuHacker 8y ago
Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics? People with out of date versions of OSX may now be subjected to more scrutiny. Apple may have made an undocumented decision (or introduced a bug) that could cause death.
- 13of40 8y ago
  > Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics? Not completely unheard of... https://emojipedia.org/pistol/ https://emojipedia.org/pistol/
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    Doesn't really count as "breaking Unicode".
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      Perhaps China can give Taiwan the finger without "breaking unicode" by simply demanding that fonts including the Taiwanese flag use a glyph that reads "One China Policy".
      - seba_dos1 8y ago
        Toy pistol is still a pistol, so everything's alright. You'd have to replace the glyph with something that can still be considered Taiwanese flag.
        darkpuma 8y ago
        Frankly that's an abuse of language. If you were to say > "In the UK, it is legal for children to buy pistols" Everybody would call you nuts. If you then smirked and said that water pistols are pistols, they'd groan at you.
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        No, now that's an abuse of logic and intention. We're talking about symbolic pictograms here, not laws. Just as you can depict emoticons by using humans, robots, colorful blobs or martians, you can depict pistols as toys, futuristic laser blowers, steampunk machinery or wild west revolvers. It's a symbol and you're free to show it any way you want.
        darkpuma 8y ago
        We're talking about language, not cars. It's no different than if all the emoticons for cars were modified to be RC cars with large antennas surrounded by lighting bolts to signify that they're receiving radio transmissions. An RC car "is a car" a hypothetical you might protest, but a toy car is not the same in substance as "a car" in much the same way that a toy pistol is not the same in substance as "a pistol." Perhaps one day moralizing tech companies might even take this seriously and revise fonts to denormalize personal car ownership for the noble cause of environmental protection. Is that ridiculous? No moreso I'd argue than depicting all handguns as squirt guns.
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        Depicting "car" emoji as a toy car would be perfectly fine and within the artistic license of font makers. Just as depicting a toy gun is.
        13of40 8y ago
        Imagine if they decided to turn the LGBT rainbow icon into a couple of hands holding each other, not to enhance the meaning of the glyph, but to, you know, protect children from gay ideas and make it harder for people to communicate about LGBT issues. Is that fair play? To me it sounds like somewhere between how dictionaries used to censor naughty words and 1984's newspeak.
- majewsky 8y ago
  This is not "breaking Unicode". They're just using a different font. (Not trying to pass moral/political judgment, but let's please get the facts straight.)
  - CompuHacker 8y ago
    Noted.
benj111 8y ago
Who even thinks up this stuff? Why? Yeah I get "to de legitimise the Taiwanese govt", 1984 Newspeak, etc. But people are going to convey the idea one way or another. Its just petty and pointless. I suppose you could say that about a lot of censorship, but this just takes it to an extra level.
- dis-sys 8y ago
  what they didn't tell you is the fact that the current government in Taiwan also refuse to display this exact same flag. I posted links in my reply this thread, don't get too shocked when you read the full story. The real question to be asked is why people always tell the censored version of the story in line with their political stands.
  - benj111 8y ago
    From what I can read (wikipedia) your links say the opposite. "The flag has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan", "found in numerous government offices in Taiwan and is that which the President and Vice President face to take the oath of office". So what is your political 'stand' in this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Chin...
- theobeers 8y ago
  It's a bit like the efforts of the Iranian government to force people to use the term "Persian Gulf" rather than "Arabian Gulf." They passed a law in 2010 that was supposed to ban any international airline from Iranian airspace, if it referred to the body of water as the "Arabian Gulf" in its in-flight maps or other public displays. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-airlines-persian-gulf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-airlines-...
  - aaomidi 8y ago
    I don't think these are similar at all honestly
Sniffnoy 8y ago
Non-mobile link: https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025 https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025
dis-sys 8y ago
The title is misleading at best - the concerned flag is not Taiwanese flag, it is called the Flag of the Republic of China [1]. It is the flag refused to be displayed even by the current government of Republic of China, e.g. the government of Republic of China recently proposed to remove the exact same flag from its national ID card [2], the Republic of China government also refused to display this flag during its most recent national day celebration [3]. The flag used by those Pro-independence organizations[4], usually called the Taiwanese Flag, is vastly different and never got accepted by the mainstream to start with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China [2] https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/ https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/ [3] https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223 https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan
- theobeers 8y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry that you cited, and it begins, "The flag of the Republic of China is the national flag of Taiwan…" edit: Is the technicality simply that the ROC flag was originally used on the mainland?
  - laurent123456 8y ago
    The Republic of China was founded in China but then they lost the war against the communists and fled to Taiwan. So that's why they kept on using the ROC flag there. China doesn't recognise this flag since they consider that Taiwan is part of China. There's also a movement within Taiwan to change the flag but they probably won't do it because China would see that as a move towards independence, and could retaliate.
- creato 8y ago
  Nothing I can read supports your claims. To the contrary, wikipedia says: > The flag has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan. The hoisting and lowering of the flag are ceremoniously accompanied by the National Banner Song while those present stand at attention to give a standard salute with the right hand, held flat, to the right eyebrow. Schoolchildren have traditionally been required to attend morning rallies where the flag is raised after a rendition of the National Anthem of the Republic of China. Before martial law was lifted in 1987 in Taiwan, it was required that all vehicles be halted when passing by a flag ceremony.
miles 8y ago
Turns out this has been going on for some time: Can't see this emoji (Taiwanese Flag) on macOS https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-this-emoji-on-macos https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-th... You can’t use the Taiwan flag emoji on a Chinese iPhone https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on-a-chinese-iphone/ https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on...
fouc 8y ago
Will Macs Sold in Taiwan have the reverse problem?
- warp_factor 8y ago
  probably not. After spending an extensive amount of time in Mainland China and Taiwan, it is fascinating to see how one country initially evolved in two separate countries based on different ideologies. I would go as far as to say that if you want to see what communism and capitalism do to a country, those two are a perfect example.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    The communism capitalism dichotomy masks a lot of subtlety, including: China’s market reforms, Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military dictatorship during much of its economic development, the relative sizes of the two countries, China interfering with Taiwan’s economy, etc I say this because Taiwan isn’t doing as hot in economic development compared to China costal cities in recent years, but much of that comes from a myriad of other reasons besides “communism is better than capitalism”.
    - warp_factor 8y ago
      I agree with you completely, it is a simplistic example of course. But spending multiple weeks in each you can have a feel for the culture of each place, the way people behave, their level of education etc etc.
      - heavenlyblue 8y ago
        You agree with the parent completely, yet continue making exactly the same point you made before.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      > "Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military dictatorship during much of its economic development," Not unlike South Korea, incidentally. A running series of military coups until quite recently. Please do not confuse the above as praise for the DPRK, which like the PRC, operates concentration camps for political dissidents.
Someone 8y ago
Bad, but also ‘just’ an extension of ‘tweaking’ maps by changing country names and borders, something every map maker that wants to have global presence has to do. For example, see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10/google-maps-disputed-territories-palestineishere https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10... (found by googling “map borders change depending on location”)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
carlob 8y ago
> We are locked :( I will never buy any China model of any Apple product again. I wonder if anyone else can see the cognitive dissonance of this half-assed Boycott...
dukoid 8y ago
Well if mainland China sees Taiwan as a (temporarily lost) "province", why can't it have a flag? Don't other Chinese provinces not have a flag?
- smcl 8y ago
  Ok let’s not forget that it’s also the flag of the Republic of China - so the other side of the revolution from the current government. I was gonna say something like “what if a US state had the same flag as the UK or the CSA” but then I remembered Hawaii and Mississippi feature them :-)
- taejo 8y ago
  No, Chinese provinces don't have flags. The SARs do; municipalities have theoretically not been allowed to have their own flags since 1997, but several are still using flags from before then and others have adopted flags since then.
9999px 8y ago
It's not as bad as it looks – he clarifies the situation in later tweets: "The region you choose on the setup assistant will stay unchanged untill [sic] you reinstall the OS. I saw users who bought the Chinese model set the initial region to elsewhere, thus 🇹🇼 is properly displayed on their Mac and the 10.14.4 upgrade won’t affect them." "So again there's no hardware lock. It has nothing to do with T2 chips. The only thing that changed is the mechanism macOS use to detect regions. You are still in control of your China model Macbooks." https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056 https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056

122 points by miles 8y ago

Seems like someone is about to be “liberated”?

Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics? People with out of date versions of OSX may now be subjected to more scrutiny. Apple may have made an undocumented decision (or introduced a bug) that could cause death.

13of40 8y ago
> Selectively break Unicode without warning because... politics? Not completely unheard of... https://emojipedia.org/pistol/ https://emojipedia.org/pistol/
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  Doesn't really count as "breaking Unicode".
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Perhaps China can give Taiwan the finger without "breaking unicode" by simply demanding that fonts including the Taiwanese flag use a glyph that reads "One China Policy".
    - seba_dos1 8y ago
      Toy pistol is still a pistol, so everything's alright. You'd have to replace the glyph with something that can still be considered Taiwanese flag.
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        Frankly that's an abuse of language. If you were to say > "In the UK, it is legal for children to buy pistols" Everybody would call you nuts. If you then smirked and said that water pistols are pistols, they'd groan at you.
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        No, now that's an abuse of logic and intention. We're talking about symbolic pictograms here, not laws. Just as you can depict emoticons by using humans, robots, colorful blobs or martians, you can depict pistols as toys, futuristic laser blowers, steampunk machinery or wild west revolvers. It's a symbol and you're free to show it any way you want.
        darkpuma 8y ago
        We're talking about language, not cars. It's no different than if all the emoticons for cars were modified to be RC cars with large antennas surrounded by lighting bolts to signify that they're receiving radio transmissions. An RC car "is a car" a hypothetical you might protest, but a toy car is not the same in substance as "a car" in much the same way that a toy pistol is not the same in substance as "a pistol." Perhaps one day moralizing tech companies might even take this seriously and revise fonts to denormalize personal car ownership for the noble cause of environmental protection. Is that ridiculous? No moreso I'd argue than depicting all handguns as squirt guns.
        seba_dos1 8y ago
        Depicting "car" emoji as a toy car would be perfectly fine and within the artistic license of font makers. Just as depicting a toy gun is.
        13of40 8y ago
        Imagine if they decided to turn the LGBT rainbow icon into a couple of hands holding each other, not to enhance the meaning of the glyph, but to, you know, protect children from gay ideas and make it harder for people to communicate about LGBT issues. Is that fair play? To me it sounds like somewhere between how dictionaries used to censor naughty words and 1984's newspeak.
majewsky 8y ago
This is not "breaking Unicode". They're just using a different font. (Not trying to pass moral/political judgment, but let's please get the facts straight.)
- CompuHacker 8y ago
  Noted.

benj111 8y ago

Who even thinks up this stuff? Why? Yeah I get "to de legitimise the Taiwanese govt", 1984 Newspeak, etc. But people are going to convey the idea one way or another. Its just petty and pointless. I suppose you could say that about a lot of censorship, but this just takes it to an extra level.

dis-sys 8y ago
what they didn't tell you is the fact that the current government in Taiwan also refuse to display this exact same flag. I posted links in my reply this thread, don't get too shocked when you read the full story. The real question to be asked is why people always tell the censored version of the story in line with their political stands.
- benj111 8y ago
  From what I can read (wikipedia) your links say the opposite. "The flag has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan", "found in numerous government offices in Taiwan and is that which the President and Vice President face to take the oath of office". So what is your political 'stand' in this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_Chin...
theobeers 8y ago
It's a bit like the efforts of the Iranian government to force people to use the term "Persian Gulf" rather than "Arabian Gulf." They passed a law in 2010 that was supposed to ban any international airline from Iranian airspace, if it referred to the body of water as the "Arabian Gulf" in its in-flight maps or other public displays. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-airlines-persian-gulf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/22/iran-airlines-...
- aaomidi 8y ago
  I don't think these are similar at all honestly

Sniffnoy 8y ago

Non-mobile link: https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025 https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1110743058201473025

dis-sys 8y ago

The title is misleading at best - the concerned flag is not Taiwanese flag, it is called the Flag of the Republic of China [1]. It is the flag refused to be displayed even by the current government of Republic of China, e.g. the government of Republic of China recently proposed to remove the exact same flag from its national ID card [2], the Republic of China government also refused to display this flag during its most recent national day celebration [3]. The flag used by those Pro-independence organizations[4], usually called the Taiwanese Flag, is vastly different and never got accepted by the mainstream to start with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Republic_of_China [2] https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/ https://tw.appledaily.com/new/realtime/20190321/1537267/ [3] https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223 https://news.tvbs.com.tw/politics/1007223 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_flags_of_Taiwan

theobeers 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry that you cited, and it begins, "The flag of the Republic of China is the national flag of Taiwan…" edit: Is the technicality simply that the ROC flag was originally used on the mainland?
- laurent123456 8y ago
  The Republic of China was founded in China but then they lost the war against the communists and fled to Taiwan. So that's why they kept on using the ROC flag there. China doesn't recognise this flag since they consider that Taiwan is part of China. There's also a movement within Taiwan to change the flag but they probably won't do it because China would see that as a move towards independence, and could retaliate.
creato 8y ago
Nothing I can read supports your claims. To the contrary, wikipedia says: > The flag has a ubiquitous presence in Taiwan. The hoisting and lowering of the flag are ceremoniously accompanied by the National Banner Song while those present stand at attention to give a standard salute with the right hand, held flat, to the right eyebrow. Schoolchildren have traditionally been required to attend morning rallies where the flag is raised after a rendition of the National Anthem of the Republic of China. Before martial law was lifted in 1987 in Taiwan, it was required that all vehicles be halted when passing by a flag ceremony.

miles 8y ago

Turns out this has been going on for some time: Can't see this emoji (Taiwanese Flag) on macOS https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-this-emoji-on-macos https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/328474/cant-see-th... You can’t use the Taiwan flag emoji on a Chinese iPhone https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on-a-chinese-iphone/ https://qz.com/1250884/you-cant-use-the-taiwan-flag-emoji-on...

fouc 8y ago

Will Macs Sold in Taiwan have the reverse problem?

warp_factor 8y ago
probably not. After spending an extensive amount of time in Mainland China and Taiwan, it is fascinating to see how one country initially evolved in two separate countries based on different ideologies. I would go as far as to say that if you want to see what communism and capitalism do to a country, those two are a perfect example.
- chillacy 8y ago
  The communism capitalism dichotomy masks a lot of subtlety, including: China’s market reforms, Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military dictatorship during much of its economic development, the relative sizes of the two countries, China interfering with Taiwan’s economy, etc I say this because Taiwan isn’t doing as hot in economic development compared to China costal cities in recent years, but much of that comes from a myriad of other reasons besides “communism is better than capitalism”.
  - warp_factor 8y ago
    I agree with you completely, it is a simplistic example of course. But spending multiple weeks in each you can have a feel for the culture of each place, the way people behave, their level of education etc etc.
    - heavenlyblue 8y ago
      You agree with the parent completely, yet continue making exactly the same point you made before.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > "Taiwan’s inconvenient history of being run as a military dictatorship during much of its economic development," Not unlike South Korea, incidentally. A running series of military coups until quite recently. Please do not confuse the above as praise for the DPRK, which like the PRC, operates concentration camps for political dissidents.

Someone 8y ago

Bad, but also ‘just’ an extension of ‘tweaking’ maps by changing country names and borders, something every map maker that wants to have global presence has to do. For example, see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10/google-maps-disputed-territories-palestineishere https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2016/aug/10... (found by googling “map borders change depending on location”)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

carlob 8y ago

> We are locked :( I will never buy any China model of any Apple product again. I wonder if anyone else can see the cognitive dissonance of this half-assed Boycott...

dukoid 8y ago

Well if mainland China sees Taiwan as a (temporarily lost) "province", why can't it have a flag? Don't other Chinese provinces not have a flag?

smcl 8y ago
Ok let’s not forget that it’s also the flag of the Republic of China - so the other side of the revolution from the current government. I was gonna say something like “what if a US state had the same flag as the UK or the CSA” but then I remembered Hawaii and Mississippi feature them :-)
taejo 8y ago
No, Chinese provinces don't have flags. The SARs do; municipalities have theoretically not been allowed to have their own flags since 1997, but several are still using flags from before then and others have adopted flags since then.

9999px 8y ago

It's not as bad as it looks – he clarifies the situation in later tweets: "The region you choose on the setup assistant will stay unchanged untill [sic] you reinstall the OS. I saw users who bought the Chinese model set the initial region to elsewhere, thus 🇹🇼 is properly displayed on their Mac and the 10.14.4 upgrade won’t affect them." "So again there's no hardware lock. It has nothing to do with T2 chips. The only thing that changed is the mechanism macOS use to detect regions. You are still in control of your China model Macbooks." https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056 https://twitter.com/thisboyuan/status/1111545977624621056