Why is this code even present on US devices? Is the word "Taiwan" such a bad word in China that, instead of some reasonable action, it crashes the OS? Is the Chinese government so upset about Taiwan they're insisting manufacturers hide the flag from the keyboard?
All aspects of this are mind-boggling.
From my reading of the article, the intention was not to crash the device, but to hide the Taiwanese flag emoji - and the crash was because the code intended to do that was buggy.
So no - it's not _that_ bad a word.
> Is the Chinese government so upset about Taiwan they're insisting manufacturers hide the flag from the keyboard?
Yes, it seems this is true - and while I've never needed to deal with requests like that from a nation state, it does seem kinda cowardly on Apple's part to agree to that, and it seems quite at odds with the resistance to the FBI getting a screenlock bypass to that iPhone 5 a while back...
It's not at odds at all. The US isn't going to arbitrarily blockade Apple's market access over the screenlock conflict. At worst you go to court and battle the US Government over that, with a decent chance of prevailing. China will and can do anything it likes, including entirely removing your market access, if you injure their fragile national self-esteem. They're very sensitive about perceived slights, whether due to their history or the inherent fragility of authoritarian regimes, or both. I'm not making a joke about their over-sensitivity, it's a real thing that all companies must deal with there.
Apple basically told the US Government point blank: no; on something important to the Feds. What happened to Apple in consequence? Nothing. Try that with China. They'd probably love an excuse to kick Apple out, even if briefly, to bolster their domestic alternatives (doing it briefly is ideal, because it might make it nearly impossible for Apple to recover lost market share, and then China gets to pretend they're still open to Apple's products after the damage is done).
I wonder if people from Huawei and HTC have a different point of view there?
Qantas just folded over CCP pressure to change their stance on calling Taiwan a nation rather than a territory. [1] China is really sensitive about this and pushes its influence heavily on this particular point.
[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-04/qantas-to-refer-to-tai...
This is a well-known cost of being able to do business in China; the version of your product for sale/use in the PRC cannot in any way acknowledge the existence of Taiwan/ROC as a separate entity. Most vendors simply have localization switches which hide/re-label Taiwan in location selectors, use some icon other than the flag to let users select the zh-TW localization, re-label any displayed maps, etc.
IIRC Microsoft got in trouble years and years ago for a mistake in code they shipped, which accidentally displayed either "Taiwan" or the flag in a build of software for use in the PRC.
This has been the case for many, many years. Most HN readers probably just don't deal often enough with localization issues to realize how politically sensitive they can be, and how easily even a small misstep can get you in trouble with a government.
Could I get away with listing "Cultures" and "Dialects" rather than "Countries" and "Languages"?
We're all so used to ISO standards that we assume they are politically neutral. That's why everyone starts their weekend project with the ISO 3166 country list that includes "Taiwan, Province of China" [1] [2] [3].
This list is crap. It follows UN country names, and the UN is not a neutral entity. It isn't even logical that "Hong Kong" can stand on its own in the list, but Taiwan has to be suffixed with "Province of China". As far as I know, no major website uses this list unmodified. (The airlines that recently bowed to PRC pressure now call it "Taiwan, China").
If you see the "Province of China" label on a website, you should refer its developer to the Unicode CLDR data: http://cldr.unicode.org/index
The CLDR data is the actual industry standard, and tries to be as neutral as possible.
[1] https://github.com/rails/country_select [2] https://gist.github.com/DHS/1340150 [3] https://pypi.org/project/django-countries/
Hong Kong is a part of China, and still has its own flag, passport, currency, and linguistic identity. The only caveat is that you have to call it a "region". So if you have a drop-down with China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, you simply prefix it "Country or region", and nobody can technically be offended.
I feel like plenty of countries manage just fine. My app is not blocked and I am not arrested in greece for referencing 'Macedonia' in a list of countries.
Hell I could go round making hilariously wrong UI borderline offensive like including goa as part of portugal or canada as part of the UK and people would think im silly sure but not ban the company althogether...
I would be interested in any examples not related to the chinese government or thai lese majeste laws. Also perhaps not obvious ones like map border disagreements.
That's where a lot of them come from.
According to your app, which country is a resident of these places living in:
* Kashmir?
* The Crimean peninsula?
* Jerusalem?
One of these has been the subject of a US Supreme Court case recently.
What's your app's stance on the status of Catalonia? Does your list of countries include Kosovo? What about Transnistria? The Donetsk People's Republic?
Do you have users in Argentina? If so, do you make sure to refer to that island group as "Malvinas" instead of "Falklands"?
I can assure you that none of these examples are regarded as "silly" by the people involved, or by some major governments.
Only when they are sure that the government really can't punish them for it, and it gets them good PR. When dealing with a government that will ban the sales of the iPhone in that country, they roll over and make sure they do whatever they need to do to have friendly relations with them.
They also said they’d do what the US government required. They didn’t like the idea of the gov being able to unlock any phone and lobbied against it but said they’d follow the law if it exists.
However because it’s China and Taiwan it’s a “thing“ because there’s a very heavy political angle.
My original comment was meant to point out that Apple isn’t hypocritical here as many people want to claim. They said they’d do the exact same kind of things here if required by US law.
Well that's not true. You specifically said "lobbied against" in your post. "Exact same things" would mean exactly the same reticence. That's where the hypocrisy lies.
But once it’s a law they lose the choice.
> they need to do to have friendly relations with them
Yep. That sure do...
Is there a list of these kinds of govt requests they choose to abide by?
No, they don't.