For Windows to be a truly global product, anyone in the world should be able to type in their language. The first step to unlocking text input for the world is to be able to display any of the world’s languages. This is a challenging task, one which most people don’t need to worry about because their language is already supported, but for millions of people around the world getting basic text support has been a problem. The stumbling block in most such cases is a little-known component called a “shaping engine”. A shaping engine is used for so-called complex text layout, which is needed for about half of the world’s writing systems. For many years, Windows customers have been able to install their own fonts and keyboards but before Windows 10, if there was no shaping engine for your script things wouldn’t look right.
Windows 10 contains a brand new shaping engine which covers many more complex writing systems than the ones that came before. As someone who’s into languages (I earn my living with them), this stuff makes me giddy – even if these complex writing systems are beyond my comfort zone. Props to Microsoft for investing in this.
Context specific glyph shaping is incredibly complicated – I don’t blame them for using years getting this out.
NSA and GCHQ are really happy about how Vista 10 is shaping up.
Also bringing more backdoors to everyone
[citation needed]
Do point to any actual evidence supporting your claims.
Who needs evidence when it feels like it’s true?
see also: WMDs in Iraq, vaccines/autism link, GMOs, chemtrails
Personally, I hold the belief that it’s in Microsoft’s best interest not to include any such backdoors or NSA/GCHQ-friendly (mal)features; if it were to come out that there was anything such in Windows 10 it’d immediately undermine everything Microsoft has done to make it appealing to technical and non-technical users, both in business-environments and at home and both in domestic and international circles. They might also be setting themselves up for a multitude of courtcases, too, and especially so if the access to these backdoors got in the hands of criminal entities.
The thing is, people are nowadays much, much more aware of all the shenanigans these spy agencies conduct and I don’t doubt at all that a multitude of security researchers will be monitoring Windows 10 for any abnormalities for years to come, so any such (mal)features would be quite likely to surface soon enough.
Microsoft may sell 0-day vulnerabilities to NSA/GCHQ and those agencies may hold information on any such vulnerabilities they’ve found themselves from Microsoft, but it’s still a step down from deliberately including such in a shipping product.
So… could you point to actual evidence for your conjectures? 😉
I did say it was a personal opinion, I didn’t try to claim anything as a fact.
I know, I was just pointing that what was good for your goose did not seem to be acceptable for the previous poster’s gander…
Edited 2015-02-24 06:16 UTC
May not be in their best interests, but as a US company they might simply have no choice.
Plus, they could (and probably would) hide any backdoor to make it look like an unintentional security hole, then unless there’s some leaked documents saying otherwise there would be no way to prove it was an intentional backdoor.
Perhaps he’s referring to complex unicode phishing when glyphs looks like normal roman letters but aren’t, hence fooling people.
Very interesting indeed. I’d love to hear Behdad’s take on it (of Harfbuzz fame).
what’s wrong with harfbuzz ?
It was Not Invented Here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
Most writing systems are totally impractical in the modern era. During WW1 Turkey was forced to use French because they couldn’t send telegrams in Arabic. Turkey adopted a Western alphabet after WW1. Vietnam also replaced the Chinese writing system with one using the French alphabet. China now uses a Roman alphabet to teach writing to young children.
Actually, several attempts to introduce latin script in China have failed in the past. Simply because Han ideographs are such a nice way to communicate in Chinese.
Similarly, Arabic script will remain in use in Arab countries, because there is no better way to write Arabic.
Other languages however which used those scripts in the past (Vietnamese, Turkish, etc.) found it way easier to move to Latin script.
Languages which still use non-native non-Latin scripts see an increased pressure to move to a Latin alphabet.
Recent story at OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/27801/The_death_of_the_Urdu_script
There is a increasingly large group of Chinese that don’t know how to write traditional, or even simplified, Chinese anymore. They can read, but not write, because they forgot stroke order and minor characters details. They in effect became dependent of phones and PCs to write.
Mao Zedong, who hated traditional Chinese ideograms with passion, was quite prophetic about this when a cradle of intellectual fought against a basic reform of Chinese writing system: some day in the future, they will be forced to do it.
Yep. Even classic European writing system are totally impractical to printing. They only seem that way now, because we have been printing with primitive technology for centuries adopting our writing systems to ones that were easily printable. While it is cool we can do complex systems now, I really think some of them should consider simplifying their systems instead of preserving arbitrary systems that no longer makes sense.
Edited 2015-02-24 22:21 UTC
Chinese is a tough nut to crack when it comes to full romanization. It is easier to write Chinese with the Latin while it is sometimes easier to read it with the Chinese script (due to the nature of spoken Chinese). This poem reflects the issue I am talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den It is readable in the Chinese script but a torture when written with the Latin.