Free Republic

Apple is working to fix what the company said was a bug that displayed the Palestinian flag emoji when some iPhone users typed in “Jerusalem” in text after it sparked controversy on social media amid the Israel-Hamas war. Some iPhone users in the U.K. noticed the device’s keyboard would display the Palestinian flag emoji among a list of prompts when a user typed the word “Jerusalem.”

July 17, 1850The first photograph of a star is taken at the Harvard Observatory. The star photographed was Vega in the Lyra constellation, the 2nd brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere.*** "On the night of July 16–17, 1850, Whipple and Bond made the first daguerreotype of a star (Vega)"First star photograph (α Lyrae, Vega) obtained by John Adams Whipple and William Cranch Bond using the 38 cm Harvard refractor (daguerreotype, 100 s exposure).Observational History Astrophotography, the photography of celestial objects, began in 1840 when John William Draper took an image of the Moon using the daguerreotype process. On 17 July...

National Public Radio (NPR) has been designated as "U.S. state-affiliated media" by Twitter as the platform would designate media from Russia and China. The social platform uses such labels to describe alleged state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets like Russian news agencies and Chinese news agencies. "NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable, said John Lansing, CEO of the media company, in a statement calling NPR an "independent, fact-based journalism" outlet. "It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy," he added. Elon...

A recent software update for Apple's iPhones includes a "pregnant man" emoji as well as a number of other gender neutral cartoons. Apple rolled out the update in mid-March according to the Wall Street Journal, adding the pregnant emoji, as well as a gender neutral "person with crown" emoji to go alongside the king and queen cartoons. Apple also added 35 other emojis. Apple first rolled out the pregnant man and "pregnant person" emoji in January as part of an optional update, but it came to all users with the iOS 15.4 update. The decision to roll out the new...

Heath Racela identifies as three-quarters white and one-quarter Filipino. When texting, he chooses a yellow emoji instead of a skin tone option, because he feels it doesn't represent any specific ethnicity or color. He doesn't want people to view his texts in a particular way. He wants to go with what he sees as the neutral option and focus on the message. "I present as very pale, very light skinned. And if I use the white emoji, I feel like I'm betraying the part of myself that's Filipino," Racela, of Littleton, Mass., said. "But if I use a darker color...

As Ed Driscoll points out, the Chicom terrorists have won. And, he asks, Is This Really the Sort of Hellish Dystopia You Want to Live In? COVID-19 Delays Release of New Emojis.Can you even imagine? A year without a single new emoji? Life has lost all meaning, or as commenter tu3031 put it: “unemployed Seattle sex workers, tranny's that can't get their surgeries, ignored feminists, fatphobia, no new emojis...how much can one nation be expected to take!”It’s not quite as bleak as it sounded at first though, as there are some new emojis already in the pipeline that can be...

💡 I've been using a laptop almost exclusively for my writing for much of the prior 2 years. I've discovered that the touchpad is both a curse and a blessing, the latter so much so that I do not disable it. When I'm not using my auxiliary ergonomic keyboard, I regularly have things happen due to my palm hitting the keyboard. One such thing is a popup which, I regret to say, I never looked up until now. Given that the HTML Sandbox makes no mention of emoji whatsoever and the only thread by keyword on FR dates to 2004...

The Western institutionalization of sharia norms. A Swedish art professor has applauded Apple’s promise to diversify its emoticon options, including figures wearing religious headgear such as the hijab. “It’s great, we need people with different skin colours among the emojis, and people with different clothes, from the hijab to the kippa,” illustration professor Joanna Rubin Dranger at Stockholm’s Konstfack academy told the TT news wire on Thursday. The website DoSomething.org first let the battle cry sound, asking Apple to take a closer look at its 800 emojis. “The only two resembling people of colour are a guy who looks vaguely...