Microsoft Deletes
2 Characters from Office Font
by
Brett Milner
|
On 10 February 2004, Microsoft released a new "Critical Update" with the following description:
I was very curious as to what was meant by "unacceptable" symbols. So I made a backup copy of the old font and installed the new one. Then I did screen captures of both versions in WordPad to see what was changed.... |
Before
After
| Notice
the missing swastika and Star of David in the new version. Replaced with
harmless, politically correct black squares. The Star of David was produced
with an upper-case [T], and the tilde [~] produced the swastika, if you
have the old version.
What irks me is that Microsoft listed this as a "Critical Update," which is supposed to mean that it is important for the stability or security of the operating system. A simple font change does not qualify, so it's obvious that they wanted to force this update upon their users. A system set up with Automatic Windows Updates (which is most newly installed ones) will have this pushed down by default, and most users will see "Critical" in the name and accept it based on that. This is an insidious form of censorship, as Microsoft decides for its users what symbols they should be allowed to have in their fonts. This should have been published in the "Recommended Updates" section, where you would have to read each update and decide for yourself. |
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| posted 18 Mar 2004 | copyright 2002-4 Russ Kick |