68.3% of people in China use third-party keyboards – many of them use Signal (opens in new tab)

In what way though? Are you arguing that people should just ignore security vulnerabilities that they are aware of, on the basis that you think there might be some vulnerabilities that they're not aware of?

I'll bear it in mind in future. Thanks.

If it's an issue in any app that can lead to privacy leaks, it's a showstopper issue for something like Signal. It being an issue with any app is even more reason to tell people about it, not less.

She has been ignored for over a year (she tried to get them to discuss the issue in 2019), and all the while people have been getting kidnapped by the Chinese government due to this misunderstanding. I can understand why she would feel upset. I think what set this off was signal responding to questions to some tiny Twitter account after ignoring her for so long.

I'm not sure I'd know about this if the statement wasn't notable for its coarse language. Moreover it's not just a case of criticizing someone who didn't know about the issue, it's criticizing people who are telling people to do something without understanding the risks.

> But if a person has something important to say, calling people that don't know about the issue assholes is not a great way to go about it.

I don't mind it at all. If someone uses "being called asshole" as a reason to not even inform anyone, they would have found another excuse. Some people simply register it as strong language and otherwise focus on the content. At any rate, it's very easy to judge what someone says in frustration when you yourself don't even suffer from the situation and/or don't care about those who do.

> But it's not like everyone tries to annoy other, it's more an issue of ignorance.

So she shed light on that, and instead of talking about the important bit, people think it's super important to teach a random person to not be rude, ever? That's what we're focusing on?

Not a Chinese speaker, but I know like 10 words.

They already have some romanizations like Pinyin that are largely phonetic.

But take something like "mao". Without any accents to indicate the tone, that could be:

  * 毛 - like a dozen distinct meanings
  * 猫 - a few meanings, but mostly "cat"
  * 冒 - half a dozen meanings
  * 昴 - one meaning
  * 懋 - a few meanings
  * 帽 - a few meanings
  * 貌 - a few meanings
  * 牦 - one meaning
  * 矛 - one meaning
  * 铆 - a couple meanings
  * 锚 - one meaning
  * 贸 - one meaning
  * 茂 - two meanings

To be honest, I got tired of compiling the list at this point. There's lots more.

When someone uses a romanized keyboard to type "m", "a", "o" you've got like two dozen possible characters that becomes. If you're trying to figure out from context which one the person might be intending, you need to look at like 60 different possible meanings in context and figure out which characters are most appropriate. And that's given the previous several things they've entered have been narrowed down to one character, but likely still have several meanings.

A lot of (I'd dare say most?) Chinese people do use romanized input (the alternative I've seen is very slowly drawing out each individual character on the screen), but whether the keyboard sees you type "I have a cute... mao" and decides you want 'anchor' or 'cat' has a huge impact on day-to-day usability for people actually using it.

The written language is vastly more complicated than the spoken one as far as I can tell. A syllable that can have 60 meanings is relatively easy to figure out in context, but when written the meaning has to be made explicit. As a really basic example, "ta" is both he and she. So they just don't have masculine and feminine pronouns, right? Wrong. 他 is he, 她 is she. These are said exactly the same so even given accents to indicate tone they're romanized identically. But when written, the distinction is made.

And if you make a mistake somewhere in all of this?

Well, baba (爸爸) is dad. baba is also poop (㞎㞎).

Wo ai ni, baba. I love you, poop.

That doesn't really solve the problem. Homophones exist, and entering the phonetic representation in some native character set would still require an additional conversion step to disambiguate the homophone. (i.e. in Japanese you can type in hiragana, and many phone IMEs work like that, but you still have to convert that input to kanji; nobody wants to read your long stream of hiragana.) The input methods add value based on how frequently they suggest the correct conversion as the first candidate (based on context).

Imagine typing English by speaking. You can say "flower", but that might get written out as "flour". Some intelligence has to be implemented that picks the right one based on context, or give you the ability to correct it. That is where the complexity in east asian input methods come from.

(Yes, as English-speaking computer users we are very lucky. The exact sort of symbols that readers of English expect map 1:1 to our keyboards. Still kind of a pain on a phone, though!)

Native Chinese speaker here.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Without keeping up with the new memes, IME still let people type them (it's simply not as easy when IME does not auto-suggest the new combination, users can manually select each Chinese character).

Regarding "an informal ambiguous layer", are you implying there is something more fundamental/low-level than the Chinese characters used in communication? If so, what is that?

Japanese IMEs operate basically the same way as Chinese ones.

Japanese IMEs are even more complicated than Chinese ones, what are you talking about? (The existence of kana doesn't solve the homophone and homograph problems.)

Here's a popular, commercial Japanese IME: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATOK