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by josephcsible 910 days ago
RTL has been a huge source of security vulnerabilities for its entire existence. Why don't operating systems have a setting to disable all RTL, so that people who don't know any such languages aren't unnecessarily exposed to the dangers with zero benefit?
1 comments

Operating systems notwithstanding, there should definitely be such option for every OS widget, that displays text (including Android TextView). And it should default to disabling all BiDi backdoors unless developer explicitly vetted specific text span to enable them.

Making entire text rendering stack vulnerable by default under pretext of catering to less than 1% of world population is ridiculous.

Exactly, somethings should've just been left ASCII. The push to use Unicode in many components for "inclusiveness" are simply political.
Or perhaps KOI-7 N1, another 7-bit text encoding [0]. The Cyrillic alphabet should be good enough for anyone. As you say, no need to let Americans use their native alphabet just to feel included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI-7