Code War: Myanmar's final digital battle ends

Description: 

"Accessing everything from Wikipedia to Google Maps in Myanmar is about to get a lot easier when it finally adopts the universal code underpinning phone and online communication next week. Tech experts say the move to bring the country more in step with the rest of the digital world is crucial, but will cause "chaos" in a rocky transition period. Myanmar is the last nation to embrace unicode that has significant numbers of people online. Without it, most users see international content -- and a lot from within the country -- as lines of meaningless symbols. Household name websites can be impossible to read while translation and voice recognition software do not work. October 1 is "U-Day", when Myanmar officially adopts the new system. From then on, all electronic communication from government offices, telecoms companies, banks and media must be in Unicode by law..."

Source/publisher: 

Agence France-Presse (AFP) (France) via "Bangkok Post" (Thailand)

Date of Publication: 

2019-09-27

Date of entry: 

2019-09-27

Grouping: 

  • Individual Documents

Category: 

Countries: 

Myanmar

Language: 

English

Resource Type: 

English

Text quality: 

    • Good