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Multilingual DNS Patent Roadblock For IETF
Xanni writes "Intellectual property claims have blindsided the Internet Engineering
Task Force and could derail the group's efforts to develop a common
scheme for supporting foreign-language domain names across the Internet.
NWFusion is carrying the story."
It seems like this is kind of like what Rambus did--except, Walid doesn't appear to have been part of IETF. I wonder... will standards bodies like IETF have to start making participants sign "no compete" clauses, NDA's, or the like in order to prevent fiascos like this from happening? And, can that be done without fundamentally undermining the open discussion and review so vital to standards development? In a word, this sucks.
It will be painful at first. But in the end, a simple clean design will have lots of benefits.
The article refers to Walid as a startup. Given the current market trend the IETF should only have to wait a month or less for them to fold.
Joke in subject line. Nothing here to see.
Great point, actually! By having this patent, essentially the IETF has to innovate another solution. Exactly the kind of thing that patents were designed to do.
Now we have two solutions, neither of them compatible. Now someone will have to come up with a third solution to make the two work. Exactly the kind of thing that patents were designed to do.
Domain names that can't be entered from a keyboard by everyone in the world are a bad idea anyway -- no one but spammers would want such a thing.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Unicode in itself is an attempt to make completely artificial, huge charset mandatory for everything to support, including devices that can't even fit Unicode font into their memory. There were some attempts to support multiple charsets in the same text, thus avoiding this requirements, however some backroom politics caused them to be stopped, and now IETF's "official policy" is to demand Unicode and UTF-8, encodings that no one but a bunch of self-proclaimed unificators support. Most of Unicode-should-replace-everything support emanates from people who use ISO 8859-1 encoding, that happens to be exactly the same as first 255 characters of Unicode, so they don't have to modify anything in non-trivial manner, and can just cut their fonts to fit them everywhere. And last but not least, I have yet to see a pro-Unicode document that was not being actively pushed by someone Martin Duerst, who seems to be made a career from coming to every internationalization-related group or mailing lists to spew Unicode propaganda until all his opponents will get exhausted rebutting it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Character set, character encoding, and fonts are three separate issues. The reason why folks like UTF-8 so much is because it is easy to use. The software I code on used to support multiple character sets (European and CJK) internally. Now, we convert to UTF-8 on the way in and convert back to the desired character set on the way out. Our code is cleaner, smaller, easier to understand, and easier to debug.
Precisely because all work on standards, formats and libraries that would do it for the programmers is stopped to benefit "Unicoders" who taken over the standardization process.
Supporting multiple character sets per document is a mess and completely unnecessary for most real world applications.
If "real world applications" == "pretty display of text", you would be right, however Unicode loses all distinctions between languages used in the text, thus making impossible to do any complex processing that must know the language. So sooner or later applications will have to include the name of language used, or face the conversion of large amount of useful data into unprocessable junk, that is just as useful as, say, gif with text in them. Unicoders, of course, already declared a standard for adding language information back into Unicode text, and "allowed" to use language attribute in XML. However it's obvious that all Unicode-using code can't deal with stateful text stream (text + language as state) because the whole point of Unicode was to avoid any state, and XML processing programs have no requirement to preserve attributes i their internal processing, thus making the whole activity impractical.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Well, if your device "can't even fit Unicode font into their memory", then you (as you say later) cut the fonts into manageable subsets.
But which subset should one support in any given situation? And what is the benefit of Unicode then compared to text that just has charsets and language names embedded as state? I mean, other than having to look up symbols in translation table, 1.5-4 times larger text files and incompatibility with perfectly usable systems that already work with local charsets and can be easily modified to use multiple charsets if someone was able to standardize the metadata formats (by not being gagged by "Unicoders" every time when a suggestion of that kind is made in standard bodies)?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's known as ISO2022. It's been around forever, and no one's stopping you from using it. It's used for COMPOUND_TEXT in X and MULE in Emacs. Most people don't like it because it's a state-heavy system. No one killed it by backroom poltics - it just didn't go over very well.
ISO 2022 is completely unacceptable for any practical use in multilingual environment -- it is used only to manage small set of charsets for display-only purpose.
The real solution won't appear until it will become easy to just place attributes that include language and charset by their full names in the text, so some simple interface (one to a program, not to a user) can be used to handle pieces of text accordingly to their attributes, and charset will be just one of them. By "handle" I mean everything that programs do with text -- sort, concatenate, input from a user, edit, format/hyphenate/..., fuzzy/phonetic match, and last and very, very least -- render with given set of fonts on a given device.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
What is actually being patented is a system which attempts to replace the resolver on a machine with one which will automatically encode the local character set into an RFC 1035 compliant format. This patent specifically states that this is a mechnism to implement internationalized domain names without modifying the DNS servers.
Now, if you are going to replace all the resolver libraries anyway, why not just extend the DNS specification to take straight UTF8 to begin with?
Why create a huge ugly hack to preserve the DNS specification when the DNS specification has changed many times over the years to support new features such as IPv6.
The only benefit I see to not changing the specification is that client application developers don't have to change their calls to gethostbyname() to gethostbynameutf8(). This is an advantage, but honestly... does anyone really believe that this is any harder than what applications have to do to support IPv6 address lookups?
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I don't see how this is so different from your basic uuencode function. I suppose you'll have to be a little stricter.. no underscores etc. Also you'll need a way to identify names not encoded from those that are.
Again, the purpose of IETF is to create standards, not to fight evil corporate types on the behalf of Slashdotters. Getting involved with litigation is a good way to make enemies and would likely undermine the needed industry support and participation for the stanards to carry any weight in the real world.
Better, imho, for them to route around the problem like the net does w/ censorship. Leave the legal battles to someone who specialize in it, since that sort of activity would not compromise their primary mission.
Eg.,
Participating in the efforts of the IETF The IETF is not a membership organization (no cards, no dues, no secret handshakes :-)
The IETF is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet
architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual.
Anyway, it's not that the IETF would be legally prevented from recommending this as a standard because of the patent. It would just put anyone implementing that standard at risk of patent fees or litigation.
If I export from my registry under Win2K, I have no problem opening and viewing it in notepad.
If I open it in Emacs, I can see that it has some kind of BOM, and then every other byte is 0x00. It's obviously Unicode, but notepad has no problem with it. Of course, if I reboot into Win9x, I'm sure notepad there is crap and won't be able to deal with it. But who cares?... Win9x is about to die the death it deserves.
I think you'll find that most of those UNIX tools haven't been coded with Unicode in mind. MSFT have been pushing generic text macros for C/C++ for a very long time. If you use them, it's pretty easy to rebuild your app with Unicode support. Thus, just about anything that ships with NT can handle Unicode. Those Unix tools that you mentioned will require a lot more work... the people who coded them built the single/multi-byte limitation into them from the start.
Internationalisation is something that I think MSFT does quite well, and it's really easy from a programmers perspective. Wow! Did I just sing MSFT praises?!
What OS are you using that can't open its own registry dumps in notepad? It's got to be a newer version if it's not in the old registry format. Perhaps WinME does this... but I wouldn't know as I don't touch those Win9x OSes if I can help it!
I have trouble with Unicode with the NT port of GNU Emacs. I've seen mention of a package on the NT Emacs mailing list that supposedly can handle Unicode. It might be a language add-on, or something. I can't remember: I didn't need it enough to search it out and install it!
The NT line of OSes has always been 100% Unicode.
A file extension isn't needed: notepad utilises a BOM (byte order mark) to determine the file type. If you've done any work with XML, you will know that BOMs are used there too (although not mandatory). The BOM allows you to determine whether the file is UCS-2 or UCS-4, and also specifies the endian-ness.
I don't think MSFT has left anybody in the dark.
Developing NT only international products is actually very nice, especially when used on a system with NTFS. International stuff can interoperate so much more easily in this environment. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of Win9x and the need to support it, most builds are multi-byte only, not Unicode.
FYI: The Win32 API under NT includes ANSI versions of virtually every system call, giving compatibility with Win9x binaries. These ANSI versions do multi-byte to wide translations, and then delegate to the Unicode version (yes: big performance hit.) What is bad is that under Win9x, the wide versions of the functions exist, but they are normally just empty stubs that do nothing! e.g. if you look at the exports from user32.dll, you will see that MessageBox consists of MessageBoxA and MessageBoxW.
I can't hold any more - this patent mess in USA makes me sick.
Why can't IETF relocate their domain task force somewhere in Europe? Just because of some brain-damaged (sorry, but it so) system in USA I can't have domain names spelled in Russian language in my own country. Where's the logic? I don't get it.
As of now, USA control the Internet. There is no reason why it should be so. Definetely USA has the biggest chunk of the 'Net, but also definetely that doesn't mean that Internet belongs to them. Democracy anyone?
Man, you just confirmed what I was writing. Money rule the world, not the people. Money is what votes, and it is not your vote and your choice (unless you're powerful financially). I'm taking this out of your own words. I don't have anything against healthy capitalism, I don't like overcommercialization of life.
And... Can you explain me, what are exactly interests of average USA business in international domains? How many USA companies will be interested in www.ÂÁÎË.com? However, I bet they'd be interested in having control over their registration and "lease" them to those "poor-3rd-world" countries. Commerce and harsh reality. Exactly what you are speaking about.
So, what should IETF really care for, those other countries which want to have domains written in their own language, or USA businesses, which want to profit on them? I guess it should be the first. But currently it is unreal in real-life and I don't like that it is so. Free software helps me struggle that, by making standards widely available.
You just completely ignored my main point.
Internet is becoming a life necessity and I don't think it should every be fully commercially controlled. I understand that it makes sense for a business to not really care about 80% of planet's population because they don't have enough financial power, but as a person I do not accept that.
When these people, who sell Suzuki cars in Iceland, ventured on the web, they naturally wanted to use the name of the company, "Suzuku bílar" as a domain name (without the space, of course): "suzukibílar.is". But they couldn't do it. DNS doesn't allow it. So they did what is usually done, and replaced the acute i with a regular i. This is kind of unfortunate because "bilar" means "breaks down" or "malfunctions".
But I guess you don't see that as a problem. I mean, why can't these people just standardise on English?
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Possibly IETF drafts (which are publicly available) could be used here. For example:
draft-ietf-idn-nameprep-00.txt (published July 3, 2000) and draft-ietf-idn-race-00.txt (dont know when this was published)
What the heck does "completely artificial" mean? All charsets are artificial. It's only about twice the size of BIG5 and SJIS, which are your alternatives for Asian support.
including devices that can't even fit Unicode font into their memory.
What do you mean by "Unicode font"? No one expects most fonts to include more than a small subset of Unicode, and there's no reason why a Unicode font that contains ISO 8859-1 subset should be any larger than an ISO 8859-1 font.
There were some attempts to support multiple charsets in the same text
It's known as ISO2022. It's been around forever, and no one's stopping you from using it. It's used for COMPOUND_TEXT in X and MULE in Emacs. Most people don't like it because it's a state-heavy system. No one killed it by backroom poltics - it just didn't go over very well.
Most of Unicode-should-replace-everything support emanates from people who use ISO 8859-1 encoding, that happens to be exactly the same as first 255 characters of Unicode, so they don't have to modify anything in non-trivial manner, and can just cut their fonts to fit them everywhere.
Huh? recode l1..utf-8 is as difficult as recode koi8r..utf-8. As for fonts . . . welcome to the 21st century. Postscript fonts label characters by name, and Truetype fonts have always been Unicode IIRC, so the only fonts that that need recoding are BDF fonts. There are nice tools to do that automatically.
From other posts:
Precisely because all work on standards, formats and libraries that would do it for the programmers is stopped to benefit "Unicoders" who taken over the standardization process.
Woohoo! All your base are belong to us!
Have you ever thought that you're being just a touch paranoid? Unicode fans are putting work into things to get Unicode to work. You're welcome to join the standards committees and put in your work. Or, alternetly, create the tools you're talking about and make them a defacto standard.
Unicode loses all distinctions between languages used in the text
So does every other character set in the world. ISO8859-1 doesn't tell you what language the content is in; neither does SJIS. Frankly, I don't know where the information is coming from; I'm working on a multilingual webpage, and there's no way in heck you're going to get me to go back through a hundred page document to put in language information. If HTML were ISO2022 based, I'd use the ISO8859-3 charset for the whole document.
making impossible to do any complex processing that must know the language.
In the .1% of cases where you're dealing with multilingual text and you need to do complex processing on it, you're going to need to use some document specific language tags (XML tags, Unicode Plane 14 tags, whatever.)
Most people aren't going to put in the tags anyway, and the computer can't tell whether you're typing French or English, so any system that requires tags is going to get a lot of mistagged documents.
However it's obvious that all Unicode-using code can't deal with stateful text stream (text + language as state) because the whole point of Unicode was to avoid any state,
Part of the goal was to minimize state, yes. But state does exist in Unicode - BIDI, for example, which is nesseccary to use Hebrew and Arabic. And of course any code that wanted to use language tags would support language tag state!
and XML processing programs have no requirement to preserve attributes i their internal processing,
There's an English saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. If programs want to discard tagging information, they will and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. If they want the information, then it's there.
But which subset should one support in any given situation?
Whatever Unicode subset you need? If you need to support Europe, you can look at MES-1, -2 and -3, successively larger subsets of European characters. If you need Japenese, I'd suggest the subset of Unicode corresponding to JIS 0213. And so on.
How does this question differ from what charsets to support?
You might be a little easier to take seriously if you stopped the paranoid rantings about the evils of Unicoders and rationally discussed the problems with Unicode.
Which countries are the ones that want internationalized domain names? Probably those which don't use ASCII. Which country was the patent granted in?
Couldn't the DNS servers be run in the countries where they are needed, where they won't be affected by the screwed-up US patent system?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Isn't the existance of sites like quepasa.com prior art of sites with foreign language URLs? Sure, it's not hindi or anything "exotic" like that, but it is a non-english language URL.
:)
P.S. I call all Klingon named URLs
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
In Britain and most of the civilized world, there are no patents on software.
In the 'States you get the M$ version of "The Freedom To Innovate."
Just move 'head office' to any British partner or consortium member. Use the court paper to wrap fish and claim a different jurisdiction.
If the instigators of this infringement suit want to pay to haul the crap all the way through the World Court for a decision that eveybody else will be lobbying against, let 'em waste their money.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They will get just what they deserve, IETF will NOT pay them becasue they are smart, so if they dont give it up for free, they will get nothing. Nice try tho.
Real nice setup for a future darwin award tho, thats a whole lot of people to piss off.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
But RFC2026 section 10.3.1 makes it pretty clear that any conforming submissions must disclose "... the existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the contribution ..."
Is this merely intellectually dishonest, or is it fraud?
Well, guess who just registered su ra tsu shi u do tsu to . org!? I'm amazed it hadn't already been done... :-D
<blink>ALL YOUR JAPANESE BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!</blink>
I mean, what can you get for twentyfive bucks these days, anyway...?
Moderators&kiddies-of-all-ages; please note the irony in this posting! (and what a sad day it is that I feel I have to write this disclaimer)
The important piece to understand is that the IETF, which has been given to such tasks as making the Internet usable worldwide by various means of communications has done two good things this month.
I think that this stance is a very good stance for a Open Standards body. It should choose open solutions that don't require licensing. But of course, IETF fails in some regards by not actively enforcing the standards in all situations. That's merely an aside, though. I don't think the IETF should be tasked with usage, because that's the job of the Internet Police.
And as a personal aside to all comments regarding the U.S.-centric Internet and how it shouldn't be forced that way, I have one simple word: ARPANet. That's right, all of you non-U.S. whiners. We dominate the Internet, because from the beginning it has always been our bitch. Our standards body is being nice and giving you a chance to fully enjoy the playground we built. If anything, you should stop whining and bow down to the gods responsible for the Internet, your PC (invented in the U.S.), and the rest of the things that we did to create the Internet.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
I can code, and think you're comment is ridiculous. This is a pretty obvious idea. If I were thinking of a way to encode foreign language names so DNS could deal with them, the solution they patented is probably the one I'd come up with too. The only work they've really done is run to the patent office and pay them a money.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Has to be one of the most insane schemes I have ever heard of. I am pretty sure the Whalid company did not develop this solution, but yet they want to make money off of it. Whatever happened to a work ethic?
You say you want a revolution....
Sorry. There's decades of prior art. Unless tricycles don't count.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Public publication would probably count here. But you might need an army of lawyers to prove it. But this is a good argument for publishing open source prototypes of all feasible applications, sort of like the w3 Amaya browser. It doesn't need to work well, it just needs to be a proof of concept and publically available. Then you can fix the bugs, or not. It's been made public.
WARNING: IANAL. I didn't think that one had to go this far, but that was the clear implication of one of the earlier posts.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Patents as a surrogate for "first post!". What a concept! :-)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There have long existed childrens tricycles that had steering wheels. Usually they were for quite small children and were made of plastic. And I think that they were only intended for use inside of the house. But they exist & existed.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Prior art requires hardcopy publication for patents purposes. It does not do to have just a sample program or some internal documents.
--
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete Dutra
DBA, SysAdmin
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
$10,000 is nowhere near the actual price of patenting something like this.
I just went through the process of pricing patents. A patent on a mechanical device was estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars - the actual patent fees charged by the USPTO plus the patent attorney's fees. An international patent was in the realm of six figures.
Challenging that patent will cost millions of dollars. Have you written your check to the IETF to help defray their legal expenses, or are you more of a "Let's you and him fight" kind of guy? Me, I'm more of a "What a bunch of IDIOTS!" kind of guy. Welcome to the desert of the real...
Proving that an IETF collaborator didn't copy the patented idea may be difficult to do, but I doubt anyone would have persued the idea knowing it was patented.
Anyway, it seems like a very logical step to decide to use an internationalization standard to solve the problem, and not very "novel" anyway.
end of line
Honestly, I hope this brings down the current DNS internationalization attmepts. Inviting a new Unicode encoding just to fit the current DNS character set is the 'wrong' way to approach this problem. I'd rather see everyone push through a year or so of temporary headaches as all protocols are converted UTF-8 in order to prevent the more permanent heaches of user agents using different encodings than the lower layers.
Imagine. All protocols sharing the same encoding... What a thought....
Not quite... engineering notebooks, if properly numbered and dated, are valid evidence for proving 'prior art', even if the information in those notebooks aren't published.
Yes, its a tough one to push through a court, but it has been done.
Not necessarily true. v42 (LAP/M) (the error correcting part of most modem transmissions), is patented by a UK firm.
Although, it doesn't stop it sucking badly when a patented process is transformed into a standard. Its a license to print money, or, more exactly, a license to EXTHORT money.
Walid's patent is filed in July 1999; was IETF working before that time is the key question
John 17:20
Right. Let Walid's fate be that of the town the railroad bypassed.
patent (noun) pronounced with a short A
:)
Only if you're American
-- Wodin
DNS allows only about 5 bits in its encoding. That is 26 letters in english, numerals and zero. The 16 bit unicode (UCS2) needs to be converted to these 5 bits to represent all languages of the world. There is already a schme published as Internet Draft (draft-duerst-dns-i18n-02) which describes this process, which is dated July 1998. There are other ways also to internationalize domain names (draft-skwan-utf8-dns-01, iDNS, to name a few. iDNS is functional for a few years now.
I do not know what this patent is about exactly. But considering this is dated July 1999 there is most probably lot of alternative possibilities to internationalize domain names if not any prior art.
Search google for those draft texts.
There may be some other prior art on escape sequences in general.\n
This is a great example.
War is necrophilia.
Yes, verbal communication of URLs is a problem, even in english. Often they must be spelled.
Certainly learning one alphabet is easier than having to deal with the european character variations, not to mention the pictographic languages. Hopefully all sites with anything of interest to those outside their language region will have the foresight to register an ASCII equivalent, but I'm not sure this will happen if it is an additional expense, and lack of foresight will probably rule.
Is it just me? Is the whole idea of multilingual DNS names just completely dumb? The difficulty is in entering or communicating domain names that are not in one of your own languages. Rendering different languages is one thing, and IMO a good thing, but for domain names, where everyone sometimes needs to type one in, anyway you cut it ASCII is the worst solution, except for all the others. I can just imagine on a trip to china having to explain the local chinese domain name just to get someone to FTP me something.
A new toplevel domain for UNICODE domains could be added. This domain would be implicit when UNICODE domains were entered by the user and added to the end of the domain before lookup. The TLD domain servers would be the ones extended to support this domain.
...
Each domain could also be assigned a 7 bit clean representation of the UNICODE name by doing simple 16 to 7 bit conversion with any necessary padding. This is different than the UTF-8 conversion method proposed. These (nonsensical) domains would then be used as the 'real' domain name that was looked up by the resolvers (such as smtp servers).
Just a thought
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
"Welcome to the real world."
Exactly. When is America ("Land of the Free") going to realize that it's IP laws are strangling the very ideals upon which the country was founded. Namely Life, Liberty, and Property. IP (as currently instituted) is not property, it is paramount to theft. When I have the same idea as you, you do not lose your idea or your ability to use that idea, but when you prevent me from using my own ideas (which you happen to have had first and independently), you are doing something very similar to stealing.
An oft quoted but important statement from Thomas Jefferson:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until wecopied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Can I finally register høtmãîl.cöm and gòåtsè.ç×?
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"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
Walid's patent should be condemned under eminent domain. Even if it is a true invention (which, from what I saw, it's not), why can't the United States just declare that this piece of "property" is of sufficient public interest to take it away from him?
OMG, have you seen their website? They're trade marking phrases from the matrix...
Isn't attending standard group meetings and patenting the ideas presented at those meetings a patented business model owned by RAMBUS?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The various encoding schemes - which Walid has apparently patented - ARE the 2nd best systems! Their only redeeming feature is that they can be deployed quickly with minimal disruption to existing clients and servers. Other than that, they're an ugly hack.
If you were designing an Internationalized Internet Protocol suite from scratch, you wouldn't go near anything like them with a 10 meter pole!
Do it right, even though it will be a long process to convert: UTF on the wire.
Edith Keeler Must Die
It's more painful and will take a lot longer, but it is the right thing to do. Let Walid wallow in their worthless patent. Three cheers for the IETF thumbing their noses at the patent Nazis.
"Oh, you patented that, well I guess Internationalization will take a lot longer then, because we are not going to use patented technology, no way, now how, unless it is licensed freely for all to use."
Edith Keeler Must Die
"Secondly, the vast majority of the world do not use English."
But every desktop computer on earth uses ASCII letters out of the box."However, I still have to disagree. If you are likely to want the contents of a non-English URL, you're going to need a non-English viewer of some kind, and if you already have that, then the input method is only a tiny step beyond."
The premise that only people speaking the language of a website will be interested in it is narrow minded to the extreme. Several examples that immediately spring to mind:
"Thirdly, there would be terrible political consequences to forcing everyone to use ASCII. It would very quickly be perverted into an East versus West issue."
This one is ridiculous. ASCII letters are the tool to navigate the web. Just like the browser and its back button. It is not ideal but it is still just a tool. Saying it will turn into a religious war is just plain alarmist.
The distinction is irrelevant... Any desktop system intended for web use is ASCII compatible in some manner, out of the box. In other words, the user does not have to fiddle with his computer to get it to work. As such, from the user's point of view, every desktop computer is ASCII comaptible.
Your idea that independant splintering might occur is very possible. However, such splintering would probably die out in the long run as its drawbacks would eventually far outweigh it's perceived benefits for the intended audience. Some immediate examples:
All these problems would still happen with an international standard. The only difference is that a standard would set this silliness in stone and only postpone the idea's inevitable death and as a result further its damage.
Adding multilingual domain names is bound to fail in the long run and will only create confusion and incompatabilities as it crashes and burns.
For example, your average Russian user will not be able to type in a Chinese domain name, who in turn will be unable to access a Japanese domain name, who in turn will not know how to see a German web site with that pesky umlaut somewhere in its domain name. The only thing this silly idea will do well is effectively fragment DNS and, as a result, the net.
May this patent help this idea disappear before it causes any real damage...
The really sad part is that "U+XXXX" is the standard nomenclature for unicode characters. Talk about prior art.
Derek
Don't Panic...
Er, do you know what the IETF is?
They're a standards body, they set standards for other people to use. If they'd have included something which is patented in DNS, for example, everyone would have to pay the patent holder to develop a DNS server.
Standards have to be free from third party IP claims to be successful, so if the IETF were to include this in a standard, it would simply go unimplemented.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Let me get this straight. Some guy spends on the order of $10,000 to get a patent.
Now the body that is going to shape how international domain name resolution happens is going to refuse to seriously look into challenging the patent.
Sure, investigating the validity of the patent could cost tens of thousands of dollers. Sure, a patent lawsuit can cost a million dollars. But nobody seems to be asking: WHAT IS THE COST OF ACCEPTING A SECOND-BEST SYSTEM? Even the people in charge do not seem to care. Maybe they don't have money to fight. A good question would be "Why not?"
If geeks can't confront solving problems regarding DNS in rational, cost-effective ways, then who will? Whether that patent is a good one or a bad one, or whether the patent system is beside the point. The point is that the patent is there, and the problem should be dealt with to lead to a good technical system.
Perhaps you mean: every IBM compatible PC? Others may show you ascii text correctly on software but I think that it doesn't map one-to-one in hardware...
_________________________
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
This isn't always true. I go to Japanese anime sites all the time, and they're not in English. The text doesn't display correctly, but I can download any pictures, videos, or sound files. Navigation is possible by looking at the actual urls for recognizable names --- they have to be in ascii, so I can generally guess what they point to. This is very useful, and if I did speak an uncommon language, would only require that I learn one second language, instead of a new language, alphabet, and specialized character entry format for each and every alphabet in the world that had sites worth visiting.
The current internet seems to be popular in many countries, and it's ascii based. I think perhaps it has already been accepted as a technical standard, just as html is the accepted standard markup language for web pages.
-- C
You're right, I misspoke. I rarely encounter those myself, though --- I've only really seen them on ftp sites. I believe many/most people who actually create websites rename them to ensure links work ok, whereas native filenames are often the result of uploading a directory of files at random.
good, good, now we are getting somewhere. how do we go about getting port 340 assigned as DNS2?
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
okay, i volunteer openearth.org as a mirror/site/whatever for such a project. anyone have experience drafting RFCs?
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
sounds good to me. any ideas for a port number? let's get started, no use in sitting aronud. hey while we're at it why don't we come up with a open, standards-based naming registrar and do away with NSI and this patent squabble in one fell swoop? dibs on microsoft.com in the new DNS...
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Next thing you know the buy who devised the null modem cable will try patenting the idea of a network. I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader as to what happens then.
A better solution would be to go to a judge and say, "Do you honestly think a non-profit internet standards organization is trying to rip off some little company? Is allowing domain names to be entered in any language such a brillint and inimaginable innovation that it deserves legal protection? Given the obvious demand for such a system, is there any way we could have done it better?"
Okay, so the U.S. legal system works nothing like that. After all, if they used common sense, we wouldn't need lawyers.
Prior to IETF, there is an APNG iDNS Working Group which is working on iDNS since June 1998 before it is move into IETF. (http://www.apng.org/idns/ & http://www.idns.org/)
Walid's patent is a clone of Martin Duerst I-D in July 1997. It is an obvious prior art which should not be granted in the first place.
Convert to UNICODE before transmitting? That's their big solution? I'm not sure whether to be pissed at for Walid the painfully obvious patent, or the IETF for taking so long to figure it out.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Yes, but the patent was granted earlier this year, which means it was patented quite some time before.
If they hope to challenge it, they'll have to go with obviousness, which the patent obviously is. We did exactly what they patented to slap our i18n info into our databases, which didn't accept double byte characters. It's a trick i18n firms have been using for years, and, as usual, it's astonishing that someone could get a patent on anything this obvious.
Here's the heart of their patent: "The domain name is converted to a standard format which can represent all language character sets, such as UNICODE. The UNICODE string is then transformed to be in RFC1035 compliant format." Or, according to the article, "This solution involves converting foreign language characters into Unicode, a computer industry standard, and then encoding them in U.S. ASCII for transmission over the Internet."
There's an obscene amount of prior art for this, applied to databases, dll's, and pretty much anything you can think of, except DNS. Even the courts usually don't allow a patent to stand that's simply old hat applied to a slightly tweaked problem.
This is a pretty straightforward thing, I find it hard to believe that no one has thought of it. Somebody here has to have some prior art examples...
Read through the posts before you before posting, please. This way when you say something it's original instead of an idea that's occured to many before you. There just aren't enough redundancy points to go around...
Any spoon would be too big.
This is starting to resemble the initial dot-com fever as swept corporate America. Anything that had those magical 4 characters in the name was new in an exciting way and so must have been a sure shot. We know what happened there.
The new craze is this IP (two NEW magic characters!) suit stupidity. Any possible patent is sought out and somehow granted, just to say "We were first, so there." It's not even so much about licensing fees as revenews, which most of these attempts have never generated in any significant form. This is about having control, being able to swing a legal club and act big.
Won't it be nice when corporations have a clue again? I'm sure by then there will be another way of feeling all powerful and amazing after this one wears off so I guess that's still wishful thinking. Technology makes things different and on many fronts easier - but no portion of it is miraculous. You still have to work
In other news today, stupidity is rampant on the internet.
Any spoon would be too big.
I'm sure if they really wanted to they could get the cash. I'm sure there are corps from places not in the US who would donate the money and landsharks to fight this. So once again the question does anyone know if the IETF really does have prior art or not. OTOH it may just be that they are using this as an excuse to come up with a better solution.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If they can prove that they where working on this system before July 21 1999 then yes yes it would. I am assuming from the fact that they say in the article that they are not going to test this in the courts that they do not have really good proof of this. (Otherwise I can't think of any good reason they don't take thesee people to court.) And as much as I wish these people would FOAD it looks like this one would hold up.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Every widely used language has a transliteration method to ASCII characters. They might be ugly, and they might be unpopular, but they work.
ASCII is just easier.
I take your point. Better to use a simple lowest common denominator that everyone can use, rather than a monstrosity that isolates people.
However, I still have to disagree. If you are likely to want the contents of a non-English URL, you're going to need a non-English viewer of some kind, and if you already have that, then the input method is only a tiny step beyond.
Secondly, the vast majority of the world do not use English. Granted, the English/Roman alphabet covers many more languages than just English, but I would still be surprised if the Roman alphabet is recognizable by a majority of the world.
Thirdly, there would be terrible political consequences to forcing everyone to use ASCII. It would very quickly be perverted into an East versus West issue.
Finally, if no standard for non-English languages is defined now, it will happen later nevertheless, except that each country will be setting up their own separate network for their own use. This would isolate people more, not less.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
You have valid points, although I think you took my language more strongly than I intended. (I stopped short of saying there would be a religious war, for instance.)
However, I've come to the conclusion that my final point (which, unfortunately, came to me last) is the most important. If we don't set up some kind of international standard now, each group of non-English speakers will go away and do their own (incompatible) thing.
If we let this eventuality come to pass, the problems you pointed out in your post would be multiplied. In addition to your input problems, you might have to switch to a different OS, install different software, and maybe even connect to a different ISP.
(Tho' not if you run Linux, of course. :-)
Well, you might still have to use a different
ISP.)
If we establish a common technology, we can deal with the difficulties of language. But if we don't, we'll have to deal with both the difficulties of language, and technology.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
As posted to the site/article mentioned:
The science of computing hasn't yet identified and made generally available the core functionality of abstraction manipulation mechanics. To use an analogy - what the patent office has done is something along the lines of accepting the earth is flat. But the earth is not flat and the limitation of sailing off the edge of the earth is a fabrication of illusion.
When genuine computer science reaches enough understanding of what computers are in terms of abstraction manipulation machines then it will also come to understand that most software patents are invalid. Although it is not uncommon for patents to be overturned, there will be an overload. How that problem will be resolved is hard to say as it's not so easy to determine what would have happened had not faulty constraints been applied in software thru invalid patents.
There are some things that international patent system can and do agree on. Such as, you cannot patent natural law, physical phenomenon and abstract ideas, and several other smaller but as important concepts like mathmatical algorythims and "inventions" which would be considered common obvious conclusion in the given field of use, etc. But upon a twisted and error prone foundation of distorted computer technology, patents are being to quickly issued, issued before the science has gotten back to being genuine, rather than biased and short sighted towards what can make money now.
These things, not patentable, are at the genuine foundation of abstraction manipulation mechanics and extend beyond computing. Through computers we can better recognize and objectively make use of such abstraction manipulation machinery.
To get a better idea, consider what is in the context of a USPTO RFC response to issues regarding prior art.
www.mindspring.com/~timrue/KNMVIC.html
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
In the web site outlining the patent the references section lists: "iDNS--Internationalized Domain Name System, by Center for Internet Research(http://www.apng.org/ids/, Jan. 1998.". Actually the web address is incorrect and should be http://www.apng.org/idns/ so I wonder if that is just a typo on the web page OR in the actual patent. If it's in the actual patent then ... doesn't the patent office at least check the references ?.
Anyway can someone explain to me how this referenced web site doesn't constitute prior art ?
I only quickly read the patent and the above reference but they seem to be presenting the same idea.
i.e. The http://www.apng.org/idns/ site suggests UTF-5 whereas the WALID patent suggests Unicode. See this site for a description of the two.
Well I just can't see how taking an existing idea which is clearly still in draft and changing one small aspect of it (ie. the encoding UTF-8 instead of UTF-5) can constitute a new idea. What the hell is the US Patent system doing to free trade if stuff like this is going on ?
Actually I've just been re-reading about Unicode aka UTF-8 & Co and it seems that UTF-5 is actually oneof the unicode formats. In this case how is specifying a patent that specifies "Unicode" all that different from specifying the same idea with one of the particular implementations of Unicode (ie. UTF-5) ?
Anyway given the large number of comments already and the fact that I only get posted at Score:1 I don't expect too many people to read this but I'd be interested in a comment from someone a bit more clued in to this than I am.
Thanks.
yeah .. it keeps reminding me that I measure *my* job as 1 to 10 monkeys for a few hours of banging away
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Well, if your device "can't even fit Unicode font into their memory", then you (as you say later) cut the fonts into manageable subsets. Character set, character encoding, and fonts are three separate issues. The reason why folks like UTF-8 so much is because it is easy to use. The software I code on used to support multiple character sets (European and CJK) internally. Now, we convert to UTF-8 on the way in and convert back to the desired character set on the way out. Our code is cleaner, smaller, easier to understand, and easier to debug. Supporting multiple character sets per document is a mess and completely unnecessary for most real world applications.
They patented a method to convert text from an arbitrary charset, to UNICODE, and then convert this to plain text as U+XXXX where XXXX is the hev version of the unicode charset. Thats a basic first year programming assignment and definately not an innovation. The first part is obviously crap as converting from one charset to another is not a new idea (Hell java does it for nearly every charset in existance for years). As for the rest does outputing a unicode character in hex count as an innovation? Is there anyone here who works with unicode and hasn't done the same thing as part of debugging an application?
Whats next, patent a method for converting from an arbitrary number set to decimal and then outputting it in hex? The stupidity of the USPTO boggles the mind.
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Couldn't this be shot down by almost any URL encoding scheme, including CGI? It seems that the debacle regards encoding unicode in ASCII. How is this any different from encoding special ASCII characters like ' ' into '+'? They are just encoding slightly different input data.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Really. Having multilingual domains will create a big mess with top level domains. Are they going to resolve it by adding new zones? Will that mean there is a chance of getting "." or "."? It would be nice if this multilingual ("localized"?) version of DNS would be completely standalone. No messing with translations and no way to get around the registration process. Becaue right now I can "translate" those new non-English domains I want, to register them through regular registrars like Tucows :). Or will I be denied right to register weird domain name on the grounds that it's Cola in Greek, translated with patented algorythm? :)
-----
Hyperom.com
Their solution apparently relies on encoding data (UNICODE strings by the looks of it) in a different format. This leads me to suppose that the following would be sufficient as examples of prior art. Of course "I Am Not A Leach". In approximatly cronological order.
The only idea worthy of patent in this entire discussion was discovered by Alan Turing quite some time ago. Everything following it has merely been competent engineering as opposed to brilliant innovation.
In related news, I have applied for a patent on a new method of wiping one's ass. I'm call it the front to back technique. This is clearly an innovative and non-obvious solution. In light of this, I have decided to require all persons using my patented technique to submit as royalties the results of their wiping to my new company, inWalid Technologies Inc.
"To blow recursion, you must first blow recus
Open a registar in europe and start doing the service here. Then that company can come here and try to use our courts. His patent is only valide in the stupid system that you have in the US.
In the European system that claim hould never be valid (dont como to Britain, they have a system that resembles the amarican), come to Portugal, our court system is so fucked up with older cases that it would take 4-6 years to get a ruling (i am not kidding).
One alternative plan is to just use Unicode (UTF-?). I would think that using unicode would be a very neat solution - although transfer could be eased by prepending some unusual ascii-character or sequence in front of the unicode domain name.
Unicode has also been developed in cooperation with China, so this would avoid conflicts with China about who administrates chinese character domain names.
Every one talks about Unicode - even the seemingly obscure "new" registry format for Windows is Unicode - of cours Microsoft as usually prefers to leave it's users in the dark, to make them feel incompetent and relying on the clutches of windows - and fails to provide a file extension for unicode text files.
But who is actually daring enough to "Go Unicode"(TM)(2001 RedLaggedTeut) ?
I expect the usual answers from my fellow Slashdot readers - that the patent is really trivial, that it is "a bad thing"(TM) to patent protocols, but what interests me is this question: what are the obstacles to go straight unicode, and is the patented kludge the only solution ?
In addition, I would like to bring to attention to /, another point brought to me by a fellow T. - what is the use of having multiple top level domains when due to trademark laws, the owner of the domain www.DOMAINNAME.com can sue you if you set up any domain named www.DOMAINNAME.ANYTOPLEVELDOMAIN. .countrycode domain is orthogonal to trademarks ? For example, isn't it pointless that you cannot reserve a domain name like your lastname, Smith, simply because some company is sitting on this name somewhere ?
Wouldn't it be better to explicitely state and propagate the knowlegde that a domain name in any other non-.com and non
To summarize, how do you think will or should the problem of unicode names that resemble exisiting domain names be handled ?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
That if it is unicode, then it should be no problem to provide an editor that lets you look at the saved registries just as easy as the NT4 registries.
This applies to unix tools like bash, diff and less as well.
[ratebots.txt]
deny rate down from all
allow rate up from all
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
You are right, notepad recognizes the unicode - it was my spiffy textpad program that did not. Neither could xemacs or GNU diff handle it, while wordpad did fine.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
As usually, the patent is also available at US Patent office
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
heehee....
i dont think its right to say that all successfull people are immoral, so i agree with you on this part.
But i think people who have _really_ much money (above 2,000,000USD or so) havent really earned this money. This is impossible. I mean, yeah, in justice they are right, but this would be immoral. Its simply not ok that somebody earns 10000...USD/hour or whatever you have to earn/hour to get so much money..
bye,
platy
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I.
Pinky:Yeah. You'll be rich.
Brain:The IETF never violates patents! I'll make gazillions!
Pinky: It says here that they never pay patent fees either. This says they will work on an alternative solution, which doesn't use your patents. What does that mean, Brain?
Brain:What? Let me see that! Curses! Foiled again!
The only people who are really and truly screwed are Walid's investors, or other poor bozos who never looked at IETF's track record. Simple answer. Refuse to hire the WALID folks when they go bust. Tell every company that the WALID folks are the reason the Internet will be harder to use over the coming years. It's not about getting mad. It's about showing the chickens where to roost.
Good idea! I'm glad I thought of it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to make a quick trip to the Patent Office...
(and while I'm there, maybe I'll trademark "DNS 2.0")Trolls throughout history:
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
"Walid filed paperwork with the IETF claiming that it will seek licensing fees "based on reciprocity" if this approach is adopted in the group's final standard."
Based on reciprocity? Once again, "patents by corporations who want to get paid" in action. I think with the major economic slowdown in the U.S. alot of startups are making inroads into a new (not-so-new?) and lucrative form of business.
There is no spork.
OK, let's put aside any patentability issues and say that they have patented a method of converting arbitary domain names to US-ASCII domain names (gee, I thought MIME does something very similar with headers, I must be mistaken).
What they are missing is the fact that for their patent to become valuable that particular conversion method must become standard. Now, you can have two kinds of standards, either de facto (like Microsoft) or de jure (like IETF). No self-respecting standards body is going to standardize a patented method so their only hope then lies in selling their patent to Microsoft. And I don't think even Microsoft has enough clout to make new de facto DNS standards...
I'm so glad yet another company has managed to patent configuring switches on a machine with lots of switches. But how many switches does that machine have to have before you can start patenting those arrangements?
Does this mean I can get a patent for turning on a flashlight? (ignoring the obviousness and novelty requirements) After all, I make a "new machine" by flipping the switch, and once the circuit is complete, a process is started whereby the energy/matter stored in chemical bond form gets transformed into energy/matter in light form and this transformation is useful.
And if not, how many switches and how many lights does a machine have to have before you can patent a certain arrangement of switches on that machine that cauess a certain arrangements of light to appear?
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Certainly one option would be to develop the community so that most folks know most languages (or all supported languages) - which could be interesting and certainly challenging. Could that be done? I'm not sure it's practical.
Whatever language is being used, the people who do not know that language will not be able to use the medium. If you and I both know Esperanto but you speak Italian and I speak Russian most of the time we will never be able to connect unless we speak Esperanto. Therefore if the Internet consisted of just you and I would we need to support Russian, Italian, Esperanto or some combination? In this case I would vote just Esperanto.
You can plainly see that this is an issue that strikes a chord with me. If I had to learn a different language to use the Internet I believe I would do it.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I guess I just advocate standardization. And while we're at it.. why do we need more TLDs before we have a directory service replacing DNS? Here's a challenge: find the URL for National Semiconductor, Inc. Now, with DNS how easy would that be if you had twice as many TLDs? Adding TLDs without first replacing DNS is putting the cart before the horse, making the Internet more difficult to use and LESS universal.. just like having international URLs.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
First, some of the documents that Walid submitted to the IETF working group on internationalized domain names are here and here.
Now, I won't comment on the contents of these documents with the exception that one of them was submitted to the working group after the patent was granted without any mention of the patent itself.
From the looks of things, the IETF only started publishing work on internalization of domain names in 2000, so the prior art argument looks to be moot as Walid's patent application was filed in July 1999.
I have to agree with the IETF's stance. Pushing patented technology (no matter how dubious the patent is) as a standard is akin to forcing internet users into paying a tax. I applaud the IETF in their statement; license the technology for free or we'll just use something else.
-----patent (noun) pronounced with a short A: A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
patent (adjective) pronounced with a long A: Obvious; plain; synonym of apparent.
The case in point is Micron technologies (vs. some bad guy I can't remember) and has to do with the specification of the PCI bus. The patent was invalidated for abuse of intellectual property. The patented invention was offered to an open standards group that required notice to be made of any IP claims, no notice was made.
The IETF requires every attendee to read a piece of paper that gives (IMHO) actual notice of this policy. I don't know if Walid attended an IETF but constructive notice has surely been achieved.
The other grounds to attack a patent are obviousness and prior art. There are prior encodings for several languages in ascii form - particularly Chineese and Japaneese from many years before. Base64 is a generic 6 bit encoding scheme. Encoding UNICODE in 5 bit ascii is obvious to me. It is a direct application of known technology to well defined requirements and constraints. Given time a direct on target DNS prior art can probably be found, we were discussing the issue back in 1990.
Getting a patent past the US PTO means very little. Unless you have $2 million to defend the claims and a very strong claim the patent is worthless.
As for the issue of whether it is adequate for the World Wide Web to meet only the needs of English speakers in the US, if the IETF started to act on that premise it would inevitably lead to standards diverging. There is a genuine demand for multilingual DNS, the fact that some people don't see the need is irrelevant, they are not the constituency to be served.
Klensen's directory idea has been arround at least 15 years. It would inevitably take at least 10 years to be anywhere near a position to challenge DNS. Equally the idea of using another of the DNS name spaces is somewhat whacky, OK so DNS can serve out names for HEISOD and CHAOS networks, my email client only queries in the Internet name space.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Incorrect, under the US patent fraud system the inventor is essentially assumed to have invented the device a year earlier than the filing date.
Remember that the purpose of the USPTO is to grant spurious monopolies to fraudsters who can then extort huge sums from corporations and give whacking great campagin bribes to members of Congress.
Congress will not reform the patent system as long as they are being purchased by the patent barons.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
If the IETF has been working on this solution for so many months, they must have some evidence to show for it. Couldn't they just cite their own research as prior art and have Walid's patent tossed out?
And on another note, who exactly would pay the licensing fees that Walid is asking for?
Dancin Santa
Well, how about a class action against DoubleClick and all other ad agencies for using and selling our "IP". IP being our browsing habits, internet usage, etc. If that isn't "IP", I don't know what else could be legitimately considered "IP". How bout it? anyone with me?
C Pungent
So where was Walid when the international community has been asking for this all this time? It sounds to me like they may have fleshed out the technology after the standards committee started working, then demanded cash for an idea so obvious it was independently created.
Unfortunately, this is a problem with open-source and standards-based development. They spend their time solving the problem well instead of getting patents, and then get scooped by idea stealers. Something should be done. Personally I'm in favor of giving obvious-patent holders the finger.
cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
This is the US patent system in a nutshell. Allow me to quote Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to author and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
Explain to me Mr. Godici, how in the world can the extension an already documented and wide-spread system with a couple of extra characters qualify as an discovery!? Ahh, yes, "the land of opportunity".
The US Patent & Trademark Office is such wimps.
> Navigation is possible by looking at the actual urls for recognizable names --- they have to be in ascii.
Not really, I get non-ascii file names often enough.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Sounds to me that WALID was trying to ride the money train.
c en et.or.kr/2000911/0252.html+walid&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ncdnhc.pea
--
J. Douglas Hawkins, of WALID, Inc., Elected to Inaugural Multilingual
Internet Names Consortium Board
[Business Wire]
ANN ARBOR, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE) via NewsEdge Corporation -- J. Douglas
Hawkins, Director of Business Development at WALID, Inc., has been
elected
to the Inaugural Board of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium
(MINC).
The Inaugural Board, which includes members from industry and academia,
will
promote the implementation of multilingual Internet names, including
domain
names and keywords. The Board will work together with the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names
and Numbers (ICANN) and other international organizations to encourage
and
direct the transition to a truly multilingual Internet.
Mr. Hawkins brings to the Board his extensive experience overseeing the
development and internationalization of products used in over 70
countries
and in seven different languages. The Board also benefits from Mr.
Hawkins'
many years of experience working successfully with United Nations'
Specialized Agencies, national governments and regional organizations.
About WALID: WALID, Inc., headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, provides
a
complete patent-pending solution for registering and resolving
international
multi-lingual Internet domain names. Through the registration of
non-English
domain names, WALID's technology enables business, organizations, and
individuals to establish a unique presence in any language from which to
communicate and conduct global commerce via the Internet.
WALID, Inc., 2245 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104, USA
About MINC: The Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) is a newly
formed international consortium created by industry, academia, research,
government and non-governmental organizations, with the common goal of
advancing the development of the Internet through the coordination of
the
technology and technical deployment of multilingual Internet names. MINC
originated from a Chairman's commission on internationalized Domain
Names
(iDNS) by the Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG), Asia's oldest
Internet
organization, partially supported by the National University of
Singapore
(NUS) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of
Canada.
For more information about MINC, please see or
send an
email to sec@minc.org.
>
CONTACT: WALID, Inc. | Bryan Cash, 734/822-2028 | Fax: 734/822-2021 |
bcash@walid.com
Here is the link for the patent
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=WO00056035A1
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
...isn't this more of a USA problem?
[rant]
I mean, where is the IETF "located"? Could they not simply adopt their IDN system everywhere *other* than the US?
The problem I find with software patents today is that they are valid only in the United States: yet nobody seems to realize this! There's a whole big world out there beyond the Yanks-to-the-South and I see no reason to penalize the rest of the Internet by somehow accepting this sort of crap coming out of the States.
The IETF ought to adopt whatever Internet Standards it likes. If this prohibits Internet standards from being implemented in the States this will be just another reason for network users in the States to oppose software patents.
I don't think the right attitude is to accomodate hypercapitalism and the erosion of our rights: but to simply ignore the US. They will either give up their notions of intellectual property and become standards compliant with the rest of us, or, not. If not? Their loss.
The Internet functions best on open and accepted standards... not on closed, proprietary protocols.
[/rant]
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Well according to the well known port list, 340 is unassigned, let's use that. And I'm sure alternic could probably be a good starting point for stanards-based DNS2
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
This patent looks like it's at the very least an ugly one (but then again, software patents aren't things that win beauty contests). So, why don't we let them have their bullshit patent and design DNS 2.0, which uses unicode throughout. Just throw it on a different port, and supercede RFC 1035. Since the whole patent hinges on this particular RFC, a new system that's not backwards compatible with the old one would not violate the patent.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
The patent describes an obvious engineering solution. Walid Tout (the "inventor") should go into the engineering hall of shame: either he wasn't smart enough to realize that this was obvious, or he was irresponsible enough to patent it anyway.
The article didn't mention, but a question I would like answered is if Walid actually did the necessary work on their own, or whether they stole their ideas from the working group.
That kind of open-standard backstabbing has been occuring more frequently, and I'm curious if this is another instance.
This is a perfect example of why you should not be allowed to patent software. Here's a group trying to create a more universal internet, and they get knocked back by a software patent. This is a prime example of patenting software and stifling innovation. I wonder how much sooner the internationalization would be complete if not for this roadblock.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
I agree with numerous others, that browser level unicode support is needed, and a simple Apache upgrade should suffice in the short term. email can wait.
Nicholas Shanks
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http://web.nickshanks.com/
Every widely used language has a transliteration method to ASCII characters. They might be ugly, and they might be unpopular, but they work.
You may think the possibility of things like "surasshudotto/slashdot" are appalling, but this would mean replacing it with things like "U0fa2U235fUa79eU890dU100aU12baU67d2Uc390U1337".
I mean, you can't say it, you can't memorize it, and you're likely to screw it up even if you do write it down; it has to be passed around on computer, except for native language speakers with the proper software and training in that software. If the whole world has to standardize on something, it should be something short, sweet, and usable (if inconvenient) to all, like ASCII. Preferably the "standard keyboard" subset of ASCII; 3 rows of about ten keys, plus a thumb bar for the single most common key, and a border of peripherally useful keys, is just about ideal for human hands. Compare the proliferation of struggling methods of writing (non-romaji) in Japanese to the near-universal, simple and efficient typewriter method of English. Anyone can learn the alphabet in a few hours (practically everybody has already done so), and type at a computer instantly if they know the alphabet.
ASCII is just easier.
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How difficult would it be to use UTF-8, instead of ASCII, in the DNS?
This is not flame-bait, I swear. /. and posts to /. (minus yours). We don't speak your language, and we don't have to. We can get by with ASCII and you can't, but you'll still have to use ISO Latin until we let you do otherwise.
Happy the Net exists? Thank your yankee buddies across the pond. Were it not for our money (power), there'd be no commercial Internet. Period. Not only have US dollars built the infrastructure, we've supplied 99% of any content worth a spit. Including
This is the harsh reality that the rest of Europe learned to except soon after the beginning of World War I: capitalism and democracy are a rolling freight train.
Why should US companies spend a fortune researching and developing solutions to cater to people that can't stand the sight of our flag?
What is "fair"? For us to bring the rest of the world kicking and screaming into the 21st century on our dime? Where was Europe when the first set of standards was being created? That's right, busy worrying about their CURRENCY. See, even in Europe, money makes the world go 'round. That's why your post was in English ASCII, dude.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy