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China Locks in its Net-Citizenry

Posted by timothy on from the welcome-to-china dept.

DatedNews writes "China's registry CNNIC teamed up in March with registar i-DNS.net to provide "Internet domains completely in Chinese characters" to the Greater Chinese Internet community. What at first might look like a localization issue could potentially become a powerfull user lock-in and turn out to be a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering."

13 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Of course... by Bananatree3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    99% of all filtered websites out there have English domains. It would seem that Chinese who are just starting with the internet would go first to chinese domain names. They might go so far as to have a "white" list for english domain names

  2. How do I do research? by Indes · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Being a Canadian student with very little experience in Chinese, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in China as they'll be oddities in the dns names..

    Does this mean everyone is gonna have to go to UTF-8? What about those in some BSD camps that don't have full chinese support?

    1. Re:How do I do research? by Uber+Banker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Being a Western person who happens to speak fluent Mandarin (and Cantonese) as well as 'type Chinese' as well as English:

      Does this mean everyone is going to have to type English when accessing URLs? Why shouldn't URLs by Chinese characters first romanisation after.

      Of course a section of the internet written in Chinese readable in Chinese will have profound impacts on me.

      But what if I only understand/comprehend English, then I must be locked in. Damn this user lock in that is dependent on my knowledge. Damn those French, Italian, Iranian speakers who are also 'locked in' by speaking their own languange.

    2. Re:How do I do research? by 2Bits · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, let's rephrase that for a Chinese student:


      Being a Chinese student with very little experience in English, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in Canada/USA as they'll be oddities in the dns names..

      What's wrong for a country to try to promote technologies that work better in the local languages?

      What would Canadians and Americans think if they have to learn Chinese to use the Internet? That's what Chinese people (and all other people) have to do, i.e. learning English, to go online.

      The world is a beautiful place, with all its differences and disparities. It would be really boring if everyone has to speak english and eat big macs, don't you think?

  3. Dupe? by John+Seminal · · Score: 5, Interesting
    What at first might look like a localization issue could potentially become a powerfull user lock-in and turn out to be a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering

    How so, this would lock out people outside of China, not inside China. I don't have any chinese character set installed on my pc, and I would not have a way of typing in that domain name.

    If I owned a company in China, and wanted to do buisness in other countries, I would not want a domain with just Chinese characters, my non-Chinese customers would have a more difficult time finding me.

    I just don't see how this locks Chinese people into anything. It gives them more choice.

    --

    Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."

  4. Some tech details, and a question by nstrom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These LGA people claim to require a browser plugin to use these Chinese domain names. However, it just seems that they're implementing the names using punycode and some new (presumably non ICANN-approved) TLDs.

    For example, the domain name "." resolves via punycode to xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. Now we can check this domain via whois:

    $whois -h whois.i-dns.biz xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d

    i-DNS.net WHOIS Server Version 1-2-0

    This service may be used to query the availability of
    multilingual domain names. Please visit http://www.i-DNS.net/
    for more information about multilingual domain names.

    For help with the i-DNS.net WHOIS service, type 'HELP'.

    Domain ID: D1148313-IDNS
    Domain Name (Native): .
    Domain Name (ACE): xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d
    Created On: 14-Nov-2004 19:58:54 GMT
    Last Updated On: 02-Mar-2005 06:12:50 GMT
    Expiration Date: 14-Nov-2006 19:57:30 GMT

    ... [snipped to get past line-length filters] ...

    Name Server: ns1.i-dns.biz
    Name Server: ns2.i-dns.biz
    and we can actually resolve this name if we use the right DNS server:

    $dig xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d @ns1.i-dns.biz

    ; > DiG 9.2.2 > xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d @ns1.i-dns.biz
    ;; global options: printcmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. IN A

    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN A 203.81.44.27

    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns1.universal-names.com.
    xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns2.universal-names.com.

    ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
    ns1.universal-names.com. 117755 IN A 203.81.44.40
    ns2.universal-names.com. 117774 IN A 203.81.44.27

    ;; Query time: 821 msec
    ;; SERVER: 203.81.44.40#53(ns1.i-dns.biz)
    ;; WHEN: Tue Apr 26 19:49:06 2005
    ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 148
    The question raised here then is the following: why use a browser plugin at all if all is needed is to configure the user's DNS resolver to consult alternate root servers for the new TLDs? The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me suggests spyware, or something else that's not quite kosher.

  5. IP Addresses? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    teamed up in March with registar i-DNS.net to provide "Internet domains completely in Chinese characters" to the Greater Chinese Internet community.

    So long as it's just the domain name and not the IP Address in Chinese characters, I think we're safe.

  6. Re:Quick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "San kay peen" -- Or Category 3* Films...

    They're rather popular in Hong Kong ;)

    * Analogous to the PG-13, M, R resitrictions in America, Hong Kong has take a similar approach but used numbers to class the films

  7. Re:spam consequenses by patio11 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, it will appear as punycode to you. You'll end up getting a domain name which looks like xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv (always starts with xn, tends to end up with a lot of - signs). Which is great for you, because if you work in an environment where its possible you can just redirect to /dev/null/ any messages which come from one of those domains, or set SpamAssassin to consider that a very spammy token.

    --
    Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
  8. "Lock in"? by sydneyfong · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Rather, say the InterNIC locks in the whole world by forcing netizens to use English characters!

    There is no reason why people have to learn English to use the internet efficiently, especially where there's more people speaking Chinese (Mandarin) than English.

    That's lock in.

    --
    Don't quote me on this.
  9. Re:Great Chinese Filtering? by DuBois · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It really *is* the Great Firewall of China. I'm in China right now, but not behind the Great Firewall (which prevents any kind of real-time access, making all access to the "outside" running-dog slow).

    Fortunately, where I am, you can actually get Hong Kong-connected ADSL, thus bypassing the GFoC and making "real" Internet access possible.

    --
    The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
  10. Re:Quick! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    For the more hardcore ones, they're called "Say Jai". ( a nickname of "Category 4" films )

    But then it's all too easy for foreign speakers to get the pronounciation wrong and instead say something which roughly means "SoB"/"Bastard", etc.

    Risk is yours. ;-p

  11. Re:I can see it now by Enoch+Root · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ya know, I'll take Slashdot's China-censoring rants seriously the day the Chinese government actually, you know, censors Slashdot...

    As it stands, I've been healthily losing time reading anti-Chinese ramblings on Slashdot for two years from Shanghai.

    I have yet to run into any t#*#&$&$[NO CARRIER]