Slashdot Mirror
China Locks in its Net-Citizenry
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."
It is therefore natural for us to ensure that foreign entities who wish to protect their Chinese language domain names in the .˾ and .ÍøÂç extensions are able to participate early on in the process. Therefore, we are very pleased to partner with i-DNS.net to bring this early opportunity to people outside of China now."
We have figured out a way to extract yet more money from the running capitalist dogs.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
surely it's called the Great Firewall of China?
Your attempted to access taiwan.gov.ta has been logged. Reeducation teams are now en route to your location. Please do not flee, you traitorous capitalist.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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
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?
potentially become a powerfull user lock-in
Arrgghhh!!! Even on the front page now? THERE'S ONLY ONE "L" IN "POWERFUL!"
Ooops. Guess I'll have to change my sig now.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
BUZZWORD ALERT!!
BUZZWORD ALERT!!
You are charged with not using the correct buzzword (however much more correct the terminology you have used may be.
The Great Chinese Filtering
should be stated as:
The Great Firewall of China
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."
What's "porno" in Cantonese?
Now only if I could speak Chinese...
About the characters... but I don't seem to be able to use them in a post. No fair! I went through a lot of work hitting ctrl-c ctrl-v, all for nothing!
How am I supposed to properly discuss this topic if I can't even post the network domain characters?
KMT party chairman visits Beijing. I wonder how the PRC press handled that, characterizing the ROC as a rogue province as long as they have. Must have kept the censors on their toes, especially when he walked off the plane in a suit, rather than rags and waving a 'Death to China' banner and dripping blood from his fangs... or is it only North Korea who portrays others like that..
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I love watching China shoot the wings off of its much-prophesied ascendency to world superpower, one authoritarian move at a time.
Remember, CHINA: "It worked for the soviets, right?"
I read tfa and saw nothing about locking in the chinese netizens.
Look, English literacy is on the rise in China in a major way. With all the influx of foreign investments and foreigners into china, the chinese people are having more contact than ever with the western world. Filtering out everything but chinese characters, while a technical possibility, is simple improbable.
I lived in china a few months last year, and I'm going back for the long haul soon- from what I have seen, the young, college educated Chinese like their access to information, albeit san porn, Taiwan, etc. To restrict their information flow even more would cause an outcry.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
How does allowing domains to be registered using Chinese characters have anything to do with censorship? The linked articles just prove that China already filters web traffic, regulates content, and shuts down sites they don't like. How is the ability to use Chinese characters in your location bar an indication of a sinister new plot? Sure, there is a sinister plot afoot, but I don't see how this is an astonishing new development...
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.
.
... [snipped to get past line-length filters] ...
;; 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:
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
;; 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
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
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
xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN A 203.81.44.27
xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns1.universal-names.com.
xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns2.universal-names.com.
ns1.universal-names.com. 117755 IN A 203.81.44.40
ns2.universal-names.com. 117774 IN A 203.81.44.27
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.
... as every famous person with an European/American name registered the Chinese character spelling (conversions available here)?
Will names with lucky symbols be outbidded for?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Great, instead of spam from a fake address at a pump-and-dump english domain, we can have spam from fake email addresses on domains that appear as a bunch of random characters to those without the language set.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Various plugins are available for translating multibyte domain names: example here http://www.domainavenue.com/ml_iclient.htm just pulled off the top of google's search. Eventually all browsers will have multilingual IDN support.
If you find a site right now it will most likely just have a odd-looking "puny-code" domainname; looks like "xn-.com". I think for the time being each international domain gets registered in both its puby-code and natice formats. I don't think all you BSD hippies are at any particular disadvantage as far as domain names are concerned, excpet to the extent that most of the 3rd party plugins are for MSIE only at this time.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
No, because IP and DNS are not on the same network layer. IP is part of the Network Layer (3), while DNS is part of the Application Layer (7).
A lower layer does not care about what's going on in an higher layer.
I'd do the opposite - anybody tries to send me anything with multibyte characters gets dropped in the bit bucket. I'm already getting two or three spams a day in Chinese. A couple more per day in Japanese. For some reason the Korean spam has stopped - hooray Korean ISPs? And no Russian or other Cyrillic alphabet spam ever.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I look at a Chinese site, and an hour later I'm hungry again.
China is not implementing their own IDN scheme in an attempt to lock people into it. This is based on existing work on internationalized domain names. The largest country putting their weight behind IDNs is only going to encourage their rapid universal adaptation, and eliminate localization issues.
English is easier said than done.
Ching chang chong! I can't understand yooooooou!
I read TFA after posting earlier and TFA says they are going to basically have their own top level domains in chinese. So unless the almighty gods that run the root servers allow new TLDs with chinese chars the rest of the world won't automatically see these domains.
And, to put on my authoritarian hat, if require all the ISPs in my empire to use my alternate set of root servers or my ministry-of-truth-approved DNS resolvers or some such, I can make amazon.chinese-chars-for-gongsi resolve to my ministry-of-truth-approved bookstore and not amazon.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
You raaaaaaaaaaaaaaang?
... Oh, "tempest". I'll ust crawl back into my cave now. :(
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
This seems like a GOOD THING! Honestly, restricting the DNS universe to a small subset of ASCII is simply arrogance. I want my umlauts and graves, durnit.
Besides, if they already have ways of restricting access to Internet sites -- adding a character set to a level 7 protocol isn't a practical way to censor anything.
The article did not state that they were going to use this as a means of control, but rather (as you suggested) as a means of empowering English-challenged domestic businesspeople.
I'm a bit suspicious of their motives, because business people in east Asia, including now the PRC, simply have to know English. It's not like the rest of the world is about to learn Chinese characters, though that is a very fine aspiration that I wholly support and approve of (I was a Chinese major and did a master's degree in Chinese history).
Keep in mind that the registrar can turn you off if they don't like you. Just snip and you're offline. It's one simple step from there to banning the domestic registration of English language domain names. The Chinese government is a pretty dastardly organization; I would not put much past them. The Chinese people deserve much better but it looks like it's gonna be a lot of years before much changes.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
There are right now three Chinese nations: the People's Republic, Taiwan, and Singapore. (No, I will not count "occupied Tibet" because it is ethnically not China). Doing this will not "filter out" those from these countries, as well as other members of the Chinese diasporah worldwide.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
They want their paranoia back.
All this really is is simply a useful extention to an existing facility. Trust someone to turn it around and turn it into some sort of fearful conspiracy theory just because it's to do with China.
now the legitimate root servers will be flooded with queries for these illegitimate top-level domains, as the names leak outside China, or people within China who attempt to use those names with software that hasn't been upgraded or configured to use the alternate root servers.
Microsoft might be able to cut a deal here with the chinese government: maybe the black box, microsoft is planning, can be beefed up and not as optional for china...and then they might actually charge some people in china for windows, you just in case the chinese officials don't like someone.
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
In this day and age, I believe that you would probably be watched closer if you were american and looking at chinese sites than if you were chinese and looking at american sites. Propaganda is such a strange thing.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
I agree.....Coupling was much better, if only NBC had just imported the original instead of trying to replicate it.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
That's the only explanation I can think of for the spin on the Slashdot posting. I think it's a legitimate question to raise, but to present it with the headline "China Locks in its Net-Citizenry" is just ludicrous, and extremely inflammatory. Only on Slashdot, where the term "editor" has a unique definition. Timothy ought to be ashamed of himself.
Ok, speaking pretty good Chinese, and for an experiment I just went through the process of registering a domain with these guys-
/. journal of the process - what happens, etc....
Interesting things about the process:
When you are registering, they state that the Chinese government has 30 days to reject your domain...maybe to keep domains they don't like the sound of from going live...
They force you to a min of 2 years, and the cost is $125.00 - when you register a domain, they give you the domain plus the domain.cn as well (they call it a 'free gift')-
After you register a domain they tell you that you have to install their software for your browser (no Mozilla, only IE)- With the plugin installed your new domain won't crap out when you type in characters (either GB or BIG5)-
I'll post an update in my
Should be interesting at the very least to see what happens with this...
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
I couldn't help but be reminded of the China faction in the game Command & Conquer: Generals, which have a unit called the Hacker with the humorous ability of "hacking" money out of thin air. ;)
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.
For half of the equation, let me ask a question --
.com and .net . Lack of mention of such dynamic translation is what would have me reach for the tinfoil.
How many people does it take to have a conversation?
Now, for the other half of the equation, let me propose a (set of) filter rule(s) --
Accesses to approved Chinese TLDs can go down one circuit and accesses to other TLDs can go down another.
Do I have to invoke the old equal-but-separate argument here?
Things clearing up yet?
If the Chinese government were doing this to make things more accessible for their people, they would not be stopping with defining the new rogue TLDs. They would be cooperating with ICANN to dynamically translate their Han TLDs to the ipidgin equivalents,
Now, if they REALLY wanted to show that they are not just trying to wall off things at the language boundary, they would be announcing plans to make it possible to cross the boundary. That would be fairly simple. When their registrars sell a 2LD name, they could sell the name as an aliased pair, both a Han name and a Latin name for the price of one. In the general case, the user would have them both pointing to the same IP.
punycode, if they are indeed using it, will cause them a lot of grief.
Chances are that a website with a Chinese URL isn't going to be of much use to you. Even if you could figure out the URL, chances are the pages would also be in Chinese and you wouldn't be able to read them. Of course, if you can understand enough Chinese to read the pages, then you can probably understand enough to type in the URL's...
L0stb0Y points out that they are providing pairs, so to speak, in the pattern of 名字.公司 being mapped to 名字.公司.cn .
That raises a lot more questions. If they've done it (sort of) right, what the plug-in would do is simply tag the .cn after the Han domain name (and some other essential bookkeeping and lookup). Except that in the case of .中国 , they would also be washing the .中国 pseudo-TLD.
You could do a similar thing within a large organization, such that addresses that resolve within the organization would automatically assume the TLD and 2LD, so that blackbeard.pirates.org would resolve internally by just typing "blackbeard". In fact, many internal domain name servers are set up that way by default, aren't they? And these guys are providing general names without any particular TLD.
Speaking of separate but equal, when is slashdot going to be upgraded to allowing general Unicode in the posts?...newly-government approved Chinese names of the form . (i.e. 'name.gongsi') and . (i.e 'name.wangluo')... The purchase of Simplified Chinese names from the i-DNS.net/CNNIC partnership will automatically allow the corresponding web-site to be accessed by an equivalent, computer-generated domain name in Traditional Chinese characters (i.e. used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) free of charge. Conversely, one can also buy a Traditional Chinese name directly and get an automatically assigned Simplified Chinese version free.
.gongsi or .wangluo instead of traditional Chinese characters and get the same website. In other words, this system doesn't lock users in or out... I really don't see how this is that big of deal. Not to be a jerk, but do the editors read these articles? I'm not a very big fan of China's internet policies myself, but the newspost's threats of lock-in are totally unfounded.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like a non-Chinese user could type in
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
you have to consider syllable complexity--there are many fewer kinds of syllables in chinese--as well as the homophone problem--there are a ton of characters, which carry different meanings, sitting on all the same characters.
for these reasons, everytime someone non-Chinese makes the news for the first time, they need to invent a name for him/her. there's no one way to do it, and you end up with meaning and sound variations.
Starting with the article title itself this whole thread is swarmed with utter paranoia.
If anybody took the time to read the article, it did say that there is a two-way free translation service between traditional and simplified characters. And, if you noticed, it implied that the traditional character registry was going to be handled outside the mainland. Now, for the numerous people who have posted their credentials to understand the difference between traditional and simplified characters, how in the farthest extremes of the imagination can you call that lock-in?
From TFA "We strongly suggest that companies in Singapore, particularly those with global or mainland China directed aspirations, to quickly lock in their business names and trademarks as Chinese domain names, before they find them legitimately taken by others"
The Chinese registrars would "simply" (ahem) have two DNS entries per IP address. The customer would choose the latin version of the domain name. In an ideal world, dns aliasing would be de-aliased by each host, but since that hasn't happened yet the registrars would be required to maintain the database. It wouldn't be too complex, would it? (wishful thinking?) But I have not been able to figure out any other way to prevent internationalized domain names from forming a communication barrier by means of the ability of humans to read the address.
You know, the place where the world is divided neatly into comfy extreme categories.
Intel = evil
AMD = good
Windows = evil
Linux = good
MS = double-plus-evil
Sun = good
Apple = double-plus-good
And of course, "China = double-plus-evil".
It's a comfy system. One doesn't have to actually engage the brains or anything. If it's about China or MS, it _must_ be some nefarious, sinister plot. Even if the new piece was, oh, say, that China funds some research into curing cancer or AIDS, it _must_ involve some Fu Manchu kind of villain cackling manically over a plan to use it to enslave the population.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
An action is just the same action, regardless of who does it. Good is good even if China or MS does it, and evil is still the same evil even is Apple or Google were to do it.
Judging an action by who did it, rather than for what it _is_, is the apex of stupidity and hypocrisy.
The PRC is evil, yes, but localizing web pages and URLs is _not_.
Every single western nation has its own localized URLs. E.g., as a random example, a German TV station's URL is "www.prosieben.de". They didn't translate it into "proseven" or some other english-sounding stuff for you. And, surprise, the site is in German too. Go figure.
It's only normal. Germans are more comfortable reading and writing German than English. French are more comfortable in French. Swedes are more comfortable in Swedish. And, surprise, the Chinese are better at reading and writing in Chinese.
If a Chinese person wants to find the site for, say, "The Beijing News" (made up newspaper name, I don't know if one actually exists like that), they'll be more likely to try it in chinese than to first translate it into English and/or transliterate it into 7 bit ASCII. There is no evil plot or conspiracy theory necessary to understand that.
There's nothing even China-speciffic about that. I would venture a guess that any other country with its own alphabet, has people who are more comfortable in that alphabet. That would include Japan, Greece, most arab countries, Russia, Ukraine, Korea (even south Korea), Taiwan, etc.
Some of those are very modern western countries. E.g., I haven't heard any "Great Firewall" stuff about Greece. (Although, there was that misguided ending up forbidding video games too when they tried to forbid gambling. But then it just shows that politicians are... politicians. Everywhere.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...which doesn't allow posting in non-English characters. !
Well there are always sinister plots happening *somewhere*. I have to wonder about the real motivations of the people who keep pushing this China bashing?
Perhaps they just don't like the fact that they (the government, not the Chinese people) manipulate and oppress their own citizens via a dictatorship which is not (and was never) communism, and is not really free-market capitalism either. If the labour market isn't free, it's not a "free" market.
The PRC are not perfect, but neither is the government of any powerful nation. Some just have better PR than others.
Someone help me out here; there must be a name for this form of argument. Namely, "A isn't perfect, but neither is B, so that implicitly excuses A". Let's ignore that while B is far from perfect, A may be an order of magnitude worse.
I'm not American, and I'll apologise to no-one for my dislike of Bush and his warmongering, blatantly self-serving and unashamedly greedy and parasitic cronies. And as far as PR goes, I can tell you that the Bush administration doesn't impress many people (power-blinded politicians excepted) outside the United States. PR is mainly directed inwards; I'm sure that from a Chinese person's perspective, the Chinese government are made to look far better than the US.
But if you think that this somehow excuses the general behaviour of the Chinese government (who I still consider to be an order of magnitude worse, although nowhere near as evil as they were in Mao's day), then you are mistaken.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
In Mandarin porn is huang2de, or yellow.
Same pronunciation as "imperial", but that is a different character. Lots of puns there.
If each country has incompatible data interchange protocols, then we cannot exchange information with them. If China is moving their citizens slowly to an alternate internet (one with domain names that cannot be accessed by the external world), then they are isolating their citizens.
It takes a lot of careful work to make Internet standards actually function. It only takes one move by some network provider in order to seriously break the protocols. Witness the Verisgin domain wildcard hijacking last year...
When they were just infants, nothing more than swirling balls of gas, the were separated and Sinistar took the path of eating passing spaceships where as Registar went on to become the largest purveyor of domain names in the universe.
That is, until Network Associates bought it out.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
The vast majority of spam is sent by an American, is written in English, and is advertising for an American company. I do not see why suddenly this will change because of this news.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Wrong, I am. I even read that Wired article when it first came out.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.