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."

Comments

In other words

[winkydink]

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.

Great Chinese Filtering?

[Anonymous Coward]

surely it's called the Great Firewall of China?

Re:Great Chinese Filtering?

[Duncan3]

Fear not!!! This will be fixed in the dupe.

I can see it now

[Raul654]

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.

Re:I can see it now

[Enoch Root]

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]

How do I do research?

[Indes]

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?

Re:How do I do research?

[2Bits]

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?

I can't take it any more!

[veg_all]

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.

Dupe?

[John Seminal]

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.

Re:Dupe?

[Enoch Root]

Don't fret. Here's how this article came to be:

- A random Slashdot reader stumbles upon an article;
- Realizing it's about China, he suspects this could make the front page;
- BUT! It's not anti-Chinese, just about allowing Hanzi URLs! What to do!
- The random Slashdot reader adds a RANDOM ANTI-COMMUNIST BASTARDS slant. Voila!
- Editors approve the article in the blink of an eye.

And that, my friend, is how Slashdot front pages are made.

Ah...

[Dan Up Baby]

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?"

tempest in a teapot

[fliptout]

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.

Re:tempest in a teapot

[DNS-and-BIND]

The young, college-educated Chinese make up a tiny fraction of China's 1,300,000,000 people. The ones who speak English are an even smaller fraction of that, and consist mostly of those who have chosen careers in export trade. Let me guess, you were an English teacher. No surprise there...such a cloistered environment. Businessmen in manufacturing, like me, get out to the factories in the countryside and see the real deal.

You don't get it. When have the outcries of people on the internet ever accomplished anything?

I'm not getting something

[coupland]

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...

Some tech details, and a question

[nstrom]

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.

spam consequenses

[dj245]

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.

Re:Will this affect IPv9?

[jerometremblay]

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.

Re:Quick!

[blueZhift]

Please forgive the poor transliteration!

Porn Video: haam di (hah-mm dee)
Horny: haam suup (hah-mm s-uh-p) literally salty and wet

At least, those are the colloquial expressions I'm told.

It always happens

[ded_si_luap]

I look at a Chinese site, and an hour later I'm hungry again.

Would you like some FUD with that?

[hunterx11]

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.

Turnaround

[iendedi]

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.

I was thinking the same thing, actually. This shouldn't affect anyone inside of China attempting to access sites outside of China. But how does this affect those outside of China resolving addresses inside of China? Does it matter?

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.

Re:The 60's called

[AHumbleOpinion]

The 60's called. They want their paranoia back.

Was Tiananmen Square in the 60s? No.
Was the Navy EP-3 midair crash in the 60s? No.

While you can argue that localized domain names are not much of an issue and that things are being blown way out of proportion, it is asinine to declare that the days of being wary of communist china are long gone. When the chinese citizens can vote anyone out of office then we can revisit the trust issue.

Just tried to register a domain...

[L0stb0Y]

Ok, speaking pretty good Chinese, and for an experiment I just went through the process of registering a domain with these guys-

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 /. journal of the process - what happens, etc....

Should be interesting at the very least to see what happens with this...

"Lock in"?

[sydneyfong]

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.

No lock-out, either

[ragingmime]

...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.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like a non-Chinese user could type in .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.