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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."
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
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 (rescinded - 2005)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."