Slashdot Mirror
China Prepares to Launch Alternate Internet
Netfree writes "The Chinese government has announced
plans to launch an alternate Internet root system with new Chinese
character domains for dot-com and dot-net. This may mean that
Chinese Internet users will no
longer rely on ICANN, the U.S.-backed domain name administrator,
and, as one
commentator notes, could be the beginning of the end of the
globally interoperable Internet."
Given the intransigence the U.S. has displayed in the past regarding control of TLDs, this move isn't all that surprising. It is somewhat surprising, however, that China has chosen
One thing is for sure...network administrators will have an interesting time trying to reconcile the conflicting TLDs
Wha I am certain of is this: when I'm in charge, we'll have none of this 'multiple language' crap. Everyone will speak Esperanto, or else.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Because why would any Chinese citizen use that over the actual internet?
-JesseNothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
This most likely wouldn't have happened if the current Bush administration cooperates internationally. Thanks a bunch!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
pinko commies thwarting my internet, I say mutually assured destruction. lets blow the hell out of them commies.
Internet 2 is just growing, lets just skip 2 and go directly to 3.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
1) I recall days when the Internet consisted of a fair number of nets: Milnet, Bitnet, ARPAnet, NSFnet... I suspect the underlying technology can handle them again.
2) If China drops off line, will they take their spammers as well?
That's the problem with refusing to cooperate and compromise. In the short term, there is more to be gained by refusing to cooperate and compromise. Eventually, however, the conflict escalates to the point where both sides lose more than they gain.
Controlling the backbones will make the "internet" a lot easier for them to censor.
I doubt it. The current system is too embedded in China to be totally replaced by their own DNS system.
NMG
"As one commentator notes, could be the beginning of the end of the globally interoperable Internet".
Or it could mean the rest of the world will continue to be interoperable while China becomes even more isolated.
I guess google's bending over backwards to censor the web searching just wasnt good enough, maybe some of the citizens figured out how to use lycos. Nothing they can do about that but recreate the internet in thier own immage. But without porn...will it really be the internet?
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Other languages have different characters and or accents on them, and it's always a piss-off to be forced to use a characted subset to express yourself properly; when you leave out the accents, you look like an illiterate slob who does not know how to write correctly.
You know, the US used to be a lot more isolationist. We tend to see ourselves as superior, which limits our incentive to reach out to other countries. So we have people inside and outside of the US pressuring Americans go "go global." Given the commerce relationships we have with China, I have a feeling that they're one of the major source of that pressure. "Go global! Buy from China!"
And then they turn around and start closing themselves off from the rest of the world.
Probably not.
Unless they are going to physically separate the networks, someone on the Chinese internet could still get out. Granted some kind of connector or tunneling may have to be used but stating the end of the globally interoperable internet is a bit extreme.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
The idea is user-friendliness and connectivity, but on the terms of the Chinese Communist Party
Chinese-encoded TLDs will make it easier for an increasingly-wired Chinese people to use the internet. It will also make it much easier for the Party to control exactly what happens on Chinese-language domains.
In an earlier age, Mao said that the Party must be in control of the gun. Now, the Party must be in control of the network. The effect is the same.
Lets suppose for whatever reason I want to navigate my computer which isnt in china with an english language OS install to www.learn-to-speak-mandarin.[$CHINESE_CHAR] or to www.[$CHINESE_CHAR].net ... how exactly am I supposed to do this? ESPECIALL if icann and the rest of the "standard" DNS using world isnt tied in to whatever they are doing?
You know .. I'm usually more tolerant than I should be when I hear about some of the crap that goes on in China .. but this sad excuse of re-inventing the wheel just to more tightly control thier censorship stuff really fries my rice ..
See what they do and see if it works better!
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I can't help but view this as the fault of the US. Think about it. ICANN, a US organisation, has done little to cater to the wishes of China, even though they're a large (and growing) presence on the internet. I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese TLDs, they should have them.
ICANN needs to get off their high horse immediately.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
As if millions of MMORPG gold farmers cried out in terror, and were suddenly silences...
The communists in China won't import American HTML, poach American manufacturing industries and game the so called "free trade" system to their advantage.
Given that they've got ICBMs aimed at Los Angeles, New York and Washington, perhaps it's high time Congress reviewed its "free trade" policies with China.
Since the communists abort their females, we're looking at China exporting Boeing 747 loads of their angry young men to the US as cheap labor if we don't do something about it now.
This move puts Chinese companies at a competitive disadvantage -- how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers? Will western companies continue to outsource to China if the country puts up too many obstacles to free communication?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Great. Every country will have its own internet. wow. Humans know to really screw things up too.
Why does yahoo do this
And thanks for all the fish!
Why can't we (the open source community) just set up our own root servers?
Should not be a problem as long as their names include even one Chinese character, since I'm not aware that ICANN is even capable of assigning such names otherwise. At least I have yet to hear about any such names.
Strikes me that what they're trying to do is even further cut themselves off from undesired Western influences. They may well succeed -- for a while.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
whatever happened to coral cache ?
This could be great, if china closes itself off from the rest of the net, my firewalls will give an audible sigh of relief. Now only if eastern europe would follow suit.
... after reading all of this, does this mean that China is starting its own root, isolated from the rest of the world, or is it starting a roo that can understand chinese characters?
I'm thinking the latter, though I'm at work and don't really care either way.
China has already implemented this internet, and the url in the OP is hosted on it! That's why I'm getting access denied!
Internet is under USA control, Europe has asked for a long time to move this control to UN to prevent fragmentation and ensure "non country tied" control.
.eu process, I can tell you that we will be glad to hear this news !
:(
Right, Chinese want to bring ICANN alternative ?
I see this as an example of what europe was anticipating.
US government got two solution, #1 push Overall Internet Governence to UN now (meaning keeping the complete control on US part of Internet) or #2 waiting for who will be the next one to push its own domain control system !!!
Europe is already considering to do that, and given the time it has required for ICANN to finish
I would preffer the Internet to be unique, but if US does not care about multilateral control of a unique center of control, then let's create multiple center of control. Stupid to kill internet like that, but c'est la vie
Blame America in 5..4..3..2..
Oh wait.. It already started.
Enjoy your new DNS hierarchy. If you create something interesting in your hierarchy, we'll either figure out how to get it in ours or maybe even ditch ours entirely and switch to yours. Until then those of us on the old system don't give a crap what you do.
Surely you mean lojban right?
-------
Incite and flee.
We could all learn Chinese. End of problem.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
All root systems are totally optional. You don't need to use DNS at all to use the Internet, and if you do use DNS, you are free to use your own that is tied to no roots and assign domains to IPs as you see fit. The ICANN roots are simply the defacto standard. It's a system that nearly everyone uses to provide DNS that's accessable to everyone else. There are other root services, OpenNIC for example, they just aren't used all that much.
This is all much ado about nothing, as it always has been with these DNS debates. Other countries are free to create a non-ICANN root system and that system can be compatible or not compatible. If they choose, they can register only non-ICANN TLDs, and provide access to ICANN TLDs by mirroring ICANN's root file. They can also choose to provide alternate, incompatible registrations of ICANN TLDs.
Wether any of this has any effect depends on if any DNS servers add their roots to the list of roots they check. If most DNS servers never check them, they'll be irrelivant. If most do, they'll be relivant.
Within the borders of China, of course, the government can mandidate people use it, but on a global scale it's up to the people who write DNS servers, and ultimately individual sysamdins. If you admin a DNS server, you determine which roots, if any, it chooses to use.
One artcle is slashdotted, and the other two are short on technical details. So, I'm wondering, how are they going to make people go to the governments name servers? Will using your own cache hints file beecome a hanging offense? Will they stop routing all of ICANN's root servers?
When (not if) the Chinese government starts using their name servers as part of their censorship operations, a zillion "alternative" name servers will spring up behind the Great Firewall of China. A zillion distributed names servers, running on obscure ports, mirroring the ICANN root servers will spring up. They will be refreshed by obscure daemons running on obscure ports that penetrate the firewall.
Heck, it probably doesn't even take any programming. Just cooking up the appropriate config files for bind could get some caching name servers going that avoid easy to block ip's and ports.
end transmission.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
We already have, well sort of: http://european.nl.orsn.net/
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
Are you people in denial? The Chinese are not particularly nice people, but their manufacturing economy would run a lot smoother over an interoperable Internet. Given the choice of maintaining the Great Firewall of China vs. maintaining their own damn Internet, I suspect even the PRC would choose the former if it were in any way easier.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
China once isolated itself from the world with the consequences known by everybody specially to the chinese.
It is worth to jeopardize the future of the country for the sake of censorship?
Is the chinese oligarchy more interested in maintaining its grip on power or in developing their own country for the sake of its future and of its own people?
Such situations in the past have shown not very good results for China down the road... Even for ruling oligarchy of the moment...
A government not accountable enough, not transparent enough, not democratic enough... is no government at all.
Most of those languages are slowly but surely losing the diacritical marks.
See many circumflexes lately? They're being deprecated from French sloly but surely. Other accents will follow
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Could it really be called the Internet if it is limited to only China. Doesn't the "inter" part imply "international"?
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
A version of firefox with the address bar located vertically along the side to support the top to bottom direction of the language? I guess it would make sense...
This doesn't end the globally interoperable Internet - as long as IP packets go end-to-end, it's still just fine. Depending on exactly how they've implemented this, it may be cleanly interoperable with the rest of DNS (except that the Global Roots have to get around to including China's extra CC_TLDs), or it may be interoperable for anybody using a compatible Chinese character-set handler client (which shouldn't be a big problem, since the reason for Chinese-Character CCTLDs is to include Chinese-character content). On the other hand, it could be implemented in a way that horribly breaks any 7-bit-ASCII DNS client. It shouldn't do that - DNS is hierarchical, so the worst it should do is botch lookups to the section because the DNS server's responding in Unicode and the client doesn't understand them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...as one commentator notes, could be the beginning of the end of the globally interoperable Internet.
I'd be happy to read Michael Geist's comments if his server wasn't slashdotted. Based on the article summary (as well all know are always 100% accurate) I have to call this a load of crap.
If both networks are still using IPv4 then there is no end to the global internet, only the global domain system. I know, I know. For most, domain names *are* the internet. But all I have to do is throw my DNS requests at a different DNS server and, bam, I'm on the "other" internet.
Has no one heard of the alternate DNS root system? It appears this is all China is intending on doing: an alternate DNS system (but making it the primary one). Now, how they plan to block all ICANN root servers and all DNS servers that use them.....well, time will tell I guess.
Hardly any reason to yell that the global internet is coming to an end. Maybe the ICANN empire, but that doesn't sadden me in the least bit.
:wq
Should not be a problem as long as their names include even one Chinese character, since I'm not aware that ICANN is even capable of assigning such names otherwise. At least I have yet to hear about any such names.
So you missed all the news stories about IDN spoofing attacks then?
If China wanted to control what their citizens could see and do on the Internet they could 1) set up their own DNS, and 2) Prohibit DNS traffic from leaving or entering the country. While technically savvy folks could navigate by solely IP or make partnerships with someone outside of China to get DNS information over non-standard ports, restricting use of DNS would be a highly effective control.
./ effect ;)
...
... Too many client tasks ...
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
So long as I can keep buying my wardrobe for 29.95$ at Wal-mart I really don't care what they do to their people.
Look, they have over a billion people there. And they can't get their government together?
TOO FUCKING BAD!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
IIRC, the US and Europe ended up getting the biggest share of the IPv4 address space, and this hasn't helped Asian countries much when it comes to growing their Internet presence. I don't know how well IPv6 has taken off there (poorly if things in the US are any indication) so I wonder if one of the goals of the Chinese project is to eventually route their own Class A blocks along with TLDs? If they did that then they would be 100% on their own, as the rest of the 'Net would have to cut them off to avoid packet collisions. Heck, they'd have to set up border mail proxies just to share email with the West... which would give them a lot of filtering/monitoring options too... I bet that is really attractive to them right now.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
China will soon surpass the USA as the largest consumer of fuel oil and by 2025 will likely be the most productive economy on the face of the Earth. Whose interweb do you want to be on -- your trading partner's, or the Other Guys?
BushCo and ICANN are shooting themselves in the foot (well, more like their constituents, but who the fuck cares about numbers in a Diebold machine anyways?). Of course, they're not going to be tasked with cleaning up their mess, whereas the Chinese will have to make their mess work. Who's got the better motive here?
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I haven't seen any comments on this yet, but my first thought on reading the summary was that this would make censorship of content on the internet(s) a lot easier. If you don't play by the rules, then their ICANN-equivalent can pull your domain registration.
The Country-wide Web! Is it possible for the world to get smaller and larger at the same time?
Things won't entirely fail, but they'll sometimes be a lot more of a hassle...
1) The two domain registrars can sync with mirror eachother's databases. Then the only glitches occur when the China and the U.S. have an active disagreement: they both want to register the same name to different parties, or China (most likely) wants to suppress from its people a DNS entry maintained by the U.S.
2) As long as IP#s and routers remain configured properly, you can always fall back on using IP#s rather than DNS names when there's a naming problem. This can be inconvenient for users and webmasters, but it should work in most cases.
u cant really call it internet, its gonna end up to be a massive intranet
anyways fair play to them hope this pushes the US to handover the DNS system to the UN
Did I miss something?
n sors_us_video/
Or was Google's "censorship for the US" policy not covered on Slashdot in the last couple of days?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/27/google_ce
Was this mentioned on Slashdot recently?
The problem with China, and what led to the Tiannamen Square massacre, is the repression of expression and viewpoints. Communism works only with an iron fist, and I know that the Chinese leadership are not ready again to go thru with exterminating the radical fringe of their own population, as Mao otherwise would have.
The idea that China will form its own Internet root sites is an entertaining one, and hearkens back to the T. Square disaster in different ways. If you look at the relative recent Chinese history (10-15 years), they have started to adopt western principles in order to keep afloat -- they offer small business loans, subsidize small businesses, encourage investments, etc. Personal wealth is now there to be had in a similar way that it is in the US. The Chinese know this as well, and have for the most part (according to what I've read anyway), are enjoying the freedoms the Party have allowed them to have in order to flourish the economy as a whole.
That said... if you take away something they already have.. you will find only more resistance and rebels emerge -- and they will have the support of the world behind them. Communism works in China... but as the ruling party goes and makes decisions like this... it's going to be fun to watch it all unravel over the next 10 or 20 years. And the fall of Communism in China will be harder hit than in Russia, although it won't be from economic collapse. It will be from political collapse.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Generally, people who intentionally break inter-operability expect that they'll be a stronger force of attraction than the existing system. MS is a perfect exemple of that.
Now the question everybody will have to ask himself is "Can I afford to be isolated from China?" Since China has become the world's factory, I doubt many people will stop doing business with them. So everybody will basically support a dual system.
And if, at some point, people are forced to chose just one system because the two can't coexist, I'm not sure they will chose the US one. What do you think people can leave without more easily? Coca Cola and Hollywood movies or cloths and mobile phones?
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
In fact, forget the internet!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Just like the big money today goes and registers all variants of their web site name (.com, .net, .org, etc.), folks will just go reserve the proper names on the other network(s), and set up links so that when you hit one you are re-directed to the right place. Eventually, you won't even be able to tell which network you are on.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
When one uploads a video to Google Video, the option to distribute the content to one, many, or all-but-one locale is available. The uploader selected the option not to make available the IED video referenced in the article (which has been updated, RTFA you moran/troll/whatever) to people coming from US netblocks.
This was a decision on the part of the submitter (aka 'creative control', probably a novelty around these parts) and not on the part of Google. Bitch at the submitter, if you have to bitch at someone. And try doing it in the right topic's comments.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
If you read the first article (which is now slashdotted), it seems to indicate that the new TLDs aren't actually .com, .net, etc, but rather are the CHINESE EQUIVALENTS of them - in other words, they're adding a couple of new TLDs that will only be accessible in China, using the Chinese characters for company / network instead of the English abbreviations we use. So yahoo.com will still link to Yahoo, but yahoo.(chinese word for company) might go somewhere else if Yahoo doesn't promptly snap it up. This seems like it's not a censorship issue but rather simply a desire on the part of the Chinese to have a legitimately Chinese-character-friendly set of TLDs.
IMD - Internet of Mass Destruction found in China... must liberate the oppressed chinese people... *gasp*
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
So you mean I can now say "internets" without being wrong?
I have to wonder how this will affect the Chinese people. Are they even being told that their internet is being replaced, at least in part? First story is slashdotted already...
When "counter-culture" types start seeing that all of their blogs and whatnot that speak against China suddely dissappear, will this invigorate their urge to spread democracy/free speech/what-have-you, or douse it? Will those previously ignorant (or who just didn't care) to the whole situation start thinking if their regularly-visited sites suddenly dissappear completely?
I'll be surprised if this hasn't been said yet, but there's an obvious name for this:
The Chinternet.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
Whoa, the article summary says that these will be in Chineese characters. This means that .com and .[chineese characters] are diffrent. While the .[chineese characters] will translate to .com by spoken and written language, they will not translate in the DNS.
sudo mod me up
crawl back behind the Great Wall, then, commissars. home depot and wal-mart will get their stuff made in Haiti or Bangladesh, then. not a problem.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
OK, somebody slap me with a clue here.
.CN domain names. (The opther links seem to be Slashdotted.) The article merely announces the creation of a second-level domain, namely .mil.cn. This is not going to destroy the Internet. There are also second-level domains for numerous Chinese administrative districts such as .bj.cn for Bejing, as there are for US states and territories, and districts of some other countries.
.com to return what will look to the rest of us like .com.cn. This will be a bad thing for free access within China, but that isn't exactly new territory for China either.
I just happened to be researching Chinese TLDs today and had already been to the People's Daily site and the site of the registrar for
China chafes at having to deal with ICANN because it is assciated with the US government, with which China is a competitor. Nonetheless, all the proposed naming seems to be of second-level domains, some of which will contain Chinese characters. (gratuitous nationalistic sentiment: Everybody is jealous of the big guy.) This doesn't seem to be any problem for the survival of the 'net.
Possibly, within China, the government will force their root servers to ignore the rest of the Internet, causing Chinese queries to
I've already blocked IPV4 networks belonging to China because all they generate is crap spam. If they want their own root nameservers, well fine, as long as the root nameservers I use don't pay any attention to them.
Seems lots of people are unhappy in here. I'm Chinese. I'm happy! China is big enough NOT to follow international rule made by hostile Western rich countries. China is creating its own standards all over tech sections: TD-CDMA to replace CDMA; AVS to replace MPEG4/H264, WAPI to replace Wi-Fi, etc... now it's time for Internet. Nice move! Applause!
I so hate it when people equate one of the many services runing on the internet with the Internet as such.
This article equates internet with DNS, which is as bad as equating internet and the web.
(Slightly in-topic) The internet will continue work just fine, the global DNS network OTOH might be slightly forked.
I guess "China to launch slightly different name resolution protocol" isn't a good headline.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
So when's the linsux internet arrive?
I hope they force all domains hosted in China to use the new Chinese TLDs. As I have no reason whatsoever to accept email from China, it'll make it that much easier to filter Chinese hosted spam...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Verisign has been a twat for too long (.com wildcard, bogus "registration is expiring" notices to people other than their own subscribers, etc). Having the looming threat of really killing the goose that lays their golden eggs over their head might be sufficient to make them straighten up their act.
There are already RFCs for stuffing UTF-8 into DNS. Microsoft's own DNS server does it.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The first link (http://www.interfax.cn/showfeature.asp?aid=10411& slug=INTERNET-POLICY-MII-DOMAIN%20NAME-DNS)
says the new TLDs are in Chinese characters which translate to .com, .net and .china. Which is legal in IDNA architecture. If the root servers in US map the ASCII equivalents to correct IP addresses then there is no interoperability problem.
The second link claims that China is building a new internet system. I think the author does not understand the internet architecture.
Examples of .com in Chinese being converted to IDN
http://www-950.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/ demo/domain?t=%E7%90%86%E5%AE%B9%E3%83%8A%E3%82%AB %E3%83%A0%E3%83%A9.%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD&x=20&y=18
You can input the other domain names and test for yourself.
As I understand, in China the users input .com and the browsers (or the lookup mechanism.. not sure which) first try to map .co.cn to an IP address, if that fails they try .com. This was creating a problem, but a minor one.
They've failed because they don't provide a true overlay of the additional functionality on top of the existing internet. By this, I mean of course that this alternate DNS should provide the ability to overlay additional .COMs and only if the lookup fails in the new DNS mechanisms should it default back to the existing ones. Yes, this would mean that the alternates could overlay well-known, pre-existing .com domain names. So what?
If this were to ever come about, I (and probably thousands of other administrators) would instantly jump on the bandwagon and convert our servers permanently. We're all tired of seeing annoying people domain squatting, or squabbling over a namespace that we have absolutely no input in.
Time for a modified BIND!
Now.. get to work, someone else!
The USA would not need to move to IPv6, and, we would not be getting a lot of blackmail DOS attacks by offshore people.
This is my sig.
If the Chinese create their own network, what does that mean? There are some real benefits to the rest of the world.
...).
.cn), but outside you do. So in China they'd refer to Slashdot as slashdot.org.us, but in the US we'd just call is slashdot.org. Similary, domains inside china would be [something unicode].[something else unicode], but we'd say [something unicode].[something else unicode].cn.
What it means is having a limited number of gateways between the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world. Either that number will be zero or more than one. Any data exchange will doubtless be monitored and filtered to permit or deny whatever content they want to get in or come out.
I seriously doubt the number of gateways will be zero. They may try to do it with just one, if some foolish bureaucrat decrees it. But if they have a gateway you can bet it will be because there is information they want exchanged, and it will quickly become apparent that more than one is necessary.
So effectively it's just a tighter means of access control. They want to be able to clamp down on all of these newfangled Western ideas, like voting and spaghetti (oh, wait
The way DNS ought to work anyway is that inside of a country you don't use the top-level domain (.us or
The whole thing is just like deciding to use NAT inside your home network, and setting up a DNS system for yourself. There's no technical reason why you couldn't have millions of computers all hidden behind an addresss translator. You only need enough real, external IP addresses to make the port mapping work. If that means IP addresses are freed up, maybe that's how all countries should do it, where it's practical.
I don't see it as "fracturing" the Internet, though.
sigs, as if you care.
...how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers?
You should be asking the question the other way around:
How can foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers connect to them?
Clearly, China has made a calculated decision that these parties need China more than China needs them, and that steps will be taken to accommodate the problem...
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
Canada! Blame Canada!
MMORPG gold farming is a service export to the US. One much in demand. It costs China little to produce the service, and ensures that they can purchase more worthwhile US goods in exchange.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Only this:
Chinese Wall was a complete failure, this is EXACTLY THE SAME
What would be a problem was if china started handing out IP addresses that had been allocated elsewhere.
Well, see, we've got two big parties in the US, and a handful of large states with a lot of electoral college votes. California and New York will go Democrat and Texas Republican. Florida is the only really big state that might go either way. So the opinion of Florida matters a *lot*.
When Castro took over, a lot of people that opposed him wound up in Florida, and have a lot of votes there. So anyone who raises the embargo on Cuba does little more than guarantee losing votes in a crucial swing state. Yes, the embargo has no national security justification any more, but it makes some Cuban expatriates happy.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
ISPs or whoever will just have a .com and a .uscom or something like that so the end user, if they really want to, can still get to US domains. It's not any different than the phone system. If someone wants to call me, they would dial 555-1212. If someone in Germany called 555-1212 they'd probably get Hans in Munich. Is this because Germany is trying to ruin the US phone system? Of course not. It's just that MOST people dont need to call people across the planet, or even outside their immediate area, so people can share phone numbers. When you want to call someone with the same phone number as a local person who lives far, far away, you use the workaround: The area code, or the international calling code if you're going really far.
.co.uk, .co.jp, .co.it, etc. Same function: Websites are compartmentalized by country, and if you want the same website name in a different country, you change the country TLD.
At worst, this will just drive another level of abstraction onto the system. And if you think about it, the internet already has this for MOST domains with country codes:
paintball
Yes, the idea of control would be why the Chinese are doing this... And as always, if they try to take away existing freedoms, people will notice and start questioning things... Come to think of it, perhaps this is good for the freedom of Chinese people in the long-term?
This is no big deal, you guys are kind of funny.
Here is the information about it, it just finally went into effect I guess.
http://www.cnnic.cn/html/Dir/2005/10/11/3218.htm
http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/
basically becomes this: http://xn--xkrp53d.cn/
Or, as I see it from my end http:///#28165;&%2321326;.cn
Basically, here's what they are doing, they setup their own root to handle the characters and these character domains will be routed to their own TLD, they will probably reroute other stuff they want to as well. Oh well, it's March 1st here in China, and there is no change I can see other than finally being able to use characters.
I think the submitter's speculation that this could be the end of the global internet is a little melodramatic. AFACT, all this means is that the human readable domain names associated with the IP addresses will not be centrally managed, like they are now. It doesn't mean that Chinese people will stop using IP addresses. If you know someone's IP, you can still connect to them.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
People might take it more seriously if that site wasn't hosted on the same server as a sex site.
Surfcontrol blocks it (217.173.157.65) for that reason.
Yeah, surfcontrol is sometimes wrong, but stuff in the Netherlands is a bit out there often.
Using the same IP for a "good" site and a "naughty" site is a bad idea, heck even using shared IPs for important systems is a bad idea - blocking software can cause collateral damage.
It was in a Jewish cementary in either Warsaw (9 years ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy). I don't think his gravestone was in Esperanto.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I believe this story contains the highest number of absolutely retarded responses I've ever seen on Slashdot.
China is creating their own *root servers*. At a fundamental level, this affects name to IP address translation *only*. Furthermore, in order to do any communication with the rest of the world at all, China's network must remain interoperable with IPv4/v6. There is no technical limitation from anyone in China setting their root nameserver hints file to the normal root servers located around Asia-Pacific, Europe, or the Americas.
The second dingaling response I've seen is that "the US controls teh intarweb!" Please. Anyone that suggests this should go have the rest of their lobotomy completed. ICANN *only* controls which TLDs are available and nominally supports the root nameservers *for the Americas only*. There are technical alternatives avilable if ICANN ever gets too far out of line.
If you have your own set of DNS and eventually your own set of IP it is like being inside a company, you have much better control of the "gates" to the outside.
How you use that control it is then a matter of policy, party policy.
Given the track record of China I believe more the above reason than the fact that US ICANN is evil...
This is not about Chinas pride of their language system, or a retaliation to the US defacto controll of ICANN. It's just another way for the chinese government to control access of information to it's citizens.
Seems a bit like overkill since Yahoo, Google, et al. are already far to generous with censoring at the whims of the PRC.
Considering the amount of censorship and control china wants to have over "their" internet, I think we're already way past the "end of the globally interoperable Internet."
It was only a matter of time before it fragmented. This is what happens when people and governments decide something is a "utility" instead of a service. They want control.
As for china's decisions, I say good riddence to bad rubbish. (I realise this is a isolationist and economically idiotic idealogy, I just don't care) Let them have their own "internets!"
to hammer 'em for "unfair" trade restraints.
What?
Over the last decade China has done as much as possible to stimulate growth while keeping everything internal. By doing this, they have burned through tons of cash in the form of loans that are not supposed to be paid back, incredibly risky investments that rarely succeed, and attempting to provide services to the massively burgeoning urban population that move to these new cities they construct. The only thing that has made this sustainable was the insatiable demand of world consumers (don't just pin the US, we are only the biggest piece of the pie, not the whole thing) for their cheap products. Yet, things like this internet move undermine the entire system by seperating themselves from the very lifelines they need to fund their system. If they create this backbone, they either are going to have to have matching root systems stay in place for companies to interact with the rest of the world, (who aren't picking up Mandarin chinese characters as a second internet language, no thanks) or risk losing all of the business in the country that demands contact with those outside who wish to communicate. I'm not saying that their internal system prevents all collaboration, it just adds difficulty to something that doesn't need it. Either case will be ridiculously expensive to both put it place and maintain and serve no purpose other than to the satisfy their own paranoid fantasies. The Chinses boom is based on consumerism and their ability to identify and meet the demands of the market, and this only hinders that and hastens the tipping both of their unsustainable growth.
I am and always will be a stereotype, because who in their right mind prefers mono?
ffs!
Ok I was wrong - it was the submitter doing the censoring (but mark my words - mutter).
This is the Berlin Wall of our century.
I mean like when you go to http://www.slashdot.com/ and are re-directed to http://www.slashdot.org./
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I can't help but view this as the fault of the US. Think about it. ICANN, a US organisation, has done little to cater to the wishes of China, even though they're a large (and growing) presence on the internet.
You speak of the masses of Chinese internet users as if their wishes mean anything to the Maoist hacks that are making the decisions. What US interest, business, freedom, or political does it serve to cater to their wishes? You criticism is grossly misplaced.
I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese TLDs, they should have them.
They do. It is called .cn.
an ill wind that blows no good
This news is missing the most important information. I read a more detailed news somewhere else:
The chinese government also mentioned that the whole reason they are doing this is because it's too dangrous for US to control the entire internet root alone.
For example, if one day US and China are not happy with each other, US can simply go: hey dude, I'm not happy with you, I'm blocking you from my internet root servers (well, not just traffic, anything and everything that people in China need for internet to operate correctly).
So, in the case US does that, the entire China will be greatly effected (we all know how much everyone in the world relys on Internet now days, both work and life).
Thus, common sense, people will do things to keep themselves safe.
My guess is that this thing has nothing or very little to do with censorship, neither has anything to do with developing a Chinese character standard to isolate the net from the world. If this does happen, the new net in China will still work with the rest of the world.
Could someone write a firefox extension that looks up a domain name on the chinese DNS servers if the domain name lookup fails on the ICANN hierarchy servers? It looks like they're just overriding .net and .com, and .cn, so you could probably limit the extension to only react to DNS lookup failures to those TLDs.
If this is true, you should forward it, with complete headers, back to the domain's postmaster and to spam@uce.gov. That is unless you think it's coming from zombified Windows boxes, in which case it won't really do anything ... but if you think you're actually getting spam from a large-scale commercial operation in the US, by all means send it to the FTC and their ISP.
I'm a US user, and almost all of the spam I get these days is from overseas, mostly from countries that I doubt really care about enforcing anti-spam laws (if they have them). I'd hate for people in other countries to be thinking the same thing about the US.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Who needs whom? Does China needs more US or US needs more China? Who will suffer more from current state?
Answer is simple. Both sides will be damaged the same. Chinese may have problems contacting customers and Americans may have problem contacting suppliers.
So what is the difference? Who will benefit from it? Why the China could dare it? Answer is again very simple. That one who stays longer wins. Here we are, this is the weakness of US! Why? US tries to be democratic, China (badly) pretends to be democratic.
And guess, whose government will be able to keep the stance longer? Is it the government which claims to represent its voters (who may be badly hurt by the situation)? Or is it the other government who claim to represent the only Party that is driven by abstract ideology?
The wishes of common people are clear: they want to have one working accessible Internet. So which side can and which side must listen to the common people (businesses)?
Bet now, who's going to win?
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
ICANN't believe they're doing this!
Ha Ha Ha America. Watch this, then re-read the article above. This is truly the beginning of the end ;)
:p
All this shows just how dead-on Joss Whedon was
In Chinese version, ICANN corrected the rumor. http://it.people.com.cn/GB/42891/42894/4148995.htm l. Everything is the same except new mil.cn domain.
GWB and his cronies. This is one crooked admin vs. the many years of decent or better than decent admins. Please do not blame an entire country for the actions of one person.
The war must begin...
the beginning of the end of the globally interoperable internet started when China decided to install a Great Firewall to filter out politically sensitive websites, just like other fascists regimes blocking radio/TV broadcasts that advocate overturning of their governments.
but then, this doesn't necessarily have to end the interoperability of the internet. since most systems on the net can decipher Unicode already, provided that this new Chinese-based domain name system uses Unicode, global routers can easily adopt to resolving their URLs.
thus it begins.
Because it supports Chinese characters. ICANN does not. More than likely they won't have a choice either.
Or you could just point your client at the ICANN root servers and let the party go bugger itself.
May the Maths Be with you!
ICANN already issues domain names in alternate alphabets. Just visit their site. There's already [chinese characters].[chinese characters]. The only change is that Chinese DNS servers would point people to what they deem to be the correct IP. Which is actually no big deal for interoperability. If you want to reference a site defined by the Chinese ICANN counterpart, just list the site as "Chinanet (orwhatever they call their internet): www.communismrocks.com". Browers then may come with a little box before the address bar that you check to indicate that it should interpret the domain as per China's DNS servers. I mean, minor inconvenience, maybe, but as long as you know which internet you're using, it's completely interoperable.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
""Khaaaaaaaaaahhhhhnnnnnnn!" "Khaaaaaaaaaahhhhhnnnnnnn!" "Khaaaaaaaaaahhhhhnnnnnnn!""?
eeps-kali-kammmm?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Or maybe:
Seriously though, I'm guessing the former: create their own, by design incompatible. I'm sure they'll be happy to create gateways for the few sites they want to allow in, later.
US must be defeated to win its "democratic" label.
"In an earlier age, Mao said that the Party must be in control of the gun."
Yes, and this is the weakness of the US. They simply cannot control the gun. They are trying to keep the control of the Internet root servers but they are doomed to fail because of the one word - "democracy".
By this moment US lost its advantage. The whole play was about "we think that nobody will dare it" and look it happened. US is loosing, US except the "irrational hope" have nothing in the pocket. What now?
There is no dough that the biggest impact is on businesses on both sides - in China and in the rest of the world.
And guess what, what will you see on the TV? Will you see every small demonstration for no-CHINAnet in China? Surely not. They "control the gun" so no "unacceptable information" is going to cross their borders. What will be broad-casted on TV is the demonstration of few people in front of the White House... and impact? There can be thousands of people demonstrating in China but nobody will know, nobody will bother. In contrast there can be dozen of people demonstrating in front of White House and millions of people will speak about it... That is a HUGE difference. That is why US is going be defeated!
That is why US must be defeated to win its "democratic" label.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Every since China went on their own web, the real one runs faster. I just opened Firefox and it feels snappier.
they are just going their firewall one futher, rather than trying to block specific sites from their country wide intranet, they are just going to disconnect them completely ;) ;)
this is bad news for chinese gold farmers
So, now there are two root servers. Ergo, you need to indicate which one you want. If you don't care, you use the current convention of <www.google.com> or <www.google.com.>, and your DNS server takes care of it. If you explicitly want your DNS server to take care of it, you use <www.google.com.[0]>. Since the US-run root server group was established first (and because I'm an imperialist American slob), you use <www.google.com.[1]> to talk to the US One True Root; for China's, use <www.google.com.[2]>. Now all you need to do is patch every OS on the planet to work with the final naming convention. That should be doable by say, Thursay, right?
Yes, I know this exact scheme won't work as-is, but a standard like this could be developed... assuming anyone cares to put in the effort to make it work. Which China might not. I'll also point out that China could have gotten the same result without breaking DNS by mandating that all DNS servers in China listen to the national <dns.cn.> DNS server as their prime authority, which in turn would be configured more-or-less as <dns.cracksmoker.com.> is in my example above. Ergo, I conjecture breaking DNS was a design criterion in the Chinese government's efforts.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, this will only break DNS, leaving virtual hosting companies hanging; the Internet at large and direct IP address URI's will still work fine. Demand increase, supply constant: expect the price of a static IP address to go up for a while, until IPv6 changes the supply.
Of course, if the Chinese really want to break the Internet, all they have to do is start handing out IP address blocks that have already been allocated outside of China for use within China.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
This stuff about "operability problems" is hogwash.
The new Chinese TLDs are not duplicating ".com" and ".net", but rather adding Chinese-character TLDs which, it seems, roughly translate to those names. The only conflict would be one of mind share.
Does that make it an inTRAnet? A big one, for sure, but it is still not the inTERnet. Besides, maybe some of our spam will go away :D Though what if someone registers an e-mail address like mine? What if China has their own gmail and someone registers ***@gmail.com? I guess China will restrict their users totally...so much for China heading towards a more open society.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
They'll have an Intranet. I hope they enjoy their Intranet.
I hope they move the Chinese off shore spam-hosting to the new and improved Intranet as well.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
We will have to search the "internets" for information.
The problem is that the term communism is used to justify a totalitarian government. True communist philosophy didn't envision an all powerfull government controlling every aspect of its people's lives. Instead of the working class rising up to overthrow the oppressive aristocracy, a new aristocracy came along and said "oh by the way, you're going to be communist now", and slapped the word People's in front of everything.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
So far, I can absolutely do without clothes or mobile phones from internet.cn. Never had to, may never.
That's not an anti-Chinese statement either, it's just practical. Practically nobody buys clothes from the mill, and practically no mills sell clothes. You buy them from a retail, catalog, or online presence, for instance Eddie Bauer or LL Bean both sell all 3 ways. As for mobile phones, most people don't buy them from Motorola or Nokia or whoever, they buy them from Verizon or Radio Shack or someone like that.
For that matter, I don't buy movies or Coca Cola online, either. But I do go to movie sites sometimes, check out the trailers, etc.
I would guess that if China really tries to separate itself and establish a separate Internet.cn, those who need access will get it. Those who don't will ignore it. As obnoxious as the US may be these days, our approach to the Internet has not been based on censorship and information control. (Not that it isn't happening or trying to happen, it's just not the basis.) I can't see the rest of the world, in a fit of anti-US pique, signing up for the degree of censorship the Chinese are putting at the ground level of their Internet.cn.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Film at eleven!
.cn-held IP addresses.
IMHO, I'm not so worried about a whole spanking new internet for China. In fact, as long as there is no gateway to the rest of the world's internet, the entire spam 'n hack attack problem may subside.
While I'm certain that many people receive valid email from China's residents, I have yet to receive any email from China that was not spam. I can't wait for the regular port trolling from
This is about DNS servers - nothing to do with IP address assignment. It may be that in a couple of years they'll get tired of ICANN foot-dragging on the IPv6 issue and declare another fiat answer, but that's a problem for another day.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So this is how the INTERNETS I've heard about (on digg.com) are coming about. And I thought there was only one Internet...
As an extension to this, you'd probably have to lookup the DNS twice for every .cn, .com, and .net, because if they have their own hierarchy, foobar.com could refer to two different IP addresses. You couldn't stick with just failed lookups.
Thank Zeus they're not implementing a conflicting IP address scheme, at least.
Yes folks, it's China On-Line, here to solve all your censoring issues. AOL has key words, we do we. AOL has access to the World Wide Web, we have access to the China Wide Web(tm). What more could you want!!! Come join COL and see the Internet the way we want you too!!!
--
Hey, I thought it was funny...
A monopoly is a monopoly.
Microsoft will "cut of the air supply" of any major PC OEM whom Microsoft thinks is deviating from Microsoft bottom line.
China will cut of the air supply of anyone whom the Chinese Communist Party thinks is deviating from their party line.
To oppose the monopolists it's a death sentence for a PC OEM in America. In China it's a death sentence for citizens of that country.
It's even worse than that. China controls 2/3rds of all the people on the planet and their economy has the potential to dwarf all the others combined. If China creates its own Internet but requires users to follow their Marxist rules, which rules out freedom of speech or commerce, companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google will sell their mothers to gain access to that market. In fact, they already have. They've already proven that with a little sophisticated "reasoning" they can justify, in their own eyes, giving Communist Officials the names of Chinese whose postings deviate from the Party Line. To please radical Muslims countries will they require their female workers to start wear burkas and walk behind their male coworkers, or will they just fire them?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Business Oppertunity!!!!!!
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
In other news today, China announces a "Great Leap Forward".
In addition to new agricultural and industrial processes, all traffic signals will be upgraded so that Red (the color of the People's Revolution) will represent "Go" and Green will represent "Stop".
The Politburo believes that this technological innovation will drive China's economy into the future.
(BTW, is that story true, or just urban legend?)
Countries have total control over their country-code TLD. The _only_ thing the US can be considered "intransigent" about is keeping control over net/com/org/mil/edu -- and so what? They're just anachronisms of the early days when the net was for all intents and purposes a project of the United States. It's just friggen three letters for godssake. It's not like the English freak out that they have to type in ".co.uk" instead of ".com," but the UK could just as well make it ".flibityflabityfloo.uk" and neither the US proper nor ICANN would have a damned thing to say about it and every country has that prerogative. Hell, they can even sell it.
Creating their own Chinese-character TLDs for .cn and creating Chinese-character version of .mil.cn are fine, and creating Chinese-character versions of .com.cn etc. would be fine. Creating a Chinese-character version of .com is annoying, because it's in more direct conflict, and risks causing trouble to anybody with an internationalized DNS resolver.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So all the search engines companies like Google who betrayed their principles and aided the Communist censorship machine find out that they are expendable despite their ass kissing? Hmm, who would have predicted...
"(Reposted, account modetarded as "overrated" by an ignorant redneck moderator)."
Sorry jackass, but you don't get to spew that crap without a response.
I find it hilarious that your first response to your totally appropriate moderation was to lash out with ignorance and bigotry.
Of course, you post was filled with it too, so I don't know why I didn't expect it.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
"The fact is that "esperanto" will never be adopted like a natural language"
True enough, but what if everybody learned it as a second language? How cool would it be to be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to communicate? Won't happen in the good ol USA, but many countries require that students learn a second--and sometimes third--language.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
> Think about it. ICANN, a US organisation, has done little to cater to the wishes of China,
.cn top level domain. Explain how establishing a fork of .com and .net are a better solution. So no, they don't have a 'right' to as many TLDs as they would like.
Stop reading Daily Kos a bit and rejoin the real fscking world, K? ICANN, along with the other alphabet soup organizations, have been working towards non-ascii domain names but it is a non-trivial problem if you want to keep any sort of interoperability. Seven bit ASCII is the only character set you can know with any level of certainty that every user can generate, so if you want a universal naming system it requires some thought.
> I may not agree with some of the views of the Chinese government, but if they want Chinese
> TLDs, they should have them.
The system is designed to allow exactly that. China has absolute control over the
If they want to treat their whole country like a NATted home network and make fakes ones that only work on their 'lan' then they are free to go for it, but don't expect them to work anywhere else. Once people understand that the line to sign up for one will be pretty short. Pretty much only party aparatchiks and government agencies will want one.
Democrat delenda est
If you can read Chinese, the original article suggests there will still be Latin-based URIs, and they will be used in tandem with the new, Chinese-based URIs. I think it should be interpreted as an alternative provided for those who don't understand English.
2 25973.htm
The original article (in Chinese) is here: http://news.xinhuanet.com/ec/2006-02/25/content_4
"I can't help but view this as the fault of the US."
Of course. Your post clearly indicates that you aren't intelligent enough to actually understand the situation, so in light of that you blame the US.
Perhaps you should become better educated and less jingoistic. You'd be able to avoid sounding like such a moron.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I wonder how many Chinese people will manually pointing their DNS lookups at servers outside of China? And whether the Chinese gov't will try to prevent it?
The global interoperability of the Internet is so important going forward, for
human social and economic and scientific progress, that
we should treat it as a fundamental human right.
Keeping the Internet free from unreasonable
constraints and damage imposed by individual national governments is essential
to the internet's survival.
If any national government takes action that damages the integrity of
the internet, that country's IP addresses should be firewalled off from the rest of
the net. i.e. a reverse great firewall of china should be imposed until the Chinese
government backs down from its internet-destruction plan.
I hope that the independent non-governmental voices on ICANN make sure this happens
if China persists with its mischief.
ps.
Yes this is mostly US government's fault for thinking they're in control of the net,
but the important question is what's to be done to discourage this kind of partitioning
of the internet.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Good, they can then return ALL the IP blocks they have, and use ipv6 only, and rfc reserved address space, thus creating a glut of ipv4 address space to be used by the rest of the world at CHEAP rates, instead of the highway robbery ARIN currently imposes. kthx.
What the Chinese government fails to realize is that their current prosperity is due almost completely to foreign investment. They think they've become an influential force, but lets be honest, the rest of the developed world is using them for personal financial gain.
I'm not saying that they don't have the motivation or capability to become a superpower, simply that they aren't their yet and they need to wake up and realize that they need the rest of the world more than the rest of the world needs them.
There's another nation with 1 billion people starting to see it's own level of prosperity; India. From what I've read they're quite eager to become an economic power themselves. China certainly has a headstart, but India will become a serious competitor in the coming years. Then there's southeast Asia which is slowly recovering from the economic disaster of the 90s, and South America, who needs to get its act together. If China continues to make things difficult for corporations they'll just take their money elsewhere.
I read both links, and I have to say that it's very cryptic. I think something got lost in the translation, but here is what *I* think they were saying...
.com and .net. The new TLDs will be composed of Chinese characters, so instead of blah.com, you'll have blah.[X][X] where [X] represents a Chinese character. If this is all that they are doing--creating new non-ASCII TLDs--then there wouldn't be much in the way of conflict with the existing .com and .net structure.
They are creating new TLDs to supplement
But as I said, the language is confusing at best and I'm not sure if this is what they are really intending.
Could this be the spark the chinese people need to revolt against their communist government? Can a decision like this to essentially block access to outside domains be the final straw that causes this country to realize that what is good for the government is not good for it's people?
My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
This may actually not be such a bad thing; it may force the adoption of features in client software that permits the simultaneous use of multiple domain name systems. A transition to such a system would be painful because it would break cherished assumptions about domain names, but it is certainly workable. But, ultimately, it would make the administration of the system more democratic because people can vote with their feet.
Let 'em have it. I can't read Chinese anyway.
China (like all counties) controls its own country level domain and can do what it wants with it. If you want a *.cn domain, you have to get it from China. If you want a *.uk domain, you have to get it from Great Britain. If you want a *.fr domain, you have to get it from France. (Okay, not really, these countries have licensed other companies to sell their domain names, but you get the idea).
.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, and .pro. They have no say in how the country level domains are run.
All they are doing is reorganizing it to make some sub-level domains. They'll have a *.co.cn for commerical enteprises, *.mil.cn for military, etc. Great Britain already uses this type of system. They'll also use a state/city domain like the old *.us domain use to (*.tx.us, *.ia.us, etc.).
ICCAN only assigns internet domains to the top level domains:
Fine, we will! We will develop the country on our own pace and ability. We just need America's help to develop faster. We would rather be a developing country for longer then be America's whore like Japan is.
Yes, and one of those two languages is usually English. Esperanto is unnecessary. Its only "benefit" over English is that it's perported to not come with a culture and so it's not perceived as being quite so dangerous. The problem is that Esperanto does have a culture: it's only spoken by self-important intellectual snobs.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
Naturally it's the United States fault.
Is it me, or did you just *assume* that ICANN told China to go fsck itself, and because ICANN is completely 100% dominated by red blooded 100% republican chip-implanted Bush supporters, it must be evil and America's fault.
Seriously, why do people who don't even think before they post get modded as Insightful? Oh wait, this is Slashdot.
Correct. China occassionally does things because they think it is something a great power ought to do, and this is one of them. There is a whole shopping list of things they are going to buy simply to shed the last of their image as a third world nation...
For Slashdotters, one of the most interesting items rumored to be on the list is Suse Linux. Better start learning to read Chinese, OSS fans...the next generation of OSS products may not be translated to English.
For that matter of fact, Java is 100% Unicode compatible... the next generation of Java software products may be programmed in Chinese characters.
On the other hand, as a veteran user of Open Source products, it is my expert opinion being written in Chinese probably won't make the documentation any less useful (excepting Postgres, Mule and a few other OSS projects)
For those of you who wanna prepare for the next hot programming language, "How to make out in Chinese" and "Teach yourself Beginning Chinese Script" are cheap and fun choices to start with.
If people would RTFA instead of struting and pointing fingers,
they would realize that the main purpose of
this is to allow consumers/customers WITHIN China to access web
contects of Chinese companies using Chinese ONLY.
Without this, even if you run Chiniese window and are using chinese
text editors, you would still need to type in English in the URL of the
browser. MOST CHINESES DON'T KNOW ENGLISH!
The Chinese economy will only gain from this as it can stimulate online
transactions in the domestic Chinese economy. It's a simple thing for a Chinese company to get a purely Chinese characters domain AND an English one from ICANN
to sell to English speakers. Thus, it's a no loss situation
for the Chinese companies.
Sure, there're problem with censorhip and government control.
BUT it has NOTHING to do with this move.
For Slashdotters, one of the most interesting items rumored to be on the list is Suse Linux. Better start learning to read Chinese, OSS fans...the next generation of OSS products may not be translated to English.
You wouldn't know it from Dell tech support, but India has quite a few English speakers, some of which are even involved in open source. It'll be interesting to see which one reaches "great power" status first, a centrally-planned economy with little political freedom, or sometimes whacky bottom-up economy with a democratically-elected government. Lots of people seem to be betting on China, but IMO India has a better shot in the long run (50-100 years) unless the Chinese embrace democracy.
This has NOTHING to do with the censor!
You didn't know that web-sites can be connected with writing the IP-number directly without using any Name Server at all..
Backbone is a group of some kind of cables. Name server is a service that translates domain names into IP-numbers.
All Chinese user all has to do is set up their PC DNS server to some US DNS server, and by pass their Chinese ISP DNS server.
That's a very subtle protectionist measure. Reminds me what we did in France couple of years back with the "exception culturelle". That was meant to avoid being "invaded" by the American culture. But these kinds of measures have very little effect because as far as international business goes, everything is still done in English. It is very important domestically to develop the huge potential of online business within China. After this I think I'll start to learn chinese.
You should be asking the question the other way around: How can foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers connect to them?
That's a very good point. I'd say that China needs Western customers more than Western companies need China.
Currently, China offers a commodity -- cheap labor -- that is not unique. Other Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam would love take business away from China. Countries in South America and Africa also provide cheap labor. Thus, Western companies have a world of alternatives that they will weigh on the basis of cost. Thus anything that makes China more expensive makes China less attractive relative to other providers of labor.
China, on the other hand, has no credible alternatives for its growing industrial output inside of this new Chinese internet zone. Domestic demand can't take the place of exports.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Despite what some people say about the joys of internationalization, I donâ(TM)t see making people use a foreign language to use the Internet as a good thing. How would Americans like it if they had to type URLs in Chinese and append a .ç¾Zå½ (.us) to the end of them?
I'm a gnu world man.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some can, some can't. How else does hosting two domains on the same server work?
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Some people might consider being easier to learn (no inconsistent conjugation, words spelled the way they sound) to be something of a benefit.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
K'Breel's literally laughs his excretion bulb off as he watches our communications network split in two. Doctors say he has recovered from the accident and will be back at work with the Council of Elders by Monday.
If you think having to use Chinese characters to send email from America to China is bad, how would you feel if you had to use chinese characters to send email from America to America?
That's what we make the chinese do - use english characters to send email from China to China.
paintball
In Communist China, DNS Finds You!
It means nothing of the sort.
China is doing nothing more than creating three new TLDs, each of which consist of two Han (Chinese) characters. Translated into English, these names are "China", [public, as opposed to private or state-owned] "company"/"firm", and "network".
China is not overriding
Presumably, entities which only will interchange data with other entities in China will register with one of the new names; whereas entities which require an international presence will use one of the ICANN names.
In effect, it is an altroot, but one provided at the national level. Nothing directly precludes these names from being allocated by ICANN and delegated to China in a future world where Chinese-character DNS names are easily usable outside of China, should the Chinese ever ask for it.
What is interesting about this action is that it is different from the previous altroot efforts in having a government behind it, unlike the crackpot altroots which claimed to own
Nevertheless, there is no direct conflict with ICANN here.
It would not have mattered who had control of the root, the chinese dont play well with ohers and still would have 'split off'
As far as im concerned, good riddens. Perhaps we will see less spam now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
China is a manufacturer, and an exporter. Insulating themselves from the global buyers hurts them, not us.
Not at all. Responsible (monitored) businesses will have access to the external net as necessary. Average citizens only need the internal net.
What about all the non-for-profit organizations outside the Chinese government?
Oh, wait...
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
The new TLDs are NOT .net and .com, it's Chinese characters of .net and .com .
Root servers can distinguish between the two, if a request came in for english .net, use regular internet, if .net is in chinese, serve the Chinese net.
They are not cut them selves off, they are just appending an extra net to the existing internet.
"could be the beginning of the end of the globally interoperable Internet"
Yes, because everyone can't wait to jump on the Chinese internet or go back to using BBSs. Just imagine having filtered, mis-leading and useless information available. It will be great!
If you type url in chinese, the new Network will be served. If you type url in english, the regular internet will be serverd.
Actually, this is far worse than any of that.
One of the base assumptions of DNS is that a single domain is the same, everywhere. That is, microsoft.com does not get mapped to microsoft.com.us (or have different records entirely) in China.
Since there are now two authoritative sets of records for the same address and no agreement over which is "more authoritative", systems on the other DNS are effectively inoperable.
Lots of people think "big deal", but it will break almost everything.
Absolute URLs will not work everywhere. Most websites have one or two, so this will be a big deal with no good way to fix.
XML uses URLs to identify namespaces. Even though the DNS information doesn't get used, the names were chosen as a way to arbitrate namespace. So the person with www.nsa.gov could manage their own names without fear of someone else stepping on them. Really any system that uses URLs for uniqueness is vulnerable.
E-mail has similar problems. DNSSEC is completely toast. Opportunistic IPSEC is broken too (although the Chinese Govt wouldn't mind).
They may have done this for censorship purposes, as the ICANN probably would ignore Chinese Govt requests of the form "Remove this or suffer the consequences." which are really the only kind they send.
It is also not obvious to everyone that China's number one method of censorship is the Chinese language, and this makes alternate language sites difficult to access. It also makes it easier to firewall DNS requests with the same purpose. I'm sure they'll love appropriating the URLs used by Voice of America and other propaganda machines.
Personally, I suspect it is also a tool to undermine foreign competition in the Chinese IT market. I know that this is a big concern. Any country that employs thousands of hackers to infiltrate America's (well, maybe its more Capitalism's fault) insecure software must be equally concerned with shoring up their data stores. Nobody has forgotten the lesson of the Enigma machine--and now the stakes are higher.
The insidious thing about these acts is that they aren't about censorship. That's just another tool. They are about the government definition of what is right and what is wrong. Legislated morality. Ironically, this is something a lot of our home grown fascists don't appreciate anything. It's the spirit behind America's Bill of Rights--that public debate, transparency, and full disclosure are the only way to get public opinion to get close to the truth.
Ironically, that's part of the reason that I question any and all exceptions to the First Amendment (including Libel, Slander, and Obscenity) as they create legal weapons that only serve to be misappropriated by the greedy. Of course I feel the same way about disarming the populace, but I'm already offtopic enough...
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
English is not the only international language.
It will come as a surprise to many USians and a few Brits, they believe that because they go to a hotel in a beach resort and people speak ENglish for them there, that surely all the populace of the place visited is busy learning English.
Are you visiting Latinamerica? Better your Spanish is up to scratch.
Do you intend to travel to China? Good. YOu better speak some Mandarin chinese.
Are you visitng an East Asian country? Arabic is your language of choice.
Do you like vodka? Learn Russian.
You English speaking people are so paid of of yoursleves that truly believe ENglish is a "lingua franca". It certainly is an important language, but is not a carte blanche to communicate with everybody.
As for Latin being used as a means of social diferentiaion, only somebody with a profound igonrance of Roman and Religious history could do such utterance.
As for English adding more words to its vocabulary, well, yeah sure, whatever. Just because you understand what karate, fiesta or kindergarten means that does not mean this words are part of the English language.
English speakers bascially claim that any word ever uttered in an English context becomes part of the language.
Well, gee, really, if you say so...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How does this impact with their previous moves into universally adopting IPv6? Do they figure better do it now and get it over with?
...as one commentator notes, could be the beginning of the end of the globally interoperable Internet.
You must be smoking crack, if you really believe this. WTF does DNS have to do with the global interoperable Internet?
If DNS is the Internet, then ICANN owns and controls the Internet. That seems rather stupid for the world to give one organization that much power. But since you don't disagree..
I think its good to split up ICANN's control. They're too power hungry and greedy, and can't be trusted.
If Americans are too stupid to learn Mandarin and Hindi they're not going to have much fun browsing the 'net in 10 years. There are 10 of them for every one of us. Each of their voices will be as loud as ours. And they aren't hung up on some fundamentalist religious nut's Holy War. Capitalism and Christianity seem to be our government's religion. They don't seem to have any, from what I can tell, besides power and control, even if it means oppression. That's an expression of strength, that they are willing to kill their own people to maintain control. Something us Americans have to consider. If we're not willing to go that far how are we going to compete? They don't have the hypocritical "freedom and justice" system we have here. They're brutal, if you try to voice an opinion contradicting the government you will be silenced. I like that. Because Americans have destroyed my dream of freedom and justice. There's no such thing. Now I believe in survival of the fittest.
Better keep pouring your money into that military America because nothing else will protect you from their media and money. Even then you have to fear businesses like Fox News that might happily endorse a pro-China bias for profit. We've sold out our children's dreams. That's what is means to be an American.
Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split you. I filter all email from .cn anyway as a matter of course, so if they're going to create their own alternative DNS and everything and sever themselves from ICANN, then cool. Go away and take your spam relays with you.
I predict that spam traffic will plummet after this happens. Enjoy your walled-garden MiddleKingdom.Net. Have fun. When you are ready to rejoin the civilized world, let us all know. Oh yeah, and when you are ready, lock down those damn SMTP servers, dammit.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The EU passed the requirement for all internet site requests as well as phone calls to be logged. It seems that the US has quietly silenced a bunch of counter culture sites over the past month. The free open internet is already dead. Slashdot is still here, but for how long?
Wow... I have been using the domain http://www.xn--x00a.net/ for almost two years... how is this news? That they are finally implementing punycode also in China?
.cn address for this one ;-)
The domain I have translates to http://www./#32911;.net/ which in Chinese would mean www.fuck.net. Not sure I could get a corresponding
I really doubt they can make another "world wide web". In the best case, they can make a country-wide network not linked to "the internet" we all know. That is unless some greede american companies choose to wire themselves to this alternate network.
Technically speaking, any country can choose to detach from the Internet an any time.
In fact, I bet many organizations and countries have been doing this for years with no hype and/or concerned posts on technical forums ever.
I don't think you understand the point. The problem is that there are already other standards that map chinese characters to ascii domains. Now, there will be no way of knowing whether this mapping or querying the Chinese servers is the desired result for a chinese domain name.
The problem will be: How will I, using my western keyboard and english OS without the Chinese language pack installed, connect to www.server.[X][X] ? By link? Sure. that will work. Type it in? No. Tell it to someone else and have them type it in? Nope.
.sau - which can then be typed in, recognised and used by people who don't speak and write Chinese.
Perhaps a 3rd party (go Mozilla plugins!! http://addons.mozilla.org/ ) will make a plugin to translate the URL on the fly. [X][X] becomes
Perhaps they will take this one step further: All chinese character URLs (does this happen today? Are your website urls in English phones or chinese characters?).
I have no problem with China doing this. I feel that it will be China's problem when people have issues connecting to them. Always interesting to visit Japanese sites. I wonder if they will follow suite.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
"Our trade deficit with China is 200 billion dollars.. the U.S. economy is worth 12.37 trillion dollars."
;-)
There is no information value in this sentence.
I give you an example (it is not real, just showing the way how statistics does not reflect the real life):
US imports 1 ton of fabric from China for $100.000
US made 50.000 Tommy Hilfiger jeans for $20 each from 1 ton of fabric originated from China = $1.000.000
How the trade statistics can be calculated? Probably by good's value:
1. US consumed the goods for 1 million of dollars
2. China imported goods for 100.000 dollars
3. It means that the value 900.000 was created in US
4. Resume: US produce 90% of goods because only the 10% is imported from China
"Our trade deficit with China is 200 billion dollars.. the U.S. economy is worth 12.37 trillion dollars.."
I just wanted to say that if China closes the borders there will not be only 200 billion dollars damage mad to US... I can understand the US patriotism and why everybody tends to say "We don't need them, they need us", but this is not how the things are. China needs US as much as US needs China.
(Calculations are inaccurate and the author is not an economist and is not affiliated with economy almost in any way
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
But it may not be as bad as all that. Not that I think it is a great idea, but Japan for example is starting domain naming in Japanese characters (hiragana and katakana alphabets, or kanji which are basically Chinese characters). So you need UTF-8 and Japanese font display and input support just to type in the domain name.
Check out this page which says it is ICANN authorized plus it offers .jp domains in kanji ("IDN multilingual domains") side by side with English ones.
I also note that i-dns.net in California supports root domains and they provide soft keyboard java applets to input them. I don't know anybody using them, though a 2000 press release mentions a couple well known companies in Japan, but I can see that the top selection in the dropdown menu (read as "koushi" or public in Japanese, though it is really Chinese which I can't read) is possibly what they will use for ".com" for example the Japanese versions use "kaisha" (company) and "netto" (net) as .com and .net equivalents it seems.
I found a 2002 Internet Draft from JPNIC on this sort of thing. It seems to me the biggest problem is that you have to be able to read a language to access an address written in that language. May be useful for old folks but at present it seems to be quite unpopular in Japan.
English is the language that is most commonly taught as a second language. It used to be latin, now it is English. I have worked at several international organizations, the language used in every case was English.
Sorry to pop your bubble but six international languages are not as useful as one. There is only one country that is actually making a determined effort to promote its language as an international language and thats France. Even they are giving up.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
(excuse my ascified chinese) to .cn at the chinese root servers, I suppose. Then noone need sully their keyboard with nasty latin characters.
"True enough, but what if everybody learned it as a second language? How cool would it be to be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to communicate?"
I think English has a bit of a jump on it for this, lol.
You don't know esperanto! learn something about it before speak!
http://www.2-2.se/
http://www.esperanto.net/
...and quite useful in scrabble. "You know, to quone something!"
...then everything will work fine from the technology side.
.com or .net domains to western companies who wish to be accessible from China!
:-)
China government may have a firewall in each exit/entry point from the country redirecting DNS queries to the government run root servers.
The chineese root servers will have a controlled copy of the ICANN root servers (possibly filtering out some unwanted domains) so internet user from china will not notice a difference.
China government will have following benefits:
- it may decide who is allowed to be in the internet naming space accessible from inside China
- it may register any domain name it wish and make it available from inside China
- it may even sell existing
Just imagine, what a nice idea is to sell microsoft.com or google.com domain to their respective owners again! And they will have to buy if they want to conduct business with 2 billions of Chineese people!
Chineese are smart, and the US is losing the battle.
I do not like many of the behaviours of the Chinese government, and I personally dislike the idea of Chinese domain names.--In fact, it has existed in China for several years but not seriously taken by big corporations, possibly to make it easy for people abroad to access.--But it makes no harm to allow Chinese domain names as well. Really it is completely OK to access the same site using both Chinese domain names and International domain names. And it could be good for domestic companies and Web surfers. Don't politicize everything China does. China does not want to be isolated from this globalizing world!
I am not sure whether Latin was a means of social diferentiation, as I didn't live in the medieval. I know English is nowadays.
Ah, it is always inspiring how many people are so sure about the "facts" on a subject with which they evidently have no actual experience. Somehow this impossible language that can't be real (according to people like AC) nonetheless exists and is spoken by people who happily use it without caring that according to many people they are not using a "real" language. Why, it even has a history and culture, and it evolves, and is spoken by some people as a first language, and is used every day by many people. But how can this be?! I heard that was impossible according to anonymous experts on the intarwebs!
Your anti-Esperanto rant seems far more crackpot-ish than anything I've read by Piron. E.g. you claim "Loyalty to Esperanto is meant to override curiosity about other cultures", which flies in the face of theory and practice, since the primary goal of Esperanto is to permit people from different cultures to communicate more easily. Esperantists whom I know certainly seem interested in other cultures, and typically enjoy talking about their cultural differences and similarities with Esperantists from other places.
You assert that you can have no "true contact" (whatever that means) with a foreign country unless you learn the language of the country. You blithely ignore that people simply cannot learn dozens of languages. Last year I visited Finland, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary; should I have learned all 4 languages in the few months I had before my trip? That is madness. I had various valuable experiences connected with the local cultures, making use of English and Esperanto. I learned Lithuanian folk dancing using no verbal language at all! It is absurd and presumptious to compare my experiences (as your rant does) to the experience of visiting a foreign country and only eating at McDonald's or other chain restaurants.
Your assertions that Esperanto is just as hard as English for Asians fly in the face of what I've read and been directly told by by Asians who've studied both, as well as common sense (Esperanto's spelling, pronunciation, and grammar are simpler than English's, even if they are more accessible for Europeans than Asians, and to ignore that is disingenuous. Yes, L/R confusion is a problem for Asians in both Esperanto and English - but English has many additional problems for Asians which Esperanto does not have.)
Your assertions that people are only permitted to speak Esperanto at Esperanto gatherings are also false in my experience. At the UK in Peking, I spoke English with quite a few Chinese people who had only started to study Esperanto a few weeks before the event and had been studying English for years in school. And at other events I have similarly seen people speaking various languages. Of course part of the purpose of an Esperanto event is to speak Esperanto (duh), so it shouldn't be a sinister surprise that Esperanto is encouraged. At the US go congress one is permitted to play other games, but of course people tend to play go. At Esperanto events I've attended, other languages are used too, informally as well as part of the formal program, as you surely know.
You also grossly misrepresent Esperantio as some sort of monolithic cult that plots to convert everyone. In my experience it is far more like any other interest - the participants will happily help an interested new person learn, they will sometimes publicize the language or its events to raise visibility, etc - the same as go players, stamp collectors, or anything else. You don't even mention (since it doesn't fit your conspiracy scenario) that there are Esperantists who explicitly don't want Esperanto to spread widely, preferring the smaller feel of the existing culture. And in my experience most Esperantists don't really have strong feelings about it and don't seriously believe that everyone in the world is going to be speaking Esperanto - they simply use and enjoy the language.
Anyway, this is the sort of thread that can become an endless timesink, so I'll leave it at that.