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ICANN Under Pressure Over Non-Latin Characters

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cue-the-queen-album dept.

RidcullyTheBrown writes "A story from the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that ICANN is under pressure to introduce non-Latin characters into DNS names sooner rather than later. The effort is being spearheaded by nations in the Middle East and Asia. Currently there are only 37 characters usable in DNS entries, out of an estimated 50,000 that would be usable if ICANN changed naming restrictions. Given that some bind implementations still barf on an underscore, is this really premature?" From the article: "Plans to fast-track the introduction of non-English characters in website domain names could 'break the whole internet', warns ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey ... Twomey refuses to rush the process, and is currently conducting 'laboratory testing' to ensure that nothing can go wrong. 'The internet is like a fifteen story building, and with international domain names what we're trying to do is change the bricks in the basement,' he said. 'If we change the bricks there's all these layers of code above the DNS ... we have to make sure that if we change the system, the rest is all going to work.'" Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?

4 of 471 comments (clear)

  1. Changing a system by Kamineko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Changing a system which works is a very, very bad idea.

    Wont this open up the system to many more phishing attacks involving addresses which include non-latin characters which look similar to latin ones?

    1. Re:Changing a system by KingJoshi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But it's not working. Mainly for all those people that want non-latin characters. It's been broken from the beginning. Sure, there is historical reasons why we have the system we do, but change is definitely needed. Twomey is right that a change can't be rushed and it needs to be done right (for reasons of security, compatibility, stability, etc). However, the change does need to occur and there needs to be some level of pressure to ensure that it happens.

      --
      In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
    2. Re:Changing a system by Sin+Nombre · · Score: 5, Insightful

      'when URLs can't even be typed in on all keyboards'
      As far as Japanese go, there are very usable technologies that allow to type in kanji. Using a standard latin keyboard. It works pretty well, and i'm not sure what other languages have such options available, but since most of Asia uses the same kanji system I'm pretty sure that at least Asia has viable typing options.
      'of what use is the parts of the Internet I can't even type the domain name for?'
      Its of no use... to you. But then again, can you read Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Sanskrit or any other non-latin language? no? Then your usability isn't in question here.

      --
      "Im such a nonconformist I'm going to not conform to the rest of you!"
      "Dude I think we just got goth-served"
  2. Watch out for attacks by Agelmar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For all you people saying "There's no problem, just do it" - I say watch out... there will be a rush of attacks and spoofs as soon as this is opened up. The letter "a" appears in the unicode character set multiple times, and some of the variants are almost indistinguishable. I'm not just talking about someone registering släshdot.org, I'm talking about someone reigstering slashdot.org (the a is FF41 instead of the normal a). Good luck telling the attacks appart from the real sites.