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ICANN Under Pressure Over Non-Latin Characters
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?
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?
Wait, so it's not tubes... It's a 15 story building?
Anyone else getting more lost every day?
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It won't break the whole Internet! Just DNS. DNS is overrated anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish reading all the new posts on 66.35.250.150.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Yes, countries that use non-English characters should be able to interact with the rest of the world using their natural language. No, they shouldn't rush the change and risk a possible crash of a large portion of the Internet. Be patient young patawans, soon you will be able to have DNS names with any character you can think of, but it will be reliable and actually work.
Space for rent, inquire within
- Don't be too surprised when people around you start building their own houses rather than choosing to pay rent.
DNS upheaval has been a long time coming, and the current anti-American sentiment worldwide isn't exactly helping to stabilize it. We're already seeing all sorts of adhoc routing setups that deal with shortcomings of an ameri-centric DNS. My guess is that within the next few years, ICANN's 'control' of the internet will be in name only as everyone else in the world will have moved on to alternative routing and domain systems.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
"Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?"
No.
Zonk either knows zero about the histories of the Internet or DNS, or is so enamored of finishing stories with questions that he'll tack on the truly ridiculous.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
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.
I'd be in favor of the change just because anything that undermines the Unix Tower of Babel -- the dependency on ASCII which complicates text handling sooooo much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago -- is good. Even Java gets it. Even Apple (finally) get it. Unix Is Teh Problem.
And the ASCII problem isn't just bad because it forces people to use inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?) It's bad because it allows people to write code like:
if(string[index] == '.' || string[index] == '?' || string[index] == '!') sentenceEnd = true;
(a line repeated, with subtle variations, several hundred times in the code of a certain ubiquitous editor).
And, lo and behold, the above does not work, but once it appears in a few thousand places it's impossible to fix, and a vast towering structure of fixes made by people who don't really understand why it's an issue is built.
So, even though the proposed change would be hugely inconvenient for a huge number of people, I'm in favor, because I want the world to grow the fork up and understand that text != byte array some time while I'm still alive.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Nice for localising, sure, but how usable will Japanese, Indian, or Arabic script URLs -- for example -- be for those who do not have access to the respective sets or keyboard layouts?
The internet was originally conceived, designed, and implemented in the USA at a time where hardware was at a premium, and corners were cut to conserve that limited resource. DNS was just one of the results of that era. However, it is the most visible because it is the front end means for people to find each other. That means there is now a very well established standard, used by people across the entire globe, that is very difficult to change.
Changing all the DNS servers in the world to switch from ASCII to Unicode is NOT trivial. The fact that some societies have used non-latin characters for thousands of years is completely and utterly irrelevant. THEY didn't make the internet. They simply bolted themselves on to an existing infrastructure.
I agree that progress needs to be made to accomodate non-latin characters, but to have people whining about "how they want it, and want it now"... That's just ridiculous. It's like waltzing into a house that was built 40 years ago and having a tantrum because the stairs are too steep and the house is too squished. Major structural renovations take time, effort, and careful planning. And there is nothing you can do to avoid that, short of implementing cheap stop-gap measures that are virtually guaranteed to cause even bigger unintended headaches later on.
Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?
Those societies did not build an entire economic and social infrastructure using all 50,000 of those characters in a few decades, though.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Why not have the browser fail to render them outside of the user's preferred alphabet?
Cyrillic users would see www.**c******.com, latin users would see www.mi*rosoft.com?
Or better yet, put up a big warning that it's using mixed alphabets?
ICANN Under Pressure Over Non-Latin Characters
You mean white people?
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish reading all the new posts on 66.35.250.150.
Base-Ten CHAUVINIST!!!
What about societies that use Base 2 [binary], or Base 8 [octal], or Base 16 [hexadecimal]?
Or entire societies, like the British empire, which use no base at all?
12 inches in a foot. 3 feet in a yard. 1760 yards in a mile...
60 seconds in a minute. 60 minutes in a hour. 24 hours in a day. 7 days in a week. 52 weeks in a year [give or take]...
Or how about base 12?
12 keys in a chromatic scale: A 440, then, logarithmically [give or take a little well-tempering]: A#, B, B# == C [kinda sorta], C#, D, D#, E, E# == F [kinda sorta], F#, G, G#, and finally A 880.
Except that on the continent, things are often just a little sharper - say A 443/444/445 & A 886/888/890...
And let's not even get into water freeezing & boiling at 32 & 212 versus 0 & 100...
True, but the English subset of the alphabet has another feature that matters in this regard: it's a lowest common denominator that all computers on the planet are capable of producing. I can type any letter easily on a computer in China, Israel, Jordan, Russia, Spain, India, etc. I can't necessarily input a given Chinese character, Arabic letter, or Cyrillic letter.
Why does this matter? Well, one argument is that it doesn't, much: if I want to view a Chinese website I'm probably in China and can input Chinese characters on my computer. But what about a Chinese person visiting an English-speaking country and surfing at a public computer (e.g. in a web cafe)? If the computer isn't set up for input of Chinese, he/she won't be able to view certain sites if they can only be accessed by inputting a non-latin URI. Thus to serve all possible customers, the computer would need dozens of input systems installed. That simply isn't going to happen. The alternative of just inputting Unicode codes is unworkable.
Hence it makes more sense to have a requirement that any non-Latin DNS registration ALSO be accompanied by a pure ASCII one, so that any computer will be able to access it. This also helps people who don't know a given language very well: if you don't know Chinese well, and are just learning it, you may find it hard to type in a web address with unfamiliar characters, even if your computer has Chinese input enabled. That shouldn't keep you from visiting a site.
In fact, there are some Chinese systems that do this, by creating a registry of Chinese names for websites. But they involve kludgy workarounds like browser bars that are not universal and are otherwise evil.
.sig withheld by request
What's this going to do for security. Didn't we have phishing attacks receintly that consisted of unicode characters being inserted into e+bay.com for instance that didn't get displayed. the domain e+bay.com being different than ebay.com.
"A domain name is a unique address that allows people to access a website, for example, smh.com.au"
No,a domain name is a sequence of characters mapped to an IP address. It was designed so as you won't have to remember 66.35.250.150 instead of slashdot.org. This wasn't a problem while the original Internet consisted of just four computers. DNS was never designed to provide identity. There was also the case of a stock trader hacking a DNS server and redirecting traffic from a legitimate finantial site to his own where he had duplicated the real site only with bogus information.
"He said that this could create problems where, for example, a character in Urdu looks identical to one in Arabic"
It sure could. How about totally replacing DNS with a system of online identities.
davecb5620@gmail.com
much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago
i18n on windows is far from "solved".
I do admit that MS had a huge benefit when they started pushing unicode.
(It takes a company with microsoft's level of clout to push around national governments )
And the ASCII problem isn't just bad because it forces people to use inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?)
Perhaps you don't realize that UTF-8 is moving on to become the most dominant character encoding,
and the legacy cruft such as UTF-16 (designed to deal with design flaws in windows) is being phased out.
Even languages that would end up as mostly 3 byte characters tend to benefit from the savings on single byte
characters for control and formatting markup.
I'm not going to harp on about it, but a few basic web searches could enlighten you here.
if(string[index] == '.' || string[index] == '?' || string[index] == '!') sentenceEnd = true;
Code like that *works* in UTF-8, which is one of the things that makes it beatiful. (among many others)
It allows you to deal with world characters sets when it matters, and allows you to ignore them when it does not.
(for example, a lexical analyzer that specifies its tokens does not want to support punctuation from every language ever conceived)
And if you think code like that doesnt exist in the windows world, you are sadly quite naive.
In my experience internationalizing applications, its typically far easier to upate unix applications, which
on occaision need nearly no changes at all, compared to the laborious grind and near total re-write often needed
for ms-windows applications.
So why does every language have strata of slang and jargon that may well be incomprehensible to outsiders? In south-east England, a fairly small area, one has a wide range of speech depending on economic status and social circle. If one has a few people speaking a common language, it won't stay uniform for long, even if everyone's still in the same place.
Sure, and why don't we just all wear the same clothes, just because different styles or colours can be taken too seriously (on gang turf, for example)? And let's all eat the same food, no need for various cuisines when flavourless mush can keep us alive.
Languages make the world more interesting. I enjoy very much traveling about and seeing how the local communicate, the phonological inventory and morphological quirks they employ, the different judgements on eloquent speech they hold. If all this disappeared, it would be very dull.
And your claim that languages are "too difficult" is a peculiar opinion of some in first world nations. The vast majority of human beings are multilingual, see e.g. Edwards, John. Multilingualism (London: Penguin, 1994). It should only take a person a couple of weeks to acheive a basic conversational level in a foreign language, which can easily be done before each time you set off on vacation. I've never had a problem learning enough of the language to talk with the locals about their culture and mine, and I think my language skills are actually fairly humdrum in comparison to a lot of people I've met.
And if all national tongues disappear in favour of some world language imposed by fiat, what would happen to all the literature written in them? Poetry translates infamously poorly. People have spent millennia composing art in words, one of the skills that makes us the unique species we are. Are we to throw all of those great monuments away?
Language may be employed in various ways. Not only to communicate, but also to obfuscate (as some Roma do with their use of Romani) or to explore new possibilities of form (conlangers, bits of Sandor Weores and James Joyce).
People aren't solitary individuals, they belong to larger societies that shape them. Understanding his language is part of understanding a person.
Chinese's difficulty is mainly at the level of official orthography. I studied Chinese at Defense Language Institute while in the Navy, where we concentrated only on the spoken language and learnt but a few characters, and after the first two months I no longer felt any barriers. Granted, I occasionally had to ask a person to explain what they meant, but still in Chinese of course, and I employed many circumlocutions, but it's not hard at all to learn enough Chinese to talk to Chinese people about themselves and their culture.
The Finno-Ugrian minorities of Russia, which are my chief object of study now, do not want their languages and literature "consigned to academia". They want their works preserved, they desparately seek more funding of publication (and an end to local government censorship), and they experience great pain over the monolingual policies of the Russian state--most of the Mari men of letters, for example, were murdered under Stalin. Are you to tell those suffering peoples to "just get over it"? One finds in Russia that the locals who did "get over" the loss of their language also have higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, and existential crisis, while those who are fighting to preserve their language and feel a connection to the past have a much more positive outlook.
Kind of an interesting point. Maybe we should just let Google run the DNS system, and just replace it with a giant search engine. If we make actually typing in a web address hard enough, then that's what we're effectively doing anyway: people will just start typing everything (including the domain name of sites they want to go to) into the Google Search box at the top of their browser window, instead of the actual address bar.
Actually, DNS arguably is a giant search engine, which simply works on a 1:1 relationship and uses a distributed database (you input one piece of information, and it gives you some corresponding piece of information back). Replacing it with a 'fuzzier' search engine that would give you back a number of results, ranked by relevance, isn't that huge a leap.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Instead of changing the fundamental DNS which is a programmer's and administrator's tool, not an advertising medium. It is founded, like programming languages, on a fundamental 7-bit ASCII character set, and is not intended to be used for NLS text.
A far better solution is some form of VDNS that translates NLS text names into the proper domain name at the system level. That also allows the same domain to have multiple language translations to reflect localized product and service names.
We seriously need to kick the general political community in the arse. They keep trying to impose technical decisions, and it fails as miserably as any corporate PHB's uninformed decisions. ASK the techies to propose solutions instead of shoving ill-conceived ideas down our throats.
For example -- once you mandate multibyte domains, you implicitly mandate multibyte URL components. Goodbye direct mapping of names to the directories, file systems, and servers.
Bad idea. Very bad idea.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.