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?

Comments

Changing a system

[Kamineko]

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?

Re:Changing a system

[KingJoshi]

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.

Re:Changing a system

[Sin Nombre]

'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.

Re:Changing a system

[Anonymous Coward]

What's this? I've been able to use the Norwegian characters in domain names for a long time. There are screetshots over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_dom ain_name

What?

[Aladrin]

Wait, so it's not tubes... It's a 15 story building?

Anyone else getting more lost every day?

not the whole internet!

[syrinx]

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.

Watch out for attacks

[Agelmar]

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.

Re:Watch out for attacks

[gsasha]

It's called a "Homograph Attack". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

you couldnt be more wrong

[Srin Tuar]

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.

The GNS System?

[Kadin2048]

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.