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International URLs Pass First Test

Posted by Zonk on from the nice-to-see-some-new-faces-online dept.

Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports on the results of a successful test of non-ASCII domain names on Internet-equivalent hardware (pdf) carried out last October. The next stage is to plug the system into the net, and if it still works, it could go live sometime next year. 'Early work on the technical feasibility of using non-English character sets suggested that the address system would cope with the introduction of international characters tests were called for to ensure this was the case ... Also needed are policy decisions by Icann on how the internationalised domain names fit in and work with the existing rules governing the running of the address books. Icann is under pressure to get the international domain names working because some nations, in particular China, are working on their own technology to support their own character sets.'"

13 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Great by otacon · · Score: 5, Funny

    now I have to learn second languages to look at asian porn.

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    1. Re:Great by vivaoporto · · Score: 4, Funny

      I watch porn to learn foreign languages, you insensitive clod!

    2. Re:Great by Lenneth-chan · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm pretty sure most porn sounds are the same in any langauge.

  2. Phishing just got a lot more interesting by L.+VeGas · · Score: 4, Funny

    Imaging all the new ways to spell bank0famerlca.com.

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    1. Re:Phishing just got a lot more interesting by slart42 · · Score: 4, Informative

      >Imaging all the new ways to spell bank0famerlca.com.

      This is already happening. A common example is the cyrillic lower case "?", which looks almost exactly like the latin "a" in most fonts.

      See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack for more information.

    2. Re:Phishing just got a lot more interesting by colfer · · Score: 3, Informative

      Preventing that has been part of Mozilla's IDN implementation, and I assume other browsers have addressed (ha) it as well. If a TLD, like .ie, Ireland, has a policy against phishing, and a table of lookalike letters, then Firefox will present the IDN address in the address bar in its own, non-English, language. Otherwise, Firefox displays the address in its IDN-encoded form, which is all ASCII. AFAIK, from reading bug reports on Mozilla, this is already in force.

    3. Re:Phishing just got a lot more interesting by drsquare · · Score: 4, Funny

      Rubbish. Since when does a question mark look like an 'a'?

    4. Re:Phishing just got a lot more interesting by chihowa · · Score: 4, Funny

      Rubbish. Since when does a question mark look like an 'a'?

      Didn't you even read the post? When it's lowercase. Duh.

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  3. Dibs! by truthsearch · · Score: 3, Funny

    I got dibs on sêx.com!

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    1. Re:Dibs! by VWJedi · · Score: 5, Funny

      The technical test is about having Internationalised Domain Names at the top-level, or root, of the DNS. So then you can have .sêx rather than .sex.

      So we could theoretically have sex at any level... but this is slashdot, so it's not likely to happen for anyone around here.

  4. Re:Maybe not.. by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While browsers can't even properly show non-english alphabet, this doesn't seem to be a good a idea. My native language contains many special characters and I usually end up deciphering the emails sent by mom to me, because along the way, servers replace these characters with funny things. Well is it the browsers or the servers that are the issue? AFAIK any modern browser fully supports Unicode and any other encodings so there shouldn't be an issue there. If the servers are the problem then either it's the protocol that needs updating/replacing (I don't know nearly enough about SMTP, IMAP4, or POP3 protocols to comment) or the servers themselves are non-compliant. If there's a problem it should definitely be fixed, but you really need to know what the problem is first.
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  5. English "X" vs. Cyrillic "khah" by J.R.+Random · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is just common sense -- there's no reason why Chinese, Greeks, and Russians should have to use a character set meant for the English language. But any given URL should have a language associated with it and any character in that URL not associated with its language should be color coded. So English language URLs would get "omicron" flagged while Greek URLs would get "O" flagged. The "default" language could be English so that existing URLs are unchanged, for other languages their ISO code could precede the URL. Now this particular scheme might have some fatal flaw but something similar ought to be workable.

  6. Balkanising the internet? by hcdejong · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Would this lead to segregation of the internet into zones defined by the language used for the domain name? At the moment, I can access e.g. Japanese websites easily, even if the content of that site is in a language I don't understand [1].
    If non-Roman domain names become popular, will I still be able to access them, or will they disappear behind untypeable URLs? A search engine may be able to mitigate this problem somewhat, but ATM I sometimes get search results for Japanese-language pages only because my search term is present in the URL.

    1: yes, a site can still be useful in this case and no, despite the stereotype it's not just for porn.