Slashdot Mirror
Russia Weighs Going Cyrillic For DNS
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that the Kremlin may start an alternate top-level domain, .rf. According to the story, .ru in Cyrillic translates to .py, the top-level domain for Paraguay, which the Russian government claims leads to confusion. This is similar to a move by China, which has their own .net and .com top-level domains in their native character set along with .cn, .com, and .net in ASCII." Hindering Paraguayan hackers may matter less to the Russian government than establishing greater control over a walled-off Internet.
It was only a matter of time...
It's great that nations can use their own languages instead of being forced to use alien Latin-English characters.
You can't really translate between 'r' and rho. It's a character set issue. It's a straight equivalency of sounds. Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet and the English alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It could be confused with Paraguay because of the character encoding, but it's not really the same letters.
i think this is a specially engineered news post to bring out the lamest "in soviet russia" jokes of slashdot. bring it on!
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
While "ru" written with cyrillic letters may look confusingly similar to "py", it is not the same.
In Soviet Russia, DNS blocks YOU.
Kevin Smith on Prince
The desire to have national domains might be understandable, but way too many tools depend on fairly strict domain name validity checking and having non-Latin/non-numeric/non-dash/non-dot chars is going to make all those tools barf. Hardly a consideration for the Govt that presided over murder of millions of its own citizens.
In Soviet Russia, the domains name you!
and prevent foreign outsourcing of Russian web site construction they plan to launch a version of HTML in Cyrillic. Soon to be followed by C++ in Cyrillic. Microsoft decided it was a niffty idea so they plan to start a Pig Latin based coding language called "Squeal Like".
Translations just slow everybody down.
It's time we get our tongues in order and build a tower to the heavens!
This is further proof that everyone should just speak English.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
That was my first thought. Lookout for a flood of new registrants for the equivalent of sites like alfabank.ru. (maybe?)
to put a wall up across the internet.
Also the reason I do not want changes to how the internet 'works'.
It seems every change someone comes up with is designed to put a wall up someplace.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How long until someon registers rm.rf ?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Is it just me, or does it seem like the article is really blowing this out of proportion? From my understanding, the Russian government just wants to add a .rf (well, . if I'm remembering Cyrillic correctly). That's it. Users with Cyrillic keyboards will be able to access those sites without a problem, and those of us with non-Cyrillic keyboards will have to either use a character map program or temporarily switch keyboard layouts (as I just did).
Is that it, or am I missing something?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
It's true that the cyrillic .(.py) looks very similar to .py, but as someone else pointed out, they are different character sets.
.? A .po-equivalent makes more sense for them, since in Russian they call their country Rossiya.
Also, why did they want . in the first place? that's just "roo" in cyrillic, which is the English spelling for Russia. Wouldn't the Russians themselves rather have
(sorry if you can't see the Russian chars)
Why not impliment a babelfish translation across domains?
*Ducks*
In Soviet Russia, py ("pie") is confusing to ru ("roo")!
My blog
"Mr. Putin, tear down your digital wall!"
The problem is not that they are not the same or even different charsets. The problem is that they are near enough for the naked eye to confuse a russian user. Lets say they have a real bank with the address www.baHk.py (baHk = bank in russian but I'm not using cyrillics here so use your imagination). A pisher could easily setup a domain www.bahk.py (using latins py = paraguay) and this should be very difficult for a naormal user to catch the error.... This is a phishers wet dream, actually.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
As it is I see spam which has Chinese characters embedded in what appears to be a google URL, but which I strongly suspect isn't.
I fear the more we see unicode bytes in URLs the more it will open up people to vulnerabilities as they click on very innocent looking links.
Hopefully the browsers can keep up with this.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's a smart move. Russia has already demonstrated that it wants to be a superpower again, which means that its main competition is China and the USA.
It has to keep up with China's level of control, and not leave the internet in the hands of the USA, if it can.
Again Putin demonstrates a smart interpretation of Machiavellian Realpolitik while no one else yet realizes the Cold War is back on.
technical writing / development
minicity spam
MP3 Search Engine
I'd like the URLs in my GUIs to be displayed in their frame with an icon indicating their character set, and colored if in a character set different from my GUI default. If I had that, I'd like to see "native" glyphs without fear that they're decoys. Even though such a system would no longer force most content publishers to deliver content in my own privileged native character set.
--
make install -not war
I don't really have a problem with government's filtering the internet of their own citizens -- let their citizens deal with that. When I don't like it is when a government want to control/monitor the the internet usage of other citizens.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Or, like in Star Wars, everyone should learn to understand everyone else's language. Then, in conversation, one would speak their own language regardless of what the other person is speaking. Han's exchange with Greedo comes to mind.
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
While the TCP/IP protocol suite was largely developed by DARPA, much of what the Internet is today (WWW) started at CERN in Switzerland.
So there.
...laura
I may not be looking at the whole picture here, but isn't this sort of decision going to have a tower-of-babel-like effect? Are search engines going to be able to index sites using the alternative character sets? Isn't there at least some risk of two different sites at least appearing to have identical URLs? Or is this really an attempt by countries like Russia and China to selectively cut their populations off from the public internet while not in actuality doing so? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that American English should be imposed on the rest of the world (I'm not that guy!), but the system in place was founded on such and I see this really mucking up the works..
The Russian government is quite openly murdering critics of the government, both at home and in foreign countries. Sneakily playing with TLDs to censor the internet doesn't seem like their style. If they want to clamp down on the internet, there won't be much doubt what they are doing. The fucking psychos will probably just bomb uncooperative ISPs or something.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'm registering my next domain in Klingon.
This could bring an end to DNS. Fine by me. The system, like email, is very fragile. But it shouldn't hurt the internet at all. Only the commercial aspect would suffer any real disruption, and even that should be temporary. Just fix a permanent address to every device. And create your own hosts file. Could make spoofing a bit more difficult, and it could make tracking a bit easier for you government bureaucrats out there.
What?
And if you don't like that... tough.
When we studied programming in high school, we used a language called "Ershov" (last name of the textbook's author), which was really Pascal translated to Russian.
I don't think, there was an actual compiler, though — nor did we have (enough) computers. Our little code-snippets were checked by the teacher by hand...
"One laptop per child"? Right...
In the American college, our professor was quite fond of (then brand new) Java. Among the advantages, he listed the ability of using non-ASCII characters. The poor man had to read my programs with variable-names in Ukrainian for the rest of the semester...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
except for the fact that much of what the internet is today was actually developed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois_at_Urbana-Champaign
What got started in Switzerland doesn't really conCERN us that much.
In Soviet Russia, Paraguay hacks you.
Soooo unfair. They already have .su (soviet union) and .ru. One more?
And why not a cyrillic TLD?
Care to back your statement with facts ? Not Western media hype akin to Iraqi WMD, but cols hard facts ? Censoring the Internet ? What a joke. No need to - information exchange is harmless contrary to popular belief.
In Soviet Russia, ICANN .su YOU. You will .ru the day ICANN .su you.
If the domain name contains characters not from the system's character set, highlight them (with another color say), and warn the user.
It's not a new problem either, "slashdot", and "sIashdot" will look the same in many fonts.
They've topped Saudi Arabia the past couple of years. Saudi has more reserves but nto the incentive to greatly increase production. Both are raking it it in.
Could you please enlighten me on how exactly introducing a top level domain is clamping down on internet? What exactly is wrong with great firewall of China and how an .rf domain would be a better solution (or a solution at all)?
And why do you want other people to live on terms that are so obviously for your convenience, and not theirs?
We'll never get a "universal language," and that's good; it means that the people who speak the universal language natively will have that much less power over those who don't.
Russia is the number one oil producer. For now. Until the Chicoms come and take it from them. See your sibling post.
I, for one was going to welcome our new domain-naming overlords, and in Russian, but Slashdot apparently doesn't care for Cyrillic in comments.
I live in Asunción, Paraguay, South America. Here, the ccTLD .py is managed by NIC.py. NIC.py specifically states that Paraguayan domain names must be third-level domains only, from the second-level domains ORG.PY, EDU.PY, MIL.PY, GOV.PY, NET.PY, COM.PY.
Straight from the horse's mouth (my rough translation):
On the other hand, Russian domain names are usually second-level domain names such as alphabank.ru, etc.
Therefore, and given that Paraguayan domain names are third-level domain names such as mybank.com.py, it would be very difficult for a Paraguayan phisher to set up Paraguayan sites to phish Russian users.
NIC.py states that it might consider creating other .PY second-level domains, so names such as www.python.py could be theoretically possible; but for that you must make a very good and convincing case to the NIC.py folks.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
What does "the same" mean in this context, and does it always mean that?
Unicode certainly has separate codepoints for Latin and Cyrillic characters that look "confusingly similar." This is a technical choice that it adopts in that case, but not in all cases; the Unicode CJK unification, for example, takes the opposite approach, assigning the same codepoint to characters that are regularly written differently in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Are you adequate?
I have no idea what the article is really about, because it is dumbed down to the point of inintelligibility. What happened to punycode? What encoding (or transliteration - pinyin?) is "the Chinese Internet" currently using for third-level domain names? How can there possibly be a confusion between .ru and .py if .[Cyrillic r][Cyrillic u] isn't a valid TLD? Or is it? How would Cyrillic domain names be encoded? How would a fixed IP address, which would go with you wherever you approach the internet (RFID implant?) solve any DNS problems?
Sorry, but the grand parent probably is correct here. The US dominance of the information highway "Internet" is probably not looked favorably upon by the governments mentioned.
You don't have to be very bright to see that Cyrillic and Chinese are perfectly legitimate reasons for acquiring their own DNS systems, and that they seem prepared to use those reasons. Despite the trouble it sadly WILL create, both in the short and long run.
Dammit, slashdot should unlink links in -1 messages. I got goatse'd yesterday, with innocents in the room. Luckily my goatse reflex is down to about 100 milliseconds so nobody consciously suffered.
Software patents delenda est.
http://www.slashdot.ru/
Of course it exists.
There are reasons why Russians want a cyrillic .rf domain, and it has nothing to do with who's got control.
.ru domain because of the possibilities for phishing. Consider 'paypal.ru': any of the first five letters in 'paypal' could be substituted with absolutely identically looking cyrillic letters. That makes 2^5 = 32 possible domain names that all look the same but potentially resolve to different addresses; maintaining all such domains to avoid fishing may not be an option for small businesses, let alone individuals.
.rf TLD solves all this elegantly: when someone says "image dot rf", it is obvious they expect you to type cyrillics; the entire url is in cyrillics so you don't have to change the keyboard layout. (The .rf will be in cyrillics of course; see this to get an idea how it looks)
1. Imagine the Internet has been developed in China and you have to enter all URLs in Chinese characters. Well, that's how it currently feels to a lot of Russians right now.
2. There is a problem in simply allowing cyrillics in the
3. You could of course impose some restrictions on how one can mix cyrillics and latin in the same domain name; indeed, you could allow only one script in a domain name. But there are two problems still: a) spoken communication and b) layout switching. a: When someone says "go to image dot ru", it won't be unclear if they mean the domain name in cyrillics or in latin. b: Russians use two separate keyboard layout for cyrillics and latin. To type an URL that starts with cyrillcs and ends in the latin suffix, you'll have to switch the keyboard layout midway (normally the Alt-Shift keyboard shortcut, but the less tech-savvy ones have to use the mouse!)
4. An cyrillic
There doesn't seem to be a Russian equivalent to Slashdot. (slashzone.ru was a good try, but it never became popular and is sorta abandoned now)
It would be much more useful to allow non-ASCII characters in the identifier names.
As it is now, if you look at a program written by Russians, it'll usually be a mix of transliterated Russian and bad English.
.gi written in Cyrillic looks almost like .ru! Poor Russkis, the whole world is trying to phish them.
Um, your response here suffers from two key defects:
The adoption of a common language, either through bilingualism or through the death of a native language, usually occurs with the subordination of one group of people to another.
You're not very knowledgeable about Chinese linguistics.
Note that the post you're responding to does not raise that kind of scenario.
If you assume that your proposal is going to achieve what you want it to achieve, you can easily prove that your proposal will achieve what you want it to. Of course there is no harm in "more people being able to communicate with one another." The problem is the unintended consequences that are brought to light when you evaluate the proposal in the light of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.
And, what the hell do you want everybody to have the same language for anyway? You're just taking it for granted that that would be any better than now. Would it really be so? Would it be so for everybody? Would it be better for some people, but worse for others? Can we get some serious, realistic reasoning about social relationships, instead of cheerful proclamations about how great it would be to live in Utopia?
This undermines their whole excuse about confusion with the .py ccTLD.
I'd suggest Mr. kdawson next time to take a slightly less political look at the stories he's putting up. This has nothing to do with "Hindering Paraguayan hackers" and even less so with "establishing greater control over a walled-off Internet." TLD '.RU' comes from ISO two-letter country code for Russia which is 'RU' (Notice that it matches first two letters of country name. Coincidence?). When you move to ITLDs, which presumable will allow us all to use domain names written in any language, translating 'RU' to a literal equivalent in Russian '' makes *no* sense at all. Forget about Paraguay here -- it simply makes 0 sense. Options that make a little more sense are '' or '' -- but they contain thee letter each.
Now, official name of the country is not 'Russia' (just as US is not 'America'), it is 'Russian Federation'. In Russian this is ' ', and that is where ITLD '.' is coming from.
--AP
that's an excellent idea !
MP3 Search Engine
That is not true.
Thats why I was getting too many hit to my .py site :)
.py
.py you can not get a .py TLD without a .com.py, .org.py, etc
Greetings from
BTW, in
Also, it cost 40$ a domain name!
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
I even wrote a short story about it, "In SOVIET Russia, Bluetooth mispronounces YOU!!". Most folks tend to say "s" instead of "th", even though a plain "f" sounds nicer, IMHO. The Hamming distance between "s" and "th" is greater than between "f" and "th", so "f" should be a "compatibility-mode sound for 'th'", if I can express myself that way.
The final point is that you need a right tool to do the job right.
Note: I am a fluent speaker of both, Russian and English. I also happen to be a fluent speaker of Romanian. In this case we also have some special letters - diacritics: {, , , î, â}
To support your point, I do think that Cyrillic is a bit more flexible than Latin. Back in the days when my country was occupied by the soviets (I live in Moldova), they forced a transition to the Cyrillic alphabet (to speed up the "rusification" of the locals). As a result, Romanian (Moldova and Romania used to form a single state; and in the future we will be united again) was spelled with Cyrillic letters, this artificial language was called "Moldovan" (or "Moldavian"). I am not going to criticize the fact that they forced people to switch to a different writing; but this does show that Cyrillic can be used for languages other than Russian.
I must also add that you too are correct, this: "w Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn" is a weird linguistic artifact. I don't speak Polish, but in my mind it is known as the "szcz-language"
The saddest poem