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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'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!
In Soviet Russia, DNS blocks YOU.
Kevin Smith on Prince
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".
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!"
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
Hm, troll ? Maybe, maybe not. When I was 14 or so one of my main motivations in learning english was to be able to work better with computers, all the books I could find where in english. In the early 80's when everybody was too busy solving problems instead of customizing their desktop and putting the right accents on letters that are unambiguous anyway.
The PC, the web and the laser printer changed all that. Mainframe printers were mostly 'chain' printers with a very limited (EBCDIC) character set, not much chance to get your fancy local script there, so people worked around it and on the whole were ok with the solutions.
Now we get top level domains with all kinds of accents in them and completely local scripts. This 'internationalization' of computing is a good thing for many people because they can now access the digital world in their own language, but at the same time it removes us one step from having a universal language, and the web could have easily given us that holy grail. Because not to be part of the cyber community or learning English ? It would have been an easy choice for most, one or two generations and English would have become a de-facto world standard.
The situation we have right now will long term probably mean that the amount of content on the net will be proportionally spread out over the various languages, with English only being a (slightly) disproportionally high fraction.
That universal language window of opportunity is probably lost for a long time, whether it ever was a serious possibility if of course open to debate, I for one had some hope that it was.
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..
I agree.....granted, I speak English natively (and have no secondary language), I would have liked to see a universal language (not required to be English, but it is sort of the de facto standard) emerge and the web would have been the perfect vehicle for forcing it.
Layne
>While "ru" written with cyrillic letters may look confusingly similar to "py", it is not the same.
Confusingly similar is an understatement. In many fonts the same glyphs are used. Yes, the same glyph is printed for both latin p and cyrillic r and the same glyph is printed for both latin y and cyrillic ew.
Scammers could exploit the fact that people in Russia pronounce the domain "ru" as "rew". If they see the glyphs "py" and do not remember that the glyphs should be interpreted according the the latin alphabet, they will pronounce them as "rew" as well. Thus, one could easily fail to notice the difference between "rambler.ru" and "rambler.py".
I'm registering my next domain in Klingon.
I agree that having a universal language is a nice idea. But I don't see how the web was a missed opportunity in this respect. Do you think that early on the web should have been restricted to English-only content?
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?
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.
I don't think that it should have been a rule, but in the early stages of development, it was dominated by the English language (most of the participants were either native English speakers or those like the parent who learned English in order to participate). Even today, there is a large English influence in "things Internet".....just less so percentage wise compared to those early days. If, instead of easing the restrictions in place, they remained as they were, I think English would have dominated the web to such a point that it would have become that universal language.
Layne
In Soviet Russia, Paraguay hacks you.
Can you even do HTML markup in anything other than English?
Not that I think that a single language is good for the world in general. (Reminds me of how the Babel fish removed the barriers to communication and became the cause of more wars as people began to understand one another.)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
of course, if it displays as .ru, it's not a problem, now is it?
In Soviet Russia, ICANN .su YOU. You will .ru the day ICANN .su you.
Which, really, is no different from allowing Cyrillic in the second-level domain. Having one site in the same ccTLD as the one it spoofs is no more secure than spoofing across ccTLDs.
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)?
There's a downside to a universal language when it pushes aside other languages, though. The cultural and intellectual diversity in language is a good thing; they ought to go on. Just as you don't want Lisp with its expressive macros or Perl with its regular expressions to just go away so everyone writes in C, you don't want a universal language to displace all others in the real world, nor do you want to halt evolution or innovation.
For example, written Korean beats any other language for writing distinct vowel sounds. This is because it was devised for the specific case of replacing borrowed Chinese characters that were awkward for Korean language with a cleanly organized system devised by royal scholars and actually put into wide use. For its purpose, you can't beat that. And yet, reading that link, you can see shortcomings that Korean has.
Similarly, if you want to talk about snow, you can't beat the Inuit language, and if you want to talk about time as relative rather than discrete units Hopi is a good choice, and if you want to talk about burning things, you can't beat Latin - damn those Roman pyromaniacs.
The universal language will surely happen to the degree that it is merited, but hopefully, no more.
I don't speak english natively, I overcame that difficulty, and so can anybody else. If the world would standardize on chinese tomorrow that would be just fine by me too...
Culture is a great thing, and I hope that everybody will be able to retain their own somehow, but wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to communicate with everybody ?
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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?
And if you want to talk about urban legends and half-remembered bits of Whorf, English is just perfect.
Are you adequate?
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.
I'll ignore your strawman with your permission, and stick to your main points:
> Sure. However, wouldn't it be awful if, because everybody was expected to know English, people who didn't speak it natively were an
> underclass? And don't you think that that would lead to the death of all those languages and cultures that you say would be nice to
> preserve?
That is a real risk, but there are plenty of examples of peoples living in one country right now where they are separated in a caste system, I don't think the language in and of itself is to blame there.
Cultural poverty is a real risk though, and that would be something not to take lightly.
> "And what's worse is that minority ethnic groups that lose their language do not thereby become integrated with the mainstream society whose
> language they adopt. Most Native American groups have lost their native languages to a colonial language, and they are still marginal.
Agreed. I've lived in Canada for a while and the treatment of minorities there is absolutely shameful. They are literally bought off. There is this weird collective guilt in Canada that the Canadian government seems to think can only be absolved with large amounts of money. Which is strange because the problem is not rooted in lack money but in something much simpler, lack of respect.
> The point is that what "universal language" really means in practice is "forced integration of other people into my culture and society,
> where we do not value them and have no place for them.""
That's an excellent point, I had not thought it through that far, I think my idealism got the better of me.
But somehow there must be a way to do such a thing in a way that it doesn't lead to someone losing out. I don't want anybody to lose anything, I would like for all of us to gain something.
As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions...
MP3 Search Engine
Hey as well!
:)
No I had not spent any time on it actually, too busy recovering from the bloody flu and trying to keep my business afloat between odd jobs
But it's nice to see you're still willing to spend time on educating me!
MP3 Search Engine
If that were the case, wouldn't the corollary be true? That those who, regardless of their background, could manage to achieve a degree of fluency in English could be a part of an upper class? Is that such a bad thing?
It's not necessarily true. In China, there are dozens if not hundreds of dialects local to a particular city or region. These dialects are spoken at home between family members, and by locals to one another. Mandarin (the official language) is taught in schools, and is pretty effective in allowing all Chinese to communicate with one another, for the most part. The local dialects do not appear to be in any danger of dying out.
I agree that language can be used as a tool of oppression, for instance, if a particular group is forbidden from using their native language, as the Kurds were in Turkey for a time. Provided that a universal language is promoted not by discouraging minority languages, but by promoting it in a positive way, through education, what is the harm in more people being able to communicate with one another?
The phishing problem would also exist if DNS was converted over to unicode, due to duplicate characters in unicode.
Plus, what about similar characters? Would straße.com be the same as strasse.com? Or häuser.com be the same as hauser.com? What about encyclopedia.com and encyclopædia.com?
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.
That's why I didn't incorrectly specify "50 words for snow" or try to say the Hopi had no words for specific units of time like Whorf did. :)
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.
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