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.

Comments

Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great that nations can use their own languages instead of being forced to use alien Latin-English characters.

Re:Great!!!

[Arthur B.]

they are not the same, they just look very similar
  != py

Re:Great!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the characters only look the same to a human eye. To a computer they would look quite different:

English "py" is keycode U+0070, U+0079
Russian "py" is keycode U+0440, U+0443

Of course, the whole internationalization issue wouldn't be an issue if ICANN didn't have their head up their collective ass.

Re:Great!!!

[Sigismundo]

Not sure why the parent has been modded flamebait. It's probably the phrase "alien Latin-English characters", but it's actually an accurate description of how a domain name might appear to speakers of non-European languages.

I wasn't aware that China had already began experimenting with Chinese characters in domain names, so I did some Googling. Here is a link (in English) that describes how to register a Chinese Domain Name (CDN). It makes for a pretty interesting read. It includes the predictable clause that you can't register CDNs that "harm the glory of the state." Users of CDNs are encouraged to use "Official Client-end CDN Software" to make access more convenient. I wonder exactly what this does.

In general I think it's pretty cool to be able to have non-ASCII characters in domain names, but it seems to introduce a lot of extra compexity into DNS. Also, it seems like it could open the door for more governmental control of the internet, as TFA mentions.

Re:Great!!!

[Dogtanian]

Actually one of big advantages of Microsoft was internalization. You mean that it was possible to shove them up your ass?

Re:Great!!!

[AKAImBatman]

The characters are not displayed in the same way

As I said, it depends on your font. In Arial, they are pixel for pixel. In Courier, they have slightly different shapes. Either way, it doesn't really matter. Very few people will notice the font differences. Why? Because they are the same characters. The fact that a computer provides two copies of the same character, actually causes as many problems as it solves.

Re:Great!!!

[ajs]

Slashdot is lame like U**x in 1980 and ate the characters you typed. Actually, Slash (the engine behind Slashdot) does exactly the right thing, converting any out-of-latin-1 characters into HTML-encoded characters such as &#041F;

However, it also eliminates these from display because of the confusion that people use them to inject (e.g. mis-spelling a domain name with Cyrillic characters so that when someone cuts-and-pastes it, their session can be hijacked). It's a specific security feature used on MANY sites which are intended for English-language discussion.

Actually one of big advantages of Microsoft was internalization. MS jumped on the internationalization bandwagon VERY late in the game, but they were the first to incorporate Unicode into the filesystem which made up for a lot of their delays... better late than never, I guess. Prior to Unicode the approach was typically to have multiple versions of the text associated with an application, in multiple character sets which would be loaded on-demand. These features worked in Unixes that I was using as early as 1987.,

I could use national characters without any problem in 1994 on NT. "Use" is an interesting term. Most uses of Unicode outside of a Word Processor in vintage NT would result in system crashes and/or corruption.

Good luck with Linux or most of Unices then. Well... Linux didn't really exist as a commercial OS at that time, so I guess you're right by default. What's more, the Unicode standard had JUST been published in 1991. It took years for most software to adapt to using Unicode, and even longer for the interoperability features to be worked out. Even today, new releases of, for example, Gnome continue to adapt to the ways other cultures use the desktop and OS with their native characters (e.g. with vertical or RtL script).

You seem to have this rosy view of the world that involves Microsoft products solving the hard problem of internationalization from day one, and everyone else staring dumbly... this is far from the case.

Re:Great!!!

[AKAImBatman]

they are not the same character. Not historically

And yes, they are the same character, historically speaking. Both characters were borrowed from a common Greek/Semitic ancestry. Cross pollination of Latin and Cyrillic languages have lead to Cyrillic renderings of the letter that are more or less the same as the Latin rendering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0

Re:Great!!!

[Maimun]

They ARE the same. Trust me, I am Bulgarian and we also use the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet was created in the 9th century by Constantine, a Byzantine friar (I dunno if this is the correct term) serving the emperor in Constantinopol. The church name of Constatine was Cyrill, that is where the name of the alphabet came from. At that time, both Rome and Constantinopol were trying to convert the Slavic states to Christianity. The Eastern Roman Empire, a.k.a. Byzantia, was more flexible than the Catholics: she offered Christianity in the native Slavic languages, while the Catholics insisted on using Latin. The Cyrillic alphabet was introduced precisely for that purpose. It was modified Greek alphabet (Greek was, of course, was the language of the East Roman Empire) with symbols added for those Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalent. Intially it was adopted in Bulgaria and after about a century or two it was adopted by the Russian proto-state -- in contrast to the Russian myths that the Cyrillic alphabet was first introduced in Russia and even invented in Russia.

The initial Cyrillic alphabet looked quite different from what is used today in Russia and Bulgaria; the appearance of the modern Cyrillic alphabet is due to a reform by Tzar Peter I of Russia. Peter I imposed visual style similar to the one of the Roman font.

BTW, the Cyrillic alphabet was not the only creation of Constantine-Cyrill. He had invented another alphabet to be used by the Slavs which was called "glagolitsa" and visually was totally different from the Cyrillic one. This radical design was not very successful, although I've heard it had been used in Croatia until 2-3 centuries ago.

Here is a four-column table of the original Cyrillic alphabet and the Glagolic one ("glagolitsa"). The first column is the name of each letter (yes, each one had a name; if the names are read sequentially they form a saying, quite deep and meaningful at that), the second is the cyrillic glyph, the third is the glagolic glyph, the fourth is the numeric value.

Re:Great!!!

[Maimun]

No, the characters only look the same to a human eye. To a computer they would look quite different:

This is precisely why Cyrillic symbols are not used in DNS. It is possible to have two URLs, one having latin letters only, the other one latin and cyrillic, that look exactly the same in most fonts but are completely different as strings, so if they are resolved by DNS they'd resolve to distinct IP addresses. This is just perfect for phishing attacks: you can't tell whether www.mybank.com is the URL of your bank "MyBank", or it has a Cyrillic "a" and is registered by the attacker, by simply lookong at it. To tell if the URL is genuine one must examine it with hex editor ro something...

Re:Great!!!

[oldhack]

You guys are failing to communicate because you have different premises. Batman defines character by the appearance, Arthur by its semantic (as does Unicode). Semantic definition is clearer than the visual one, especially since the appearance of the same character varies depending on the font used. The possible problem due to similar appearances remains, although I don't know how big of a problem it is/will become.

Re:Great!!!

[CuriousCuller]

I live in Poland, more specifically in Przemysl on the Ukrainian border so I'm exposed to both alphabets more or less daily. I must confess, I envy the Easterners! The Latin alphabet is really not suited to Slavic tongues and I think the Cyrillic one is a far superior way to render them. For example, in Cyrillic you get one nice little letter looking like w with a tail, whereas we get szcz... if you're an English speaker, it'd be something like the sh ch between freSH CHeese. Anyway, the inadequacies of the Latin alphabet is why Polish sometimes ends up looking like a cat walked across the keyboard and totally bewildering to anybody living west of the river Oder. Consider this little gem: w Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego slynie - and that's without actually using any of the eight accented letters. Basically, horrible things were done in the past to squeeze a square peg into a round hole and that's why Polish has ended up with rather random letter combinations like cz, ch, rz, sz, szcz etc. in order to get 36 sounds out of a measly 23 letters (Polish doesn't use v, x or q)... Cyrillic is far more efficient all things considered - with one letter for each distinct sound. Alas, we're stuck with what we have now... a pity.

Re:Great!!!

[CRCulver]

Sts Cyril and Methodius did not invent the Cyrillic alphabet. They invented only the Glagolitic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet was invented in the Kingdom of Bulgaria nearly a century later.

It's not really translation

[mr_mischief]

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.

Re:It's not really translation

[Cctoide]

I'm not sure what you're asking, but I've always heard of conversion between scripts (i.e. writing systems) being called transliteration.

soviet russia bait

[savuporo]

i think this is a specially engineered news post to bring out the lamest "in soviet russia" jokes of slashdot. bring it on!

In Soviet Russia ...

[trolltalk.com]

In Soviet Russia, DNS blocks YOU.

... which is the whole point of "greater control".

Re:In Soviet Russia ...

[fm6]

In Soviet Russia, they are so tired of this joke.

Well...

[gibbdog]

In Soviet Russia, the domains name you!

Just to spike the ball.....

[edwardpickman]

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".

Re:Just to spike the ball.....

[techpawn]

This is why we need "common" as a language choice! Go ahead and keep your individual languages (English, French, Goblin) but also have a "Common" language for all people. Like in Firefly everyone spoke a little English and a little Chinese to create a language of the people...

I fear that it would create more and bloodier Wars than ever before though.

Re:Just to spike the ball.....

[Nerdfest]

The database oriented variation would be called "SQL Like a Pig".

How long?

[A beautiful mind]

How long until someon registers rm.rf ?

Re:How long?

[sootman]

My first thought was 'tm.rf'--in Soviet Russia, The Manual, um, Reads... wait...

Re:How long?

[megaditto]

Bah, I can think up some that are way cooler. Let's see here:

rt.fm
poop-s.coop (a real TLD by the way)
pen.is (BIC's homepage in Iceland?)
vagi.na
got.root (also real)
Eat-sh.it
sniff.co.ck (real TLD)
Give-a-fu.ck
por.no
s.cat
free.blow.jobs
felat.io
sc.um

goat.se (deserves an honorable mention I guess).

Just me

[Rinisari]

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?

In Soviet Russia ...

[morgan_greywolf]

In Soviet Russia, py ("pie") is confusing to ru ("roo")!

A big issue for the rest of us ...

[gstoddart]

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

Politically speaking

[athloi]

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.

Re:Politically speaking

[dusanv]

Or maybe, just maybe, they only want Cyrillic characters in URLS. ASCII isn't suitable for majority of the world so brace yourself for more of this in future.

The article is loaded with bs like this brownish pearl:
Kleinwachter says the speculation is that people will need a password authorised by government agencies to use the global internet.

How the fsck did he deduce that from introduction of Cyrillic DNS?

Re:Why is /. always late with stories?

[jacquesm]

minicity spam

Re:Further Proof

[jacquesm]

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.

Icons for Victory

[Doc Ruby]

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.

internet walls

[pembo13]

Hindering Paraguayan hackers may matter less to the Russian government than establishing greater control over a walled-off Internet.

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.

Trouble ahead?

[Duncan Blackthorne]

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..

That does it!

[Quiet_Desperation]

I'm registering my next domain in Klingon.

Programming in Russian

[mi]

Soon to be followed by C++ in Cyrillic.

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...

Easy solution to the problem

[DaleGlass]

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.

Re:Language in Star Wars.

[Hoi Polloi]

When the computers take over we'll all be forced to speak in binary.

101101011101....