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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.
In Soviet Russia, DNS blocks YOU.
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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".
How long until someon registers rm.rf ?
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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
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.
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.
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