Slashdot Mirror
First Non-Latin TLDs Go Online Today
eldavojohn writes "ICANN today switched on the country code top level domains for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which are the first non-Latin TLDs available and are also fully readable right to left. Slashdot does not support them but you can find the TLDs in the BBC article. ICANN said it had 21 more requests for TLDs in 11 different languages. A quick note — if you do not have the language packs installed, you may experience unpredictable browser behavior in the URL bar. Right now countries like China and Thailand have implemented workarounds to achieve the same effect."
China and Thailand have implemented workarounds to achieve unpredictable browser behavior in the URL bar?
It is now possible to get a domain that cannot be slashdotted!
But they will still need Latin characters to type "http://"
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
Well, hooray for a more fragmented Internet. While every keyboard can type A-Za-z, that's not true of Chinese or Arabic, so sites using those TLDs will be effectively off-limits to those that aren't "native". Sure, the sites can also register an ordinary domain name, but then why not just use that domain name to begin with?
A evolution of the net, rather than a revolution.
I wouldn't mind if they used an escape character sequence and then mapped other alphabets to strings of Latin characters, but actually breaking backwards compatibility...
...and both twitter and bit.ly fail to handle the IDNs correctly. Twitter doesn't make http://-./ a link, and bit.ly just says "Server Error".
But then again, nobody could have thought this would be easy... I have an email address ending in .name, and 4 character TLDs can even be difficult sometimes.
Why did the BBC article not include a link to a valid non-latin URL so we could see how our browsers cope? Even if the page is not understandable, it would be nice to know that the pages load.
Haha, way to go Slashdot! So I have to input http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ instead of http://-./ ?
(Not that anyone will see what I originally meant)
Ridiculous tribalism, that's all it is. Fragmentation of the Internet to appease some regressive, regional e-peenery is the stupidest idea to date. I speak 8 languages and love some, like Russian immensely, but the internet is a nation with its own language, and that language is Standard English. I call shenanigans on anything else being shoehorned into its basic infrastructure!
"Remember when I said I would never lie? Well, that was the first time."
So now we have mention of a new website. Slashdot cites its shortcomings as unable to display a link to the site and the article has no link.
You can find a link by following here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Guess what -- this will all get blocked. More fragmentation = less free internet. Here comes Sharia law that says all internet usage must be in Farsi, and all websites with latin endings will be blocked. Weak.
For the inhabitants of Mönsterås, Sweden.
The town name means 'patterned ridge', but to date they've have had to put up with the domain "Monsteras" - which means "monster-carcass".
(å, ä, ö/ø in the Scandinavian languages are considered to be their own unique characters, not accented 'a's and 'o's.)
currently people are not getting on the internet because its all in english: it serves as a barrier and they see no reason to even try
but when the internet supports their native language, they get on the internet, get a taste of it, like it, want to use more it, and inevitably this drives them to the english web, since there's more of whatever they're looking for over there
in other words, the long term effect of supporting other languages on the web is paradoxically further and faster consolidation to english
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm a Westerner, but I think this is pretty cool. Is it particularly useful for me? No, not really. Besides a semesters worth of Japanese in college, I studied Spanish and Latin, both in high school and in college. Amazingly, both use the Latin alphabet. I've dabbled in some Italian and German as well, but I can type the majority of those characters on my keyboard, too, or with character combinations to get at the unicode. However, if this enables further localization for geo-location specific sites and content for those to whom its relevant, then its a pretty big step forward. Most foreign sites which need to be easily accessible to westerners will still probably maintain a Romanized domain name which points to their English/Spanish/German content, while leaving their native language content accessible via the native language hostname, thus making it so that everyone is comfortable getting at information without having to switch brain modes. American and Europeans doing business with Asian and Middle Eastern customers will probably do the same, providing access via native-language domain names for their major markets. Is it extra work? Yes, but in the long run its going to be worth it, and it may provide an excuse for people to learn an Asian or Semitic language, or even an Indo-Aryan language like Russian or Greek which uses non-Roman letters. People should do that anyway, though.
My browser has had support for Mojibake encoding for years.
Have gnu, will travel.
Now to axe the latin protocol prefix, colon, slashes and dots. Also, what about those with disabilities- it is visual after all. We need "thought domains"- but wait, what about those with impaired mental capacities? Domains by intuitition would work. But what about parallel universes! Argh.
The introduction of the first web names using so-called country code top-level domains (CCTLDs) is the culmination of several years of work by the organisation.
Could have sworn they've been available for quite a while...
What are the security implications. I understand that certan characters appear more than once in differeing character sets. As in 'A' could be represented by 65, 72 etc. That means that Asite.com could be registered multiple times.
Preventing similar characters from being used to make one domain look like another.
Deleted
Isn't that a possible hacking vector?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So where can I register a domain name in Arabic? What Arabic TLDs are available? I'm Canadian, can I register?
DNS is not even an integral part of the Internet, but rather a layer on top, used mostly for the WWW part. Many peer-to-peer applications would work just fine even if DNS was never created.
Except a lot of peer-to-peer applications depend on WWW for discovery. You still need DNS to download the client or a recent list of well-known hosts.
So when is /. going to allow none Latin characters? I cannot even say ! What gives?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
i'm not at all implying that other people care about USA-centric crap, but i'm saying they most definitely are interested in tech that often starts in the usa
there's also the network effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
more people using a given website simply makes it more compelling, because how many people are in a given social website often defines how useful that site actually is. this renders languages other than english at an automatic, and continuing, disadvantage
even internet tech that started outside the usa, if it gained an international following, say the chan message boards from japan (4chan), icq in israel, or chatroulette in russia, they all migrated to the english web as an inevitable aspect of becoming an international success, and even though they of course have multilanguage abilities and continue to be used in multilanguage ways, their english manifestations are their largest elements
then there is the bizarre phenomenon of paleolithic tech that gets born in the usa, and mostly forgotten there, but continues to live on in other areas
google's orkut started in the usa, but faded, but is huge in brazil, and also india. google relocated orkut from california to belo horizonte
remember friendster? its still alive and well in malaysia, philippines, indonesia. a malaysian company in fact recently purchased friendster
all i'm saying is we're talking about technology, not culture, and no one believes that being usa-centric is the point or even an aspect of being rooted in the english language
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The site in the ICANN blog worked for me in both Safari and Firefox, in the Windows XP and OSX versions of both. Both Safari and Firefox showed Arabic in the text on the tab, but only Safari showed Arabic in the address bar.
It's purpose is to advertise your service. Even 4 billion is a large search space for humans.
It all started with host files. non scalable updating and distributing a flat file with all the people who wanted to run services and to allow other people to use them easily (name vs address) so DNS was invented to allow people to advertise their serv(ers|ices) all by themselves.
If people want to create their own little unusable fiefdoms. Go right ahead.
Deleted
Chrome 5.0.375.29 beta for Linux mutates it into the xn-- form you mention.
Reply to That ||
Support for Unicode URLs is already available in Google Chrome (5.0.375.29 beta). The Arabic URL is: http:///.-. Chrome will display it on my Ubuntu 10.04 machine as: http:///.-./ar/default.aspx However, in Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3, the URL will be shown as: http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx I have a standard Ubuntu 10.04 installation (no extra language packs or whatever).
Every time I go to Google and many other websites I get Crap in my local language. Getting decent international news from Google became difficult; everything is right to left :( Some websites will make it difficult to switch to English like Skype. Now I have to figure out how to type these odd named websites which probably include official government websites. The next thing is that websites as Google will start serving me those non-Latin links. Living in a crappy third world country is not enough for them, they have to make acquiring information more difficult and who knows may be next they will have a firewall that will filter all infidel latin based URLs.
i've tried that chrome auto-translate, and it kind of sort of works, and will always just kind of sort of work. language is inextricably human, and no computer will ever be able to understand every nuance of meaning to translate well, never mind perfectly
the only good translator is a human translator, and even they screw up or are fundamentally unable to translate every nuance of meaning. we are all human, so we will always understand each other when it comes to basic motivations and such, but when it comes to various nuances of culture and meaning, different people in different languages are to some small extent permanently incomprehensible to each other
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where can I go to register a site in squibbly? ÷ :]
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
Welcome to the twentieth century!
As I maintain my own DNS servers and such, I was curious how this worked. Here's what I learned with 15 minutes of research:
My first stop was to see the root.zone and I looked for these new TLDs, curious to see how they would show up in a Latin-based zone file. Ah, I spotted these odd XN-- zones and then knew what to dig into more.
Take for instance (I pasted a Unicode domain, but Slashcode won't show it) which is handled by ns[1-3].dotmasr.eg.:
$ dig ns (Unicode domain)
; > DiG 9.6.2-P1-RedHat-9.6.2-3.P1.fc12 > ns (Unicode domain) ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;.(Unicode domain) IN NS ;; ANSWER SECTION:
. 3600(Unicode domain) IN NS ns1.dotmasr.eg.
. 3600 (Unicode domain)IN NS ns2.dotmasr.eg.
. 3600(Unicode domain) IN NS ns3.dotmasr.eg.
If you look in the root.zone file, you will see that the ASCII/Latin version of this zone is really XN--WGBH1C.:
XN--WGBH1C. NS NS1.DOTMASR.EG.
XN--WGBH1C. NS NS2.DOTMASR.EG.
XN--WGBH1C. NS NS3.DOTMASR.EG.
TLD Reserved Domains has a list of the current mappings. ToASCII and ToUnicode are the methods to convert back and forth which links to RFC 3490 which has the nitty gritty details.
(meh, Slashcode doesn't support Unicode encoding, but I can see the Unicode domain name I am pasting in before I hit Preview in Firefox)
Also, the whole switching from right to left in Latin characters to left to right in some Unicode is odd when trying to edit!
This is?
Got to: http://idnblog.com/2010/05/05/idn-history-today-idn-cctlds/
prepend: "http://"
to the text following : "Here is one newly enabled domain with a functional website that works right now:"
I would post it here, but /. does not support these non-latin. (big surprise)
of posting what you just wrote in english, on a usa-started and hosted website
as a dutchman though, you are very much within the western world, which is even more english dominated than the wider world, and your perfect english is an example of that
but as i a sit here in midtown manhattan staring out at brooklyn (from breukelen in utrecht), read about the yankees baseball team (from jon quesa: "johnny cheese", how the dutch derisively referred to the english dairy farmers), and contemplate all the kills in the area (creeks), and all the roosevelts in our presidencies, i know that linguistic and cultural influence is a very relative thing indeed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For this to apply to all the Indian languages. Each state with its own language and script .. it's going to be mass confusion. Just like life in India, it would fit right in.
Sent from my desktop computer
As far as I know, all keyboards around the world can type ASCII characters. (Does "A" really mean "American" any more? It's the base character set for all things computer-ish.)
I, too, am a Westerner. I have spurs on my boots, ten-gallon hat, bolo tie, and horns on my Cadillac.
for languages that I cannot even pronounce, let alone read or write? that is krep I can dump immediately to save disk space and memory.
I can fake my way enough in english, french, german, and spanish to get along, thanks.
no, I'm not guessing which is supposed to be my native language, thanks. if nobody else can figure it out, why should I try? :-D
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
in the long run its going to be worth it, and it may provide an excuse for people to learn an Asian or Semitic language
And that's such a good thing because...? Why can't they replace their alphabet with the latin one, like in Turkish?
While i agree on the form with you, let us not forget that a lot of people neither read english, nor even know the roman alphabet, and only read their own language. Effectively you are telling those people "sucks to be you, now get off my lawn" Those domain name in their own language are VERY attractive to the majority of those which only know their own language. I know people which only visits chinese, japanese, germanic , or french domain. For the chinese/japanese one they would probably appreciate not having even to use roman char set *AT ALL*. And if a web site is in farsi or chinese, chance is that if you do not speak the language *you are notn interrested in the content to begin with*. Filtering and censoring is only a side effect, and a minor one. Filtering could as well be adddressed by the dictatorship governement by mandating the web site to be ONLY with a .egypt (roman) domain name or whatever. ".egypt" being in (farsi) does not really make it better or worst for censoring.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This has been dome for a long time (spelling paypal with similarily looking cyrillic characters. i.e.: "raura" but in cyrillic. or "eVau" for "eBay").
Most browsers circumvent it by either displaying the escaped characters (a.k.a. Punny Code) or by using a different colour to tag non-lating characters (don't know which browser uses this technique).
The current difference now, is that the top-level domain, too could be done in non-latin caracters.
i.e.: up until now, the hacks only spellt "PayPal" with seemilarily-looking cyrillics. starting from today a new TLD could be created which looks like "com" but is instead cyrillcs ( "som" in this instance )
Browsers will simply react by showing the escaped form or flag the letters with a different colour.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not quite what you are looking for but addresses a similar issue that has a broad domain overlap with the one at hand.
Bullshit. My conservative estimate is that every major version of Windows, OS X and Linux over the past 7 years supports input methods for Arabic and Chinese, using an ordinary Latin keyboard. Also, you can buy Arabic keyboards if you like, or even just Arabic character stickers for your existing keyboard. And of course, there's also the fact that you can reach Arabic or Chinese-content sites from links or search engines, or the fact that you can copy and paste a foreign script URL on your browser bar.
Can you read any Arabic or Chinese, anyway?
Are you adequate?
And as far as I know, all major desktop operating systems have input method support that allows you to use a Latin keyboard to input any script in common use. If you don't know how to use it, well, that's your problem.
Are you adequate?
a few years ago, they all used friendster
sometime in the recent past (12 mos?) i noticed they were all on facebook now
yes, exactly as you say, its a dying distinction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
of AltertNIC? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC
The less you talk, the more people hear you say.
So, most browsers support IDNs these days, but what about e-mail clients? In theory, it shouldn't be an issue for SMTP servers when translated into the ASCII form, but are there any e-mail clients that actually support IDNs? How about web-based e-mail services? I can foresee issues with people trying to e-mail these new domains.
all that trouble with the fake 'e' come to a crashing halt as the hacker appears to be dyslexic.
You can't handle the truth.
Maybe they somehow patent their method of client exploitation, because if not they risk most choosing to be robbed by phishing sites -- they might do less damage than the real thing.
Come to think, this maybe THE main idea behind patents: preventing a better product/idea from coming up.
They might think it is a victory to their home culture.
Why can t they think in opposite? They should have feel that they have occupied Europe and acquire all alphabets into their language as result.
Expand, not shutdown!
It is wrong to shink the internet, hiding to think you are getting some respect. It is just opposite
To those Firefox users wondering why the http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx link in TFA didn't display non-ASCII characters in the address bar...
Yes, Firefox supports International Domain Names, but there's a bunch of Whitelist Preferences in about:config that control which TLD's will work. The .xn--wgbh1c isn't in there, so you need to make sure you have the following preferences:
Extra hint: Changing the preference will not affect currently-open tabs and windows.
It must be a burden to be part of a formerly great civilization whose language and alphabet cannot be expressed on the internet.
Then again, maybe not.
The next thing to remember is to put next things next.