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."
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.
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".
For now, I hope so. Imagine a RTL domain name, coupled with a phishing email telling recipients to visit moc.tfosorcim.[NEWGTLD] that renders as [NEWGTLD].microsoft.com. Won't that be fun?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I got a better one. www.bankofamerica.com. See, I used Unicode character 212e instead of the e. Looks the same to most people, and would probably fool quite a bit of people. I wonder how they hope to stop situations like this. (I actaully used an e, because slashdot wouldn't let me put in the HTML entity, but this is good enough to demonstrate the problem)
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
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!
Phishing aside I would say the biggest concern here is the fact we are effectively walling off parts of the internet for respective regions.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days