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."
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.
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