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."

Comments

Really?

[Tekfactory]

China and Thailand have implemented workarounds to achieve unpredictable browser behavior in the URL bar?

Re:Really?

[AnonymousClown]

Yeah, like www.bankofamerica.com.secure.cn

I have a better one: www.bankofamerica.com.secure.ru.

It has an algorithm that predicts what expenses you will have in the near future and withdraws your money and puts it in a safe account that's unknown to you so that you don't spend it. They did that to me - took all my money out - and then all I have to do is send them an email and they'll pay my bills - all for a $19.95 monthly service fee on my CC. I can't loose!

This is my first month on this program, so I'll let you guys know how it works.

Re:Really?

[CastrTroy]

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)

Re:Really?

[PopeRatzo]

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

So, if you only could have done it, you might have done it.

Now I'm really scared.

Re:Really?

[phantomcircuit]

Just for anybody who is interested and lazy... javascript:alert(unescape("http://www.bankofam%u212ercia.com"))

It doesn't look exactly like 'e', but it's certainly close enough to fool some people.

Re:Really?

[vux984]

Ironically, "http://www.bankofamercia.com" is probably close enough to fool some people too, and doesn't require any fancy javascript. ;)

Re:Really?

[boxwood]

I have an even better one: www.bankofamerica.com

It has an algorithm that increases my taxes and deposits the money into their executive bonus pool.

Re:Really?

[negRo_slim]

Phishing aside I would say the biggest concern here is the fact we are effectively walling off parts of the internet for respective regions.

Good news everybody!

[sunderland56]

Slashdot does not support them

It is now possible to get a domain that cannot be slashdotted!

Re:Good news everybody!

[leuk_he]

Yes you can slashdot them, but you cannot show a correct text-. Yet...

Non-latin TLDs?

[kvezach]

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?

Re:Non-latin TLDs?

[Just Some Guy]

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?

Re:Non-latin TLDs?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

this a boon for russian scamers.

some letters in russian cyrillic look like latin characters but have different uses. example, the cyrillic character that looks like a "C", is actually aquivalent to "S", their "H" is actually our "N". so a TLD ".som" in cyrillic would be seen on the screen (and understood by westerners) as ".com".

so here's my suggestion to firefox developers: put some easy to see visual clue on the address bar to tell exactly in which language or character set the URL is written in.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

they didn't break backwards compatability,
here's the brilliant standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
it's just awesome.

Why not post example

[grahamm]

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.

Re:Why not post example

[tot]

The ICANN blog has a working link.

Re:Why not post example

[chill]

Here you go: http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx

Fragmenting and such...

[Unka Willbur]

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!

Re:Fragmenting and such...

[Anonymous Coward]

When the 7 Billion people around the globe will be speaking Standard English, then you may have a point. Until then I think it is everybody's right to use his/her native/preferred language on the Internet, including in TLDs. I speak 5 languages and Arabic is my native language and I think that today is a great day for the Internet.

Re:Fragmenting and such...

[melikamp]

but the internet is a nation with its own language

Yeah, but it's not English, it's TCP/IP. And 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.

Re:Fragmenting and such...

[eldavojohn]

Ridiculous tribalism, that's all it is.

Well, then as the submitter, I regret tagging it with "culture."

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!

Huh, as a developer I had always assumed that we wrote software to help people. Not that people changed their behaviors and customs to be able to use our software. I guess I was wrong. I find it disturbing that a polyglot like yourself can so easily dismiss an engineering challenge as "ridiculous" and "shenanigans" because all it takes to get around it is for everyone in the world to learn my language of takes.

I find it humorous that we sit here and rail for interoperability and satisfying the consumer and no DRM and open standards ... only to turn around and call something that opens up the internet to the rest of the world "ridiculous."

If this is the consensus among geeks, what a shame it is to be a geek.

Where do you stand on the effort that went into the Linux language packs? Were those ridiculous tribalism as well when someone took the time to make them?

This is just like .xxx

[drumcat]

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.

A great victory

[MoellerPlesset2]

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.)

Re:A great victory

[sootman]

Sweet! Now I can finally get my site, "anosfeliz.es" off blacklists! ;-)

(For the non-Spanish speakers out there: "feliz" means happy (and adjectives come after nouns, like Rio Grande [big river] or El Camino Real [the royal road]), "años" means "years" and "anos" means "anus." So instead of "happy years" it would be... something else entirely.)

you're not thinking the issue through

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:you're not thinking the issue through

[wvmarle]

Not necessarily.

Since sometime back in the '90s the web site www.ilse.nl was founded: a search engine that would index Dutch language sites only. Very useful for those that speak Dutch. Luckily for us Dutch we don't need a different character set, we can get along with the limits of Latin just fine. When it came to searching for Dutch language sites it was the number one choice. And so there are a few more, www.startpagina.nl is another very popular one.

Wikipedia comes in lots of languages - but I have never heard anyone here shout "fragmentation! Less freedom!" about that. Even though most of those other languages are inaccessible to them. But then English is inaccessible for a large part of the world, and the vast majority of people still prefers to use their native language. And that preference continues online. Even though they may be proficient in English.

I can actually imagine that the English language in the long term becomes a minority language. After all there are more native Chinese speakers than native English speakers in this world. There are probably even more non-English speakers than that there are English speakers, and in this case not even talking about native English speakers.

Re:Seriously?

[Philip K Dickhead]

Oh C'mon! Jesus used the Aramaic alphabet.

Shakespeare wrote in a "diffyrente waye", with an alphabet that included letters like the "thorne" - a "th" that is frequently mistaken for a "y" - hence our ridiculous "Ye Olde".

As for Homer Simpson? I don't believe he can write very much at all.

Re:Seriously?

[tlhIngan]

Is it chauvinistic that I find this insane?
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...

Except there *IS* an escape sequence. And the actual representation is in standard latin alphabets.

The reason is that browsers can detect the escape sequence and interpret the rest of the URL as a unicode string.

The escape is "xn--" - domains using it have xn--domain, TLDs as xn--TLD. Use both and they both have to be escaped - xn--blah.xn--blahtld.

The trick for the Rest of Us is to be able to set that as "off" by default to keep these xn-- sequences from looking like normal latin characters. The good news is the encoding is such that Paypal and the like don't get rendered as xn--paypal.com and such, but xn--junk_that_renders_as_paypal.com.

Internationalized domain names have been around a few years. This is just an internationalized TLD using the same DNS-friendly encoding scheme.

Re:Thats all good

[HiVizDiver]

Don't you mean HTTPVS/URLVS?

ever hear of facebook? twitter?

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:Thats all good

[TheRaven64]

SPQR://

How it works

[jroysdon]

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!

Re:Thats all good

[GaryOlson]

Wouldn't the Latin URL start off with "HTTPUS" for the URLUS?

Only works if your DNS server is properly configured to return the proper IP addressus
CCXVI.XXXIV.CLXXXI.XLV

Been done for a longtime

[DrYak]

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.