ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names

philalethiac writes "Millions of Chinese language users will soon be able to access the Internet using Chinese script following a decision today by ICANN's Board of Directors to approve a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names."

Comments

Re:Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks

[Trepidity]

There are some attempts to mitigate the problem, though you're right that it can be one. Some registrars are limiting the characters that can appear in their domain, and there's a push to make that more widespread. One approach is to limit to "local" scripts only, so e.g. Cyrillic or Latin in .ru, but no Telegu or CJK in .ru. That greatly limits the number of clashing pairs compared to allowing all of Unicode. Some registers also have policies on not permitting certain known clashes, such as allowing two domains to be registered that are identical, except for one having a Latin 'a' where the other has a Cyrillic 'a' (which look identical in most fonts).

Firefox and Opera will only display the internationalized Unicode name for TLDs that are whitelisted as having a "safe" policy on the subject, and will display the punycode for other domains. Here is Mozilla's current policy.

Re:! Ha!

[donscarletti]

Ah, pinyin, the writing system that 1.3 billion people can write, and only primary school kids can read. To be able to write in a valid language and never be fear that it will be read by anyone important is liberating. For example:

xie2xian4dian3 shi4 zhai2nan2 de xin1wen2 dan1shi4 wang2zhan4 de ji4shu4 fang1mian4 chu1chou4, er2qie4 nei4rong2 shi4 gou3pi4. wo3 gan4le4 zhong1xiao4 mo4xi1ge1zhuan3 de ma1 de bi1. (Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters. Commander Taco's mother is a classy lady)

Though on a more serious note, this is a little bit worrying. OK, ICANN is allowing Chinese domain names, this is no huge problem to me, since I can read and write Chinese anyway. But the Chinese will be pissed off when Japanese start using Kana and they are no longer able to enter the correct domain names to look up porn. I think this just screws the world all over in the long run, at least EVERYONE knows ascii.