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ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names

Posted by timothy on from the beats-nationalized-any-day dept.

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."

8 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    ICANN haz internationalized Chinese domain name?

  2. ICANN speak Chinese but Slashdot can't by KWTm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess, until Slashdot enables the UTF character set like everyone else has for the past decade or so,

    1. There will be some domain names that we can't link to on Slashdot
    2. No one will get my First Post joke.

    --
    404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
    [GPG key in journal]
  3. Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks by Mattpw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With all the non latin address character sets being approved I imagine there is a world of new opportunities which completely void all the "inspect the address bar" education which was pushed on the general public for so many years. ICANN has managed to turn the net into a pretty much anything goes place, almost every major company is practically extorted into buying the new extension flavour of the month to prevent spammers and fraudsters sending seemingly legitimate email and the general public is left completely confused with no guiding address principals.

    1. Re:Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  4. Re:! Ha! by donscarletti · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
  5. Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation by _merlin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    However, my biggest concern is that the use of non-ascii characters in domain names breaks the whole International nature of the web

    Requiring everything to be ASCII breaks with the whole international nature of the web by forcing everyone to use English alphabet characters.

  6. Re:left-to-right-top-to-bottom-you-silly-foreigner by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Funny

    While I don't like to raise too much sturm und drang about it, as a native English speaker I must still take some affront at the chutzpah with which these dirty foreigners waltz into our tongue, thinking they have carte blanche to sully our language.

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  7. Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation by ashenden · · Score: 4, Informative

    You don't get it: gTLDs and ccTLDs are being translated (aliased) as well. When this is done, for, say, the Japanese user, there will be no need for any ASCII, whatsoever. As for mapping to ASCII, all IDNs are mapped to punycode, which is ASCII, but it will be invisible. And mixed scripts aren't allowed, so phishing fears are overblown; it won't be any worse than it is today. IDNs should have been a part of the original DN structure, but better late than never. It's simply idiotic to have an entire website in Japanese, except for the DN.