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ICANN Approves First Set of New gTLDs

Posted by timothy on from the land-office-business dept.

hypnosec writes "ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved the first set of global Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and surprisingly all four are non-English words including . ("Web" in Arabic); . ("Game" in Chinese); . ("Online" in Russian); and . ("Web site" in Russian). Approval of four non-English words can be considered as a milestone and this approval marks "the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language.""

106 comments

  1. .microsoft by Linux+User+33 · · Score: 1

    why no .microsoft? I think the company deserves to have it.

    1. Re:.microsoft by ackthpt · · Score: 2

      why no .microsoft? I think the company deserves to have it.

      They're plateauing. The decline is next. Based upon what I'm deluged with on Facebook these days, you're likely to see .lolcat before you see .microsoft.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:.microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thats what you all have been saying for decades - especially after every new OS release..

      Time for a new job?

    3. Re:.microsoft by SJHillman · · Score: 2

      We've established the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the edge of Cyberspace to reduce to dark ages after the fall of Microsoft from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000. Wait, wrong Foundation and wrong Empire.

    4. Re:.microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Who said no microsoft? They have applied for 11 gTLDs, 9 of which have passed, including .microsoft.

    5. Re:.microsoft by g0bshiTe · · Score: 1

      "deluged with on Facebook" using FB and considering it getting deluged by it you must be new to the intarwebs.

      Be sure to check out 4chan, tubgirl and goatse.

      The last two will change your life!

      --
      I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
  2. Wow, an amazing co-incidence by jez9999 · · Score: 5, Funny

    surprisingly all four are non-English words including . ("Web" in Arabic); . ("Game" in Chinese); . ("Online" in Russian); and . ("Web site" in Russian).

    That's an amazing co-incidence that all those languages use a mere full stop to mean different things!

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
    1. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by MightyYar · · Score: 2

      Since Slashdot sees fit to block those languages, I think I'll take their cue and add Arabic, Russian, and Chinese language urls to my spam filter :)

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    2. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see you get jokes...

    3. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's truly amazing is how stupid you are.

      Newcomer alert!

    4. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      How deliciously appropriate. Slashcode's truly embarrassingly archaic handling of Unicode finally comes front and center on the front page.

      How hard is it to get Unicode support in this code? Seriously, it's freaking blogging software! It's not like you're doing byte-dependent low-level math requiring the exact codepoints of ASCII characters! You're just delivering text over HTTP! What is WRONG with you? Do you guys seriously want to show that as an example of "News for Nerds", or have you seriously finally killed off that byline once and for all because you can't understand something as simple as Unicode?

    5. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1
      I

      "Since Slashdot sees fit to block those languages, I think I'll take their cue and add Arabic, Russian, and Chinese language urls to my spam filter :)"

      It isn't just "those languages" that /. blocks. Their character support has changed over time... but I don't know of ANY time during which it wasn't fundamentally broken.

    6. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Since Slashdot sees fit to block those languages, I think I'll take their cue and add Arabic, Russian, and Chinese language urls to my spam filter :)

      Won't adding "." to your URL filter block everything?

    7. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The hilarious thing is that I can't tell if you typed out unicode characters or not, because this is a very high-tech website.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    8. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I had a discussion with CmdrTaco about this, and his excuse is simply his own incompetence. According to him, it is "impossible" to prevent users from inputting characters that could mess up the layout.
      Of course, being an actual programmer, I know this is bullshit, and it's only him.

      Yes, Unicode has potentially bad characters like direction reversal and so on. But only in certain designated blocks. That's why you use a WHITE LIST, and only allow blocks that don't contain such characters. And for the very first block you use the same rules as for Latin-1/ASCII too, which by the way ALSO has potentially really bad characters like all below 0x20!

      But hey, in this day and age, I'd expect a nerd/geek site to allow embedding of arbitrary <object>s (to support HTML5 sitelets), images, audio, video, and other non-executable types. (Or even Flash and PDF, but those are executables, so they must require a warning and a click before being allowed to render/run.)
      Apart from, of course, all current (X)HTML, MathML tags but no styling or scripting.
      Pussies! I *could* handle that, and still be more secure than /. is right now.

    9. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Copied and pasted directly from TFS to be absolutely certain I got it right. I'm prone to typos and had to learn that lesson the hard way. ;)

    10. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by cayenne8 · · Score: 1

      How hard is it to get Unicode support in this code?

      Well, what's the real impetus?

      I mean, this is a US centric site, with US centric post and is in English...not much of a need to go to the apparent trouble to change the existing system to Unicode.

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    11. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Krojack · · Score: 1

      Wait, you're just NOW considering adding Chinese and Russian languages to your spam filters?

    12. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, what's the real impetus?

      Does having a front-page article shit all over itself because the non-ASCII characters that are the entire point of the article decide not to render count?

    13. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by RyoShin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Slashdot will never fix their unicode issues. Or their lack of editors who edit. Or their sensationalist and, sometimes, completely wrong summaries. All of that costs time/money and, if they even still cared about value over money while owned by GeekNet, they certainly don't now that they're owned by Dice.

      IMHO, Slashdot is dead as a proper "nerd news" site, and has been for some time. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a site (nerd or otherwise) that has the same comment moderation system (which is still the best one, in my opinion, though not without its flaws) and a large, informative/funny/insightful community. Slashdot still enjoys popularity thanks to its community, which is always more worthwhile than the summaries, which almost seems like a catch-22 setup. At least, it's the only reason I'm still here.

      Perhaps it would be worthwhile for the comments for this story to be hijacked and used to suggest good alternatives to /.?

    14. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      And for the very first block you use the same rules as for Latin-1/ASCII too, which by the way ALSO has potentially really bad characters like all below 0x20!

      All of them? Including 0x0a?

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    15. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by markhb · · Score: 1

      The more broken something is on Slashdot, the greater the probability that it's exercising code that was actually written by CmdrTaco.

      --
      Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
    16. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, it depends.... If they don't support unicode because they just never thought about it, it should be fairly easy to add. If they don't support unicode because it opens up the possibility of homograph attacks and social engineering that they'd rather not be responsible for, then it'll take more effort.

    17. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Qzukk · · Score: 1

      Real men write <br>.

      --
      If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
    18. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by fritsd · · Score: 1

      what's even worse: if you read his message backwards, it says "you - tee - eff - ate", i wonder what it means..

      --
      To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
    19. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And for the very first block you use the same rules as for Latin-1/ASCII too, which by the way ALSO has potentially really bad characters like all below 0x20!

      All of them? Including 0x0a?

      Yes! In fact 0x0A is so bad, DOS and some of the well-known protocols had to add a 0x0D in front of it as a warning sign.

    20. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did your brain suddenly go ___BLANK___ when you read the word "potentially"? ;)

      But try adding a lot of 0x0A (or <br>) in here, and think about why it is filtered...

    21. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Archon-X · · Score: 1

      Best I have found is news.ycombinator.com. It's like slashdot was 10 years ago. It's got a slight hipster/startup twist to it, but it sure beats wading through reddit.

    22. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by richlv · · Score: 1

      whenever somebody on slashdot posts about it being usa-centric site, i see an image of an overweight white guy in a trailerpark :)
      i know, i know, it's not true. but that's what we learn from your movies.

      (coincidentally, i'm in florida right now. not many trailerparks, but some drivers and cars in western everglades are interesting :) )

      --
      Rich
    23. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      How deliciously appropriate. Slashcode's truly embarrassingly archaic handling of Unicode finally comes front and center on the front page.

      How hard is it to get Unicode support in this code? Seriously, it's freaking blogging software! It's not like you're doing byte-dependent low-level math requiring the exact codepoints of ASCII characters! You're just delivering text over HTTP! What is WRONG with you? Do you guys seriously want to show that as an example of "News for Nerds", or have you seriously finally killed off that byline once and for all because you can't understand something as simple as Unicode?

      Actually, it does support Unicode. The problem is, a bunch of people misused it so now there's a whitelist of allowable Unicode characters.

      Yes, a whitelist. Because people were abusing Unicode non-printing characters to the extreme. And yes, it's actually a huge problem because Unicode has a number of control characters.

    24. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Dahan · · Score: 1

      How is it a "huge problem"? ASCII has a number of control characters too. A whitelist is a great idea, but why is the whitelist so restrictive? Just grab a copy of the current Unicode Data file and whitelist all current non-control characters. And if you're concerned that Zalgo might come, I suppose you could omit any non-spacing chars from the whitelist without people complaining too much (though perhaps it'd be good to include the ones that are actual letters in various Indic scripts).

    25. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly, it's by design. Slashdot once tried allowing non-7bit-ASCII characters and didn't bother to filter out control characters. Some commenters tried out their new abilities, and in the end Slashdot decided that Unicode is evil and that accents, math and non-Latin scripts have to be banned.

    26. Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      How is it a "huge problem"? ASCII has a number of control characters too. A whitelist is a great idea, but why is the whitelist so restrictive? Just grab a copy of the current Unicode Data file and whitelist all current non-control characters. And if you're concerned that Zalgo might come, I suppose you could omit any non-spacing chars from the whitelist without people complaining too much (though perhaps it'd be good to include the ones that are actual letters in various Indic scripts).

      Actually, Zalgo did come - /. was one of the first sites it was messed with.

      And here's what some fun did...

      http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32808&cid=3541545

      FYI, that's a Score:1 post, not a Score 5: Interesting.

      Or http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=543514&no_d2=1&cid=23306292

      Face it, there are enough folks who basically ruin it for everyone. If not that, we'll just have upside down text soon enough.

  3. Actually a very dumb idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    This means that (A) English, which is the de facto world language, is hereby attacked by ICANN.
    (B) everyone who does not speak Chinese, Russian etc will have to spend money to adapt because they'll have to buy yet more domains and yet more interpreters.

    1. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Fuck that, now I can block by TLD!

    2. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      The fact that gTLDs are a trademark/typosquatting money grab for registrars isn't exactly news; but why exactly will non-english TLDs require 'more interpreters'?

      If you don't do business in a given country or language area at all, just ignore them. If you have some limited interest in keeping the trademark-infringement scammers away, you don't need an interpreter to buy YOURNAME.whatever-incomprehnsible-foreign and have it point to your existing site. If you do do business in a given language area, presumably you already have somebody who is capable of doing the localization.

      I think that gTLDs are moronic; but the difference between being moronic and spawning random slum domains that nobody actually wants only in English vs. being moronic and spawning random slum domains that nobody actually wants in multiple languages isn't that large.

    3. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by speps · · Score: 1

      No you ". (“Web site” in Russian)"

    4. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think the point everyone is missing that these are not just non-English words, they are also using a different character set.

    5. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No you ". (“Web site” in Russian)"

      In Soviet Russia ". (“Web site” in Russian)" you!

    6. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ha! A little short-sighted.
      We don't have to worry, but amazon, slashdot and other big guys must decide whether they can just reject future (whateverUNICODEtld) used as email addresses for registration at their sites. Imagine google.(whateverUNICODEtld)!

    7. Re:Actually a very dumb idea by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Ha! A little short-sighted.
      We don't have to worry, but amazon, slashdot and other big guys must decide whether they can just reject future (whateverUNICODEtld) used as email addresses for registration at their sites. Imagine google.(whateverUNICODEtld)!

      Oh, the proliferation of pure-shakedown TLDs is, undoubtedly, a clusterfuck in the making, that much I fully agree with. I was just unimpressed by the original poster's 'zOMG foreign!!!' concerns. With the exception of legacy systems that still can't handle unicode, being shaken down for bullshit TLDs that are latin-character nonsense isn't much different than being shaken down for bullshit TLDs that are unicode nonsense(except for wacky glyph similarity-based impersonations, of course, those will be fun!)

  4. "Surprising?" by SirGarlon · · Score: 2

    What's surprising about the fact that when ICANN started approving top-level domains that allow Unicode characters, that the first four were from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? The only surprise to me is that two are Russian and one is Chinese, instead of the other way around.

    --
    [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
    1. Re:"Surprising?" by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The honest fellows at the Russian Business Network will need all the TLDs they can get to stay ahead of the blacklists...

    2. Re:"Surprising?" by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      How long before just having Cyrillic in your domain name is enough to get you blacklisted?

    3. Re:"Surprising?" by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      Given the nontrivial overlap(in many reasonably common fonts) between Cyrillic and Latin glyphs, and the accompanying opportunities for wacky domain spoofing, Not. Soon. Enough.

      All-Cyrillic domains(with the exception of the ones that you could construct purely from characters with serious overlap issues) aren't nearly as threatening; but, given that sprinkling in a few Cyrillic characters will let you construct visually identical(but completely different) URLs for a substantial number of Latin-character domains, I'd be inclined to treat any mixed-alphabet domains as guilty until proven innocent.

    4. Re:"Surprising?" by Yomers · · Score: 1

      I'll be surprised if those Russian domains will ever be widely used - about 3 years ago Russia got .RF (but in cyrillic letters, so I can not properly write it here, it's xn--p1ai ), and yet I've seen only one legitimate website advertised on this tld, and it was advertisement of demolision works service crudely painted in an elevator.

  5. .cant wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yay! I'm gonna be the first to reserve the no.you.cant hostname! (International characters replaced with Slasdot-friendly ones)

  6. How do I type this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As a dumb American, how am I going to type these?

    1. Re:How do I type this? by flyingfsck · · Score: 1

      Point and tap on your tablet dude.

      --
      Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    2. Re:How do I type this? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      As a dumb American, how am I going to type these?

      You jest, but there's a darker side to being "full international".

      I have a keyboard setup that allows me to easily enter virtually any character used in any latin-based alphabet, although the Slashdot editor would promptly sit on them (Hey, I want my "thorn" back!).

      Without a whole lot of trouble, I can bump the tally up to include Arabic/Persian, and I have ways to branch out from there. However, the more extensive the character set is, the more problems come with it. Arabic is right-to-left, not left-to-right. It also has a whole raft of ligatures and looks really ugly if you don't use them. Chinese/Japanese "character sets" contain thousands of elements.

      Putting together routing and filtering rules for a variety of systems while supporting all those possibilities is a nightmare, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

      The "murican" character set may be parochialistic, but it's about as simple as Latin goes. No funny dots or accent marks, no hooks at the bottoms of letters. No alternate codings that can confuse both memorization and collating sequences.

      I strongly support the ability to render content to the full extend that localization allows. But I'd really be a lot happier keeping the basic routing and identifying components limited to something manageable.

    3. Re:How do I type this? by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

      I think you should give ASCII a bit more credit; ~ ` ' ^ " and , were/are all supposed to be used as accent marks in the original version by backspacing over the letter and adding the necessary punctuation mark.

      It's weird that you're complaining about the travails of inputting ligatures—you do know that all major platforms have IMEs that do the work for you, right? It's generally built into their regional input layout. This is what makes inputing CJK languages feasible; you run a phonetic search against the database of characters and it pulls up the ones that match. In Windows, at least, you can switch between different input languages and keyboard layouts with a mere hotkey.

      And if for some reason that's not enough, one of the several Chinese IMEs is actually just a Unicode lookup; you type in the hexadecimal code of the character you want and it slaps it in your document. Requires an absurd amount of memorization to use effectively for anything, but I think in any proper Emacsian quest for completionism that's somewhat acceptable.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    4. Re:How do I type this? by preaction · · Score: 1

      That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?

      This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).

    5. Re:How do I type this? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 2

      That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?

      This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).

      No, actually, it's not Amero-centric. It's historo-centric. Just like lawyers are hung up on Latin. What concerns me isn't the language - since to computers all languages are equally gibberish, it's the complexity of the support mechanism. ASCII/EBCDIC were the character sets used to set up the Internet, and support for them (ASCII, at least) is pretty well universal.

      Once you're AT a website, I would certainly hope that their data entry facilities are supporting their target audiences, whatever they are in whatever languages/character sets make the users happy. But getting there shouldn't be balkanized. What we have now is a lowest common denominator. What we risk achieving is a World-Wide Web that's so nationalistic that no one will make the effort required to leave home.

    6. Re:How do I type this? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      You're confusing data entry with uniform resource identifiers. Ligatures exist in English as well, but we don't use them in domain names. Nor do we use control characters (backspace, for example, which only worked on devices that could overprint).

      What you do within a website is between you and the site provider. I'm only concerned with the general navigation of the Internet.

    7. Re:How do I type this? by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 1

      That's fair, although I think most of the issues that can be raised which are specific to URIs are either (a) answered by data solutions (databases have no trouble sorting Unicode text) or (b) analogous to existing problems (squatting domains by misusing ligatures is really no different from squatting on typos.) I guess having to write a regex for every gTLD ever would be a pain, but when IDN was first introduced there was an RFC (3490) that specifically set out a turnkey algorithm for ASCIIfying the whole mess. Instead of spooky invisible control codes you only need to deal with cumbersome strings clogged with hyphens.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    8. Re:How do I type this? by nullchar · · Score: 1

      And DNS will continue to use Punycode in the foreseeable future. DNS is all that matters here as what is a "domain name" (read: hostname) other than a mapping of name to number?

  7. If they wanted it by Sparticus789 · · Score: 4, Funny

    If the world wanted to have control over the internet naming schemes, they should have spent the time, money, and effort to INVENT the internet.

    'Murica!

    --
    sudo make me a sandwich
    1. Re:If they wanted it by Major+Ralph · · Score: 2

      If I had mod points, you would have them.

      --
      I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
    2. Re:If they wanted it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      If you wanted mod points you should have invented them.

    3. Re:If they wanted it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If he had invented mod points, he wouldn't want them.

  8. Um, excuse me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ... "the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language."

    I happen to be able to type in website addresses for generic Top-Level Domains in my native language and I do so every day, you insensitive clod!

    1. Re:Um, excuse me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And your native language is... English?

  9. Why no .4Q top level? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's many that should move from .com and .gov to have a more fitting top level. There could be a gov.4q unemployment.4q mybank.4q the list could be huge!

    1. Re:Why no .4Q top level? by nullchar · · Score: 1

      There is an application for .WTF (as well as .FOO and .DOT, etc etc)

    2. Re:Why no .4Q top level? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the tiger on the sign points the other way, should the domains then be Q4?

  10. How about something more useful by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 1

    Every domain under NSA surveillance should be required by law to register under the .nsa domain.

    --
    Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
    1. Re:How about something more useful by CanEHdian · · Score: 1

      That's too obvious, so they opted for a "." behind ".com", ".org", ".ca", etc. and it's also hidden from view. Just try it, type www.google.ca. with the . at the end and it will resolve fine if it's monitored by the NSA.

      http://newgtlds.icann.org./en/announcements-and-media/announcement-15jul13-en

      See that . between org and /en ? Yep. Monitored.

      :--)

      --
      When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
    2. Re:How about something more useful by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 2

      Some day it'll be remembered that DARPA was involved in the creation of the internet and people will talk about it like Sauron handing out rings.

      --
      Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
    3. Re:How about something more useful by CronoCloud · · Score: 2

      3 letter TLD's for the Tolkien fans under the sky.
      XXX for the porn lords in their halls of gold.

      Just had to do it.

  11. Pls no. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Please ICANN, please. You are ruining what a TLD was supposed to be.
    Worse, these are top-level TLDs, stop polluting the global space with shitty word-grab TLDs.

    If people want TLDs for their crap in their country, force them to use the country identifiers that were all made standard 50 gigayears ago.
    http://ru.crappy-word-grab-TLDs.whatever-crap-site.subdomains/crap-directories-with-nothing-in-them-because-you-paid-a-fortune-for-a-site-nobody-will-know-exists/thanks-obama.html
    Oh, also, flip the damn DNS already. Newsgroup hierarchy is considerably better than DNS will ever be. At least flip it around so it can be even closer but still nowhere near as good.
    Can we just work on a full replacement of the web that runs alongside it already? It is not like any of the casual morons that use computers every day will even notice the difference, those idiots google Facebook and click the first result and they are happy. So the ones smart enough to know the difference between a program and a website will know how the new system works easily.
    Also make sure ICANN has nothing to do with it because greedy and awful.

    1. Re:Pls no. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      those idiots google Facebook and click the first result and they are happy.

      No repetition of the analogy of dialing some phone number versus looking up the number every.single.time in the yellow pages has worked for my mother. It's hopeless that a browser bar suggests "yahoomail.com" forever and I keep seeing her click that. If she had learned this in the nineties, the fearsomeness of a DNS error would have taught her the hard way. Curse you, google.com failsafe! ;)

    2. Re:Pls no. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please ICANN, please. You are ruining what a TLD was supposed to be.

      So what do you think a Top Level Domain is supposed to be?

      Worse, these are top-level TLDs, stop polluting the global space with shitty word-grab TLDs.

      Nevermind, I don't care what you think it's supposed to be. You don't even know what the abbreviation stands for.
      "Top-level TLDs"? WTF?! Are you also using a "PIN number" when you're using an "ATM machine"?

  12. Russian? Transliterations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    . (“Online” in Russian) - Onlain
    . (“Web site” in Russian) - Sait

  13. Get off my internet by mwvdlee · · Score: 1

    the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language.

    And the first time many people won't be able to access and type in a website address just because it's written in a language their OS's input methods can't reasonably handle.

    (yeah, yeah, I know all those companies will get a .com next to their localized gTLD name that everybody will use instead; this is just a moneygrab after all).

    --
    Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  14. We needed to step back, not forward by ArcadeMan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    1. Re:We needed to step back, not forward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And who would enforce it? The registrars who make millions with the same domainname in very f***** country + all gTLD's? And on what basis? "Any Company shall only register in their home-country"? Sure, then we gonna get SONY US Corp, SONY UK Corp, SONY Deutschland AG, etc.... The Domain system was broken long before most slashdotters where born, this is not gonna be fixed, there's simply too much money to be made...

    2. Re:We needed to step back, not forward by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Except, of course, that many bodies are multi-/inter-/trans-national. Is it reasonable to require SpecialtyManufacturer.uk which ships to the U.S. and Canada to register SpecialtyManufacturer.us and SpecialtyManufacturer.cn just to have a better standing with search engines and "look" more American-/Canadian-friendly? Where would you move UN.org?

      But then again, why partition based on nationality? Why not on something more relevant, like language? We could then just have one SpecialtyManufacturer.en. That gets the information to everyone who could possibly read it. Of course, it also ignores the fact that jurisdictions actually do exist in a meaningful way. But hey, Canadian users of a hypothetical Beijing-based google.cmn (Mandarin) surely can't be missing out too much. Right?

      All TLD partitions are flawed. They're artifacts of a network architecture that needed them to accomplish some basic load-sharing. That's why we're moving now, slowly but surely towards arbitrary TLDs. If anything, we should be asking when (not if) the infrastructure will be capable of eliminating TLDs altogether.

      And I would again like to point out that whatever mental discomfort TLDs give you, the second level TLDs (like .co.uk and .ed.cn) are the ones that actually _still_ pose a technical threat to the end user, because they break the normal server.site.tld model used by the majority of sites. Which in turn means that every browser has to be aware of each of them, and have special logic to say "no evil.co.uk, you manipulate cookies for all of co.uk." If anything _those_ are what we should be worrying about first.

    3. Re:We needed to step back, not forward by Princeofcups · · Score: 2

      We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.

      How is that any different? Companies and people are becoming increasingly more international these days. Something more useful would be function, e.g. .store, .blog, .person, etc. The only reason we have the country codes is that each country wanted to control its own primary, for whatever reason. It's time to get national borders out of the internet.

      --
      The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
    4. Re:We needed to step back, not forward by Cajun+Hell · · Score: 1

      What's so great about countries?

      --
      "Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
  15. I'd like U+1F4A9 please by water-and-sewer · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, if unicode characters are now a legitimate part of website names, I'd like to register a new domain:

    http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm

    Imagine all the fun I could have with it: microsoft.pile-of-poo, oracle.pile-of-poo, mostgovernmentrepresentatives.pile-of-poo and so on. It would make blogging so much more satisfying. Who wants to be a dot-com anymore? So 90s. Be poop instead!

    --
    If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
    1. Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please by aztracker1 · · Score: 1

      I actually think that would be pretty awesome.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    2. Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

      That deserves to be a meme.

      Though perhaps only a meme on /b/...

    3. Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please by joeyadams · · Score: 1

      The biggest hindrance to adoption is that major browsers, along with JavaScript itself, handle strings in UCS-2 and tend to mishandle codepoints above 0xFFFF. Hopefully this will push browser makers and web designers to handle UTF-16 surrogate pairs properly.

    4. Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I'm afraid you can't have it: http://unicode.org/cldr/utility/character.jsp?a=1F4A9 shows the character as "idna2008 disallowed", which is to say it is not accepted for use in domain names.

    5. Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please by dkf · · Score: 3, Informative

      Hopefully this will push browser makers and web designers to handle UTF-16 surrogate pairs properly.

      Don't hold your breath; it's hard to do right without causing other catastrophic problems. (You really don't want to make indexing into a string by character position be an O(n) operation; lots of common operations rely on that not being true, and changing that alters the complexity class of many algorithms in horrible ways.)

      --
      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    6. Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think this guy deserves it:http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/07/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/

  16. I have an idea by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

    1. Reserve the .isanasshole TLD
    2. Hollywood actors pay huge amounts so nobody can register "myname.isanasshole"
    3. Profits!

    --
    Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    1. Re:I have an idea by nullchar · · Score: 2

      These are all uncontested applications (except for .sucks) and will all be new gTLDs within the next year or so:

      .gripe
      .fail
      .sucks
      .wtf

      (Listed in order of application prioritization by ICANN.)

  17. Domain squatting and spamming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It would seem ICANN's priorities are out of wack. They don't provide any means to discourage domain squatting and spamming. So why then, are they making these two abusive uses of domains more abundant? Someone needs to come up with an easy to use distributed DNS system and throw ICANN out of power.

    1. Re:Domain squatting and spamming by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Domain squatting is only a problem if you were late to the game. No tears should be shed. No, it doesn't matter what your excuse is, iut should always be first come, first serve. Unfortunately, it seems that whatever entity has the most money always wins. Sad state of affairs. Surely someone will say "how can a company know what it'll be selling in future years" or whatever johnny-come-lately ad nauseam comes to mind. That's the price you pay. It's a futures market and you've got to pay to play or use some other name or use subdomains or hyphens. The worst is when whatever domain just redirects you to a subdomain of another domain. You didn't need both, fucktard.

  18. Not Quite... by iCEBaLM · · Score: 4, Funny

    "the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language."

    My native language is english, I've been able to do this for a long time.

    1. Re:Not Quite... by magic+maverick+ · · Score: 1

      So. Also, `info' apparently means something in over 30 languages as well.

      --
      HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
  19. why limit TLDs at all? by sixsixtysix · · Score: 1

    seriously, why limit them at all? surely it'd make tons of money and likely not add to much more effort to maintain.

    --
    ...
    1. Re:why limit TLDs at all? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, why not do away with those nasty oligopolies and give anyone any TLD they want, first come first serve. It'd make as much sense as the current set up, but would be egalitarian and... er... not make nearly as much money.

      I've been saying this from the start: Either don't do this or go all the way. But noooooo. And why not? ICANN'T, that's why.

  20. The little train that could by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IThink ICANN IThink ICANN IThink ICANN

  21. In the meantime by maroberts · · Score: 1

    Anyone sending emails from these new TLD's get a nasty surprise due to years and years of email regexes bouncing their email as coming from a bad address.

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

  22. it's the end of the web as we know it by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 2

    I feel fine.

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
  23. Oh, believe me, this is a step *deeper* by Medievalist · · Score: 2

    We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.

    Corporations are people, remember? And the important ones that buy and sell legislatures like bars of soap are all multinational corporations. They don't have countries.

  24. Fragmenting the Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's all this is doing. It's going to turn all of these regions into islands that no one from outside can access. The reason we use latin characters is that the internet was designed to use them from the very begining, AND they represent the Lingua Franca, i.e. English, i.e. the international language.

  25. objection! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Given that handling it takes up half of libc and that gets you not quite a complete set of tools, I would hardly call upon unicode as an example of something simple.

    Not a complete set? Something basic like a "canonical form" is not available in libc, and in fact is only defined for a revision three major versions back, by a third party. Conversion isn't even in libc, you need iconv for that. And so on.

  26. AOL keywords by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hate to say it but AOL with their keywords was right, and TLDs are wrong.

  27. Won't stay ahead of mine... apk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    My app for blocking dorks like them (& I am FULLY aware of them bigtime, 1st set of "online crooks" I was aware of that used "fastflux" & dynamic dns botnet tech in fact from as far back as 2007 iirc) is already UNICODE aware & has all the new gTLD's incorporated into it @ this point -> http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74

    * :)

    (Just for "the future", looking ahead to what you speak of as an inevitability... planning ahead).

    APK

    P.S.=> Nothing to be tracked yet though - I've only gotten 1 entry over time that was UNICODE & a known malware spewing site (from Norton SafeWeb) - my 12 sources for data don't currently track & list UNICODE gTLD's yet either, but that's inevitable with this new set being introduced by ICANN imo...

    ... apk

  28. Slashdot, always on the cutting edge by J'raxis · · Score: 2

    Nice article summary. Still don't support that 1998 technology called "UTF-8," do ya, Slashdot?

    --
    Liberty in your lifetime
  29. Punycode versions: by nullchar · · Score: 1

    As we cannot post unicode versions, here are the punycode versions:

    .xn--ngbc5azd = International Domain Registry Pty. Ltd.'s Arabic for "Web or Network"
    .xn--80asehdb = Core Association's Russian for "Online"
    .xn--80aswg = Core Association's Russian for "Web site"
    .xn--unup4y = Spring Fields, LLC Chinese for "Game"

  30. So much for the web being international ... by fygment · · Score: 1

    ... as we increasingly see the nationalistic silos being re-erected. Don't go '.com', go '.ca' to show your patriotism to Canada. Only a matter of time before we get '.pq' for Province of Quebec (with only websites in French allowed and the word 'pasta' forbidden).

    --
    "Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.