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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.""

12 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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?

    2. 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.
    3. 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?

    4. 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 /.?

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

    Fuck that, now I can block by TLD!

  3. 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
  4. 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...

  5. 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
  6. 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 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'!"
  7. 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.