First Non-Latin TLDs Go Online Today 302
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."
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
they didn't break backwards compatability,
here's the brilliant standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
it's just awesome.
Re:Why not post example (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not post example (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go: http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx [xn--4gbrim...xn--wgbh1c]
Re:Good news everybody! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes you can slashdot them, but you cannot show a correct text-. [xn----rmck...xn--wgbh1c] Yet...
Re:A great victory (Score:2, Informative)
That's a hostname (which is already supported via IDN, such as http://xn--malmpeeps-37a.se/ [xn--malmpeeps-37a.se] ), this story is talking about TLDs.
There's no technical reason Mönsterås can't have mönsterås.se
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Safari and Firefox work (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
The solution is pretty already for the most part in place, and occurs at the browser level. Most of the browser vendors have known about this for years [wikipedia.org] (since 2005 I believe) and implement a combination of whitelists, phishing filters, and Punycode [wikipedia.org] to avert the problem .
Other possibilities they could add is highlighting the background of any URL not in the user's native character set, or that uses characters of different sets, write those suspect characters in bold, or pop up a security dialog. The problems with these approaches it that they are much more prone to user error than a default-enabled filter. How many real-users (as in, outside the slashdot crowd) would known what the changed background or bold letters mean? How many just ignore any popup dialog that appears and hit OK to get on with it? At least something like Punycode it's a lot easier to see something wrong with the URL, and the phishing screens are much more likely to be noticed than a simple pop-up.
Re:This is just like .xxx (Score:2, Informative)
There is not a Sharia law about rocking the casbah, though I've heard they don't like it.
Re:Non-latin TLDs? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Non-latin TLDs? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the way that most Chinese people type on the computer is using a Latin keyboard to type pinyin phonetics. So they've already learned it whether or not they are using the internet. This is not going to change with the new TLD. The only difference is how it looks on the screen after they type it (and the fact that they don't have to click the icon to switch between Chinese and English input mode).
An English speaker would have to be retarded to not be able to make basic sense of a Swedish or French web site. Hungarian, okay, that's harder.
Been done for a longtime (Score:4, Informative)
This [mashable.com] 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 [mozillazine.org] circumvent it by either displaying the escaped characters (a.k.a. Punny Code) [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Fragmenting and such... (Score:3, Informative)
Email, Web, NNTP: not P2P.
VOIP: the ones connected to the phone lines are not P2P.
So let's take torrents as an example. All you need is one Web site (so one IP address) that publishes tracker IPs. Then your clever torrent client can get participants' IPs from the tracker.
I am not saying that DNS is not being used: I am not stupid. My claim is that the Internet would remain a very vibrant place even if DNS crashed and burned tomorrow, after some necessary adjustments.