ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names 116
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."
ICANN speak Chinese but Slashdot can't (Score:5, 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.
Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation (Score:5, Insightful)
Requiring everything to be ASCII breaks with the whole international nature of the web by forcing everyone to use English alphabet characters.
Re:Do they resolve to cn or are they seperate? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would assume that deciding to do it separately would be the only logical decision. Traditional to Simplified mapping is not 1:1. There are a decent number of cases where two or more Traditional characters map to 1 simplified character. There are also other cases that are 2:2. Managing the transformations centrally would likely be a nightmare.
Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation (Score:3, Insightful)
Requiring everything to be ASCII breaks with the whole international nature of the web by forcing everyone to use English alphabet characters.
Everyone has to use English ASCII characters for top level domains (*.com, *.jp, *.cn, ...) and protocols (http, https, ftp, ...), so everyone online in every country has to continue to use ASCII whether they want to or not, even after these International domain names are in common use.
BTW, I never said that everything had to be in English ASCII, just something like a domain name or e-mail address that is used to identify a website or person should be.
The postal system in most countries allow one to mail a letter using romainized characters in addition to local language characters. For example, in Japan I can send a letter from one city to another (locally) using an address like "Akihabara 1-2-3-567, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 111-1111", in addition to Japanese.
Re:Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks (Score:3, 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.
Seems like a good browser feature would be to highlight any non-ASCII characters in the address bar in a contrasting color, such as red or bright green. Then it would take only a minimal amount of additional education to understand that it means something is amiss, unless you're clearly expecting an address composed of foreign characters.
Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation (Score:2, Insightful)
Circular reasoning. One could just as easily say that TLDs should be allowed to be non-ASCII as well (and who says they won't be?), which resolves the current dependencies on English. But that wouldn't make you happy because you use English and you want everyone else to use it too. Only for the domain or email address, you say... but those just happen to be the most important parts, right?
Your postal system example is just further evidence of systemic bias. Yes, you can send mail in Japan using addresses written in English. Can you send mail in the US using katakana? The point is that DNS is equally important to nearly every country that uses it. Forcing everyone to use a de facto trade language is not good enough. Why isn't it good enough? Because people and businesses end up with transliterations like this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0852721/ [imdb.com] and they may not even realize that their product, business, or name is being filtered because they're not native English speakers, trade language or no.
The correct solution if you want to get in contact with a foreign domain? Use a translator.
This is a terrible idea (Score:3, Insightful)
As a person who can read/write Japanese(similar to, but a bit different from Chinese) characters, I don't know why ICANN thought this was a good idea. It's not like the actual contents of pages had to be in Latin characters, so "Allowing use of other languages" is not really an issue. Only the address had to be in Latin characters.
Having all internet users use the 26 (x2 for capitals) letters of the Latin charset and 10 numbers is a much, much simpler than having everyone try to learn all the letters of all the character sets out there.
This is going to make administration harder.
If you started getting hacking attacks from .com, would you even know how to type that into your firewall? If you got an email from @.com, do you think you could describe the address over the phone to a colleague? From the preview, it appears Slashdot is filtering out Japanese characters I used for the addresses. The above examples would be tokyo.com and shujin@osaka.com if they were forced to be in latin. And that's something that's usable by both Japanese and foreigners, whereas the Japanese-character addresses are for 'Japanese only'.
I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.
Re:left-to-right-top-to-bottom-you-silly-foreigner (Score:3, Insightful)
Hm, there was some of it ("what for / useless / why those people won't just learn our script") on the occasion of last such ICANN news (regarding TLDs in, among others, Arabic script IIRC)
Yeah, the language is about communication. And in todays world, there are lots of people for whom even Latin alphabet itself looks like, say, Georgian alphabet to you. Accidentally, they are often amongst those with most to gain, if they had less roadblocks in communication.
Re:left-to-right-top-to-bottom-you-silly-foreigner (Score:1, Insightful)