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The Internet Technology

ICANN Approves .IRAN (in Non-Latin) 148

Posted by timothy from the but-shouldn't-we-all-be-able-to-read-it dept.
penciling_in writes "CircleID reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced its approval of non-Latin string evaluation of 'Iran.' This approval will allow the availability of Iran's top-level domain in its own native language, Persian, also known as Farsi (that is, the domain name .IRAN, in non-Latin characters). According to ICANN, there are currently 33 requests for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs), representing 22 languages, out of which 18 countries/territories have so far been approved."
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ICANN Approves .IRAN (in Non-Latin) More

ICANN Approves .IRAN (in Non-Latin)

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  • Dont do it (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:13PM (#33915198)

    Are you serious? This is the exact thing what we are fighting against and now we give terrorists their own ccTLD that allows them to hide behind weird non-latin characters?

    Someone has to do something.

  • Show me the TLD (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mad_ian ( 28771 ) on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:15PM (#33915206) Homepage

    So... what does this look like? I think a lot of us are using OSs that show us Unicode and non-Latin characters, so lets see it.

  • What the internet really needs (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:20PM (#33915226) Journal
    Approval of Unicode 1F4A9 as a TLD

    • Slow news night, folks. It's ok to move on to something more interesting.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mysidia ( 191772 )

      Approval of Unicode 1F4A9 as a TLD

      The internet domain name system needs to be re-parented; it's too short sighted and will be quickly obsoleted once we need to interact with aliens, space stations, or colonies on other planets.

      All the existing TLDs should be moved to thid-level domains under .GL.E.MW. (GL for ground level, E for Earth, MW for Milky-Way Galaxy)

      That will provide for proper DNS hierarchy when stations on other planets need to communicate, for example....

      WWW.GOOGLE.GSO15.MA.MW. Ref

      • We may eventually have to admit that the hierarchical system won't scale sufficiently. Let's go back to bang paths and pathalias.

      • I think we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

      • You're proposing a specific domain level for altitude*, but you want to go directly from planet to galaxy? A domain level for star system (the range at which lightspeed communication methods are possible) would be a bit more meaningful and useful. Think about it: How many planets there are in the Milky Way whose names start with E?) You're also going to have to give up on using 2-letter galaxy codes to differentiate between more than 100 billion galaxies. Something like GOOGLE.US.E.SOL.MILKYWAY would be

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fritsd ( 924429 )
      That's bullshit.
    • ...along with a mandatory .1F648 for all the "think of the children"-safe sites.

  • The ccTLDs in question (Score:5, Informative)

    by Looce ( 1062620 ) * on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:43PM (#33915306) Journal

    Iran, Islamic Republic of. ccTLDs: xn--mgba3a4f16a, xn--mgba3a4fra.

    The Unicode whitelist on Slashdot is preventing us from having the Farsi reading, so see here [icann.org].

  • What injustice! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:51PM (#33915324)

    I demand .AMERICA as a TLD.

    You can't see it in Slashdot, but it's in 72 point font, bold and blinking.

    Because America is that cool.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday October 15, 2010 @11:55PM (#33915336)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Dibs on flockofseagulls.iran.

      Yeah, but I got "and.iran"

    • God dammit! I came here specifically to post that joke! I HAD DIBS!

    • When musicians try to teach geography, you're just asking for trouble. While A Flock Of Seagulls' "Iran so far away" is true in most of the English speaking world, there's no telling how much educational damage has been done by Simon and Garfunkel singing "I am Iraq; I am an island."

  • So? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Myria ( 562655 )

    As a sovereign nation, Iran has the same rights to a top-level domain as any other nation, and in her official language now that it is possible. That she is currently out of favor with the West should be irrelevant.

    Besides, don't we want more Internet access for Iranians anyway?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by c6gunner ( 950153 )

      Why in the world would you assume that the article has anything to do with the geopolitical situation? This is like someone writing an article about the price of Viagra coming down, and you yelling "STOP TALKING ABOUT MY ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION!!!". Chill out.

      • Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Saturday October 16, 2010 @12:57AM (#33915506)

        Why in the world would you assume that the article has anything to do with the geopolitical situation?

        Maybe because even the freakin summary said that 18 other IDN's have already been approved.
        If it weren't for the geopolitical situation, what makes the 18th approval worthy of note?

        • If it weren't for the geopolitical situation, what makes the 18th approval worthy of note?

          WTF?

          I mean, yeah, no, your argument makes perfect sense. I mean, this year was Superbowl 44, and I barely saw any news coverage at all on TV. After the first few, they stopped being newsworthy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by maxwell demon ( 590494 )

      As a sovereign nation, Iran has the same rights to a top-level domain as any other nation, and in her official language now that it is possible

      I didn't know that Iran is female. Does it need a burqa to cover the whole country , then?

  • tho there are many contenders for that tld ...

  • non-latin names and whois (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MavEtJu ( 241979 ) <[gro.ujtevam] [ta] [todhsals]> on Saturday October 16, 2010 @12:17AM (#33915416) Homepage

    Who has any clarity / clue on how whois gets implemented for these domains?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flnca ( 1022891 )
      Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] ... the ccTLD is encoded in Punycode [wikipedia.org] ... that makes it easy to use in any type of internet software, since it's just ASCII.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ZWNJ ( 919340 )
        Try it now: whois xn--mgbbgcw7khi.xn--mgba3a4f16a.ir

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MavEtJu ( 241979 )

          Then the next question is of course, how are the maintainers of whois-servers.net going to handle this?
          I'll drop them an email I think!

          Edwin

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by flnca ( 1022891 )
          Works for me, I'm using RHEL5 (RedHat Linux). It shows a domain name in Arabic or similar script belonging to a guy in Teheran. I don't know if the rendering is correct, but a guy speaking Arabic once told me the letters need not be connected ... they show up as individual letters in my console, but that could be a bug in the whois program or in the console app.
  • Is that nastaliq?

  • Is this a new namespace, or an alias for the old one?

    • I don't think it will be an alias for .IR, because the purpose of it is to ditch the Latin alphabet altogether, and there are truckloads of Latin domains registered there. Having URLs such as http://www.mfa/gov.#%23%23%23 [www.mfa] wouldn't accomplish that.

      But Iran currently maintains .####.IR (with the just-approved TLD as a second-level domain), which is used for domains spelled in the local alphabet, and this new TLD might be an alias of that.

  • ICANN: Tower of Babel for the modern day? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mykos ( 1627575 ) on Saturday October 16, 2010 @02:09AM (#33915646)
    I am all for giving people resources in their own language as a stop-gap measure, but in the big picture, it would be nice if we didn't re-segregate the world by language?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by martas ( 1439879 )
      uhh yeah, but good luck getting everyone to agree on what the common language should be.... if it was up to me, i'd vote to eradicate not only all but one language, but all but one culture (don't really care which one, as long as it's compatible with western individual freedoms, and, of course, places scientific advancement high up on the list of priorities). obviously, i'm in the minority...

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by peppepz ( 1311345 )
        "Eradicating languages and cultures" is not "compatible with western individual freedoms".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by martas ( 1439879 )
          *woosh*. that was a "if i was god, i'd make boobs grow on trees" kind of statement. i wasn't suggesting genocide would be a good idea.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      you mean, rather than forcing billions of people around the world to continue using domain names in a foreign character set that they can’t read? “stop-gap?” Until what? Until English takes over the world? News flash: won’t happen. Along with lots of other people, a billion Chinese say otherwise.

    • Re:ICANN: Tower of Babel for the modern day? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Saturday October 16, 2010 @02:48AM (#33915758)

      You have a problem with making Persian the one language used by the whole world?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mykos ( 1627575 )
      My main concern is just about where we're going as a human race. I mean, nobody really thinks of aliens speaking separate languages when you read sci-fi.

      I like to think that most people would agree that a single language would be one less roadblock in an advanced society. Not trying to westernize anyone...hell, I'd even accept Chinese dialects since they're the most spoken already.

      • > ...I'd even accept Chinese dialects since they're the most spoken already.

        More likely English. 1.8 billion people around the world speak it as a second language while Chinese is concentrated in China. There may be more Chinese speaking English as a second language than there are non-Chinese speakers of Chinese.

      • I mean, nobody really thinks of aliens speaking separate languages when you read sci-fi.

        That's a failure of most sci-fi authors. Or more to the point, it's a reflection of their view of the world, as something that should eventually be unified by some means (early sci-fi writers tended to think in terms of imperialism, later ones in terms of federalism based on the UN) into a single culture. So they present that as the norm for any other advanced civilization. I remain unconvinced. Diversity of culture

      • I like to think that most people would agree that a single language would be one less roadblock in an advanced society.

        Warning: actual linguist ahead.

        You must be from the US (so am I, so I'm just sayin'). The majority of the world is multilingual. Try it--it's good for you. :)

        In fact, having only one language would be worse for "an advanced society." How are we supposed to figure out how the mind works in terms of language (e.g., why are there language universals? what are they? what is the nature of language impariment?) when we only have one to study? Moreover, the goal itself is also slightly unrealistic: languages have

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by peppepz ( 1311345 )
      Being able to speak your own language has nothing to do with not being able to understand others' languages.

      I believe computers should adapt to people's customs and not the opposite; current technology gives us the opportunity for this to happen more often than not, and localised domain names are a step in that direction.

    • The increasing tendency for languages to use their own script on the internet not only on websites, but also in TLDs does lead to people who have no knowledge of that script being less and less able to access it, as they can't even input the characters for the domain any more. That said, how many people were looking at foreign websites in any case? Non-English speaking people were used to accessing English websites, as the biggest majority of the web was in English, but English speakers, who are notoriously

  • Farsi uses the arabic script - in fact, farsi and arabic written languages are indistinguishable. If the whole point of .IRAN is to support the farsi script, then why have it as a separate entity from an arabic TLD?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k8to ( 9046 )

      Yeah, why not just put all western domains under .latin. (uhhh....)

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by tonique ( 1176513 )

      FYI: Persian alphabet is derived from, and looks similar to, the Arabic script but the written languages are certainly distinguishable. Being able to distinguish might require some expertise -- I can't do it anyway. Also, the Persian (or Perso-Arabic) script is used by many other languages.

      Wikipedia knows these things:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perso-Arabic_script [wikipedia.org]
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by wmac ( 1107843 )
      In case you are interested, genuine alphabet of middle history Iran has been Pahlavi

      http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mpersian.htm [omniglot.com]

      and the more older one (i.e. thousands of years of history) is Mikhi alphabet:

      http://www.persiancalligraphy.org/History-of-Calligraphy.html [persiancalligraphy.org]
    • Nuclear Weaponry?

      OOPS, I mean peaceful generation of electricity for civillian uses, by nuclear means.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jeaton ( 44965 )

      Not quite the same script. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perso-Arabic_script [wikipedia.org] for details, but there exist letters in Farsi that do not exist in Arabic.

      Also, it would be like saying "why give the United States .us? They use the same language as England, why can't they use .uk?" This is a county-code TLD, just represented in the native script of the country.

    • Just because two things looks similar doesn't make them the same. For starters, Arabic alphabet is 4 letters short of Farsi. Then there are letters (and even digits) that are written, pronounced and even used in different ways.This is quite like saying "To me, as a third party Japanese and Chinese look similar, so they should use the same TLD" which is very very wrong.

    • in fact, farsi and arabic written languages are indistinguishable

      This is simply false. They are two very different languages using the same alphabet.

      If the whole point of .IRAN is to support the farsi script

      No, its point is to provide convenient access to Iranian resources in Farsi to people who only speak that language (and not English).

  • icame.isaw.iran

    icrawl.iwalk.iran

    any others?

  • How bout icame.isaw.iconcurred. next?

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