ICANN Approves First Set of New gTLDs 106
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.""
.microsoft (Score:1)
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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.
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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.
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Be sure to check out 4chan, tubgirl and goatse.
The last two will change your life!
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Who said no microsoft? They have applied for 11 gTLDs, 9 of which have passed, including .microsoft.
Wow, an amazing co-incidence (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!
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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 :)
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"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.
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The more broken something is on Slashdot, the greater the probability that it's exercising code that was actually written by CmdrTaco.
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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?
Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence (Score:4, 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.
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Wait, you're just NOW considering adding Chinese and Russian languages to your spam filters?
Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence (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?
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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 fi
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All of them? Including 0x0a?
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Real men write <br>.
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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.
Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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 :) )
Re:Wow, an amazing co-incidence (Score:4, 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 /.?
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Best I have found is news.ycombinator.com [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.
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Actually, Zalgo did
Punycode versions: (Score:2)
As we cannot post unicode versions, here are the punycode [wikipedia.org] versions:
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Re:Actually a very dumb idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Fuck that, now I can block by TLD!
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No you ". (“Web site” in Russian)"
In Soviet Russia ". (“Web site” in Russian)" you!
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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, presumab
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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!)
"Surprising?" (Score:3)
Re:"Surprising?" (Score:5, Interesting)
The honest fellows at the Russian Business Network will need all the TLDs they can get to stay ahead of the blacklists...
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How long before just having Cyrillic in your domain name is enough to get you blacklisted?
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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 dom
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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-ri
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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 again
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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.
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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?
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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 advantag
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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
If they wanted it (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!
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If you wanted mod points you should have invented them.
Um, excuse me... (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!
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There is an application for .WTF (as well as .FOO and .DOT, etc etc)
How about something more useful (Score:2)
Every domain under NSA surveillance should be required by law to register under the .nsa domain.
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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.
:--)
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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.
Pls no. (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 alre
Get off my internet (Score:2)
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).
We needed to step back, not forward (Score:4, 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.
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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...
Oh, believe me, this is a step *deeper* (Score:3)
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.
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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 ge
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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.
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What's so great about countries?
I'd like U+1F4A9 please (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 [fileformat.info]
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!
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That deserves to be a meme.
Though perhaps only a meme on /b/...
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Re:I'd like U+1F4A9 please (Score:4, 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.)
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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.
I have an idea (Score:2)
1. Reserve the .isanasshole TLD
2. Hollywood actors pay huge amounts so nobody can register "myname.isanasshole"
3. Profits!
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These are all uncontested applications (except for .sucks) and will all be new gTLDs within the next year or so:
(Listed in order of application prioritization by ICANN.)
Not Quite... (Score:5, 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.
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So. Also, `info' apparently means something in over 30 languages as well.
why limit TLDs at all? (Score:2)
In the meantime (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.
it's the end of the web as we know it (Score:3)
Slashdot, always on the cutting edge (Score:3)
Nice article summary. Still don't support that 1998 technology called "UTF-8," do ya, Slashdot?
So much for the web being international ... (Score:2)
... 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).