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The Internet Your Rights Online

China Locks in its Net-Citizenry 217

Posted by timothy from the welcome-to-china dept.
DatedNews writes "China's registry CNNIC teamed up in March with registar i-DNS.net to provide "Internet domains completely in Chinese characters" to the Greater Chinese Internet community. What at first might look like a localization issue could potentially become a powerfull user lock-in and turn out to be a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering."
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China Locks in its Net-Citizenry More

China Locks in its Net-Citizenry

Comments Filter:

  • In other words (Score:4, Funny)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:41PM (#12353379) Homepage Journal
    It is therefore natural for us to ensure that foreign entities who wish to protect their Chinese language domain names in the .˾ and .ÍøÂç extensions are able to participate early on in the process. Therefore, we are very pleased to partner with i-DNS.net to bring this early opportunity to people outside of China now."

    We have figured out a way to extract yet more money from the running capitalist dogs.
    • Potential registrants who cannot speak or type Chinese can also register names via an on-line transliteration service provided at a modest fee.

      OK, who want a really rough translation of their domain names into chinese? .. Bite the wax tadpole anyone?
    • We have figured out a way to extract yet more money from the running capitalist dogs.

      Oh, heck, they've been doing that for years! Large civil projects were often performed out of Hong Kong years ago before the handover, because HK companies could get the job done unlike so many bureacratic failures within the PRC.

    • I couldn't help but be reminded of the China faction in the game Command & Conquer: Generals, which have a unit called the Hacker with the humorous ability of "hacking" money out of thin air. ;)

  • Great Chinese Filtering? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:44PM (#12353407)
    surely it's called the Great Firewall of China?

  • I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:44PM (#12353408) Homepage
    Your attempted to access taiwan.gov.ta has been logged. Reeducation teams are now en route to your location. Please do not flee, you traitorous capitalist.
    • Yeah, you called making money the wrong name, it's "socialism with Chinese characteristics"...er "Three Represents"...er, what's the current guy calling it?

    • Re:I can see it now (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2005 @12:49AM (#12355970)
      Ya know, I'll take Slashdot's China-censoring rants seriously the day the Chinese government actually, you know, censors Slashdot...

      As it stands, I've been healthily losing time reading anti-Chinese ramblings on Slashdot for two years from Shanghai.

      I have yet to run into any t#*#&$&$[NO CARRIER]

    • you traitorous capitalist.

      The irony is that you could probably get into a great deal of hot water in PRC by vigorously advocating that Marxist ideology be applied to liberating the oppressed workers of China right now.

      Just like you could get into trouble in the USA by refusing to pay taxes to the official government, declaring your independence, forming a new government with the same rhetoric and other tools used by the founding fathers.

  • Of course... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bananatree3 ( 872975 )
    99% of all filtered websites out there have English domains. It would seem that Chinese who are just starting with the internet would go first to chinese domain names. They might go so far as to have a "white" list for english domain names

  • How do I do research? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Indes ( 323481 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:44PM (#12353418) Homepage
    Being a Canadian student with very little experience in Chinese, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in China as they'll be oddities in the dns names..

    Does this mean everyone is gonna have to go to UTF-8? What about those in some BSD camps that don't have full chinese support?
    • Being a Canadian student with very little experience in Chinese, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in China as they'll be oddities in the dns names..

      But it might be easier to those who know Chinese to get localized Chinese information. It makes sense that those who most want localized Chineese information are Chineese.

      If China is smart, they'll find a way to keep spam out of the new domain. I remember the golden days of the internet when I would do a

    • Being a Western person who happens to speak fluent Mandarin (and Cantonese) as well as 'type Chinese' as well as English:

      Does this mean everyone is going to have to type English when accessing URLs? Why shouldn't URLs by Chinese characters first romanisation after.

      Of course a section of the internet written in Chinese readable in Chinese will have profound impacts on me.

      But what if I only understand/comprehend English, then I must be locked in [slashdot.org]. Damn this user lock in that is dependent on my knowl

    • Re:How do I do research? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 2Bits ( 167227 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @08:36PM (#12354210)
      Well, let's rephrase that for a Chinese student:


      Being a Chinese student with very little experience in English, I think that it may be harder now to get localized information about specific things in Canada/USA as they'll be oddities in the dns names..

      What's wrong for a country to try to promote technologies that work better in the local languages?

      What would Canadians and Americans think if they have to learn Chinese to use the Internet? That's what Chinese people (and all other people) have to do, i.e. learning English, to go online.

      The world is a beautiful place, with all its differences and disparities. It would be really boring if everyone has to speak english and eat big macs, don't you think?

      • If each country has incompatible data interchange protocols, then we cannot exchange information with them. If China is moving their citizens slowly to an alternate internet (one with domain names that cannot be accessed by the external world), then they are isolating their citizens.

        It takes a lot of careful work to make Internet standards actually function. It only takes one move by some network provider in order to seriously break the protocols. Witness the Verisgin domain wildcard hijacking last year...

      • What would Canadians and Americans think if they have to learn Chinese to use the Internet? That's what Chinese people (and all other people) have to do, i.e. learning English, to go online.

        While I have absolutely no problem whatsoever wth Chinese URLs/webpages, whatever, you have to know that this is a specious argument. The Internet was developed in English, therefore people who wanted to partake had to learn English. Now China is addressing that problem by creating Chinese URLs. When China creates th

    • Chances are that a website with a Chinese URL isn't going to be of much use to you. Even if you could figure out the URL, chances are the pages would also be in Chinese and you wouldn't be able to read them. Of course, if you can understand enough Chinese to read the pages, then you can probably understand enough to type in the URL's...
    • What about those in some BSD camps that don't have full chinese support?

      Fuck 'em and tell them to join the modern world, perhaps? Sorry, but I hardly think that China gives a rats ass about people who choose to use an OS that doesn't support their language. And by the way, that group includes unicode, in case you were wondering.

  • I can't take it any more! (Score:5, Funny)

    by veg_all ( 22581 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:45PM (#12353424)
    potentially become a powerfull user lock-in

    Arrgghhh!!! Even on the front page now? THERE'S ONLY ONE "L" IN "POWERFUL!"

    Ooops. Guess I'll have to change my sig now.

  • Buzzword Alert (Score:2, Redundant)

    by NitsujTPU ( 19263 )
    BUZZWORD ALERT!!
    BUZZWORD ALERT!!

    You are charged with not using the correct buzzword (however much more correct the terminology you have used may be.

    The Great Chinese Filtering

    should be stated as:

    The Great Firewall of China

  • Dupe? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Seminal ( 698722 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:46PM (#12353437) Journal
    What at first might look like a localization issue could potentially become a powerfull user lock-in and turn out to be a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering

    How so, this would lock out people outside of China, not inside China. I don't have any chinese character set installed on my pc, and I would not have a way of typing in that domain name.

    If I owned a company in China, and wanted to do buisness in other countries, I would not want a domain with just Chinese characters, my non-Chinese customers would have a more difficult time finding me.

    I just don't see how this locks Chinese people into anything. It gives them more choice.

    • From the article:

      The Director General of CNNIC, Mao Wei, said, "We have already established a framework of registrars nationwide in China, and we and our registrars have been very active in assisting corporations in China, in particular the small and medium enterprises, to understand the need to claim their domain name resources that are completely in Chinese characters.

      I suspect that the submitter was implying that by creating their own government-managed "framework" of registrars, the Chinese governme

      • Starting with the article title itself this whole thread is swarmed with utter paranoia.
        If anybody took the time to read the article, it did say that there is a two-way free translation service between traditional and simplified characters. And, if you noticed, it implied that the traditional character registry was going to be handled outside the mainland. Now, for the numerous people who have posted their credentials to understand the difference between traditional and simplified characters, how in the

    • Turnaround (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iendedi ( 687301 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @08:35PM (#12354204) Journal
      How so, this would lock out people outside of China, not inside China. I don't have any chinese character set installed on my pc, and I would not have a way of typing in that domain name.
      I was thinking the same thing, actually. This shouldn't affect anyone inside of China attempting to access sites outside of China. But how does this affect those outside of China resolving addresses inside of China? Does it matter?

      In this day and age, I believe that you would probably be watched closer if you were american and looking at chinese sites than if you were chinese and looking at american sites. Propaganda is such a strange thing.
    • That's the only explanation I can think of for the spin on the Slashdot posting. I think it's a legitimate question to raise, but to present it with the headline "China Locks in its Net-Citizenry" is just ludicrous, and extremely inflammatory. Only on Slashdot, where the term "editor" has a unique definition. Timothy ought to be ashamed of himself.

    • No lock-out, either (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ragingmime ( 636249 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {emimgnigar}> on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @10:42PM (#12355087) Homepage
      ...newly-government approved Chinese names of the form . (i.e. 'name.gongsi') and . (i.e 'name.wangluo')... The purchase of Simplified Chinese names from the i-DNS.net/CNNIC partnership will automatically allow the corresponding web-site to be accessed by an equivalent, computer-generated domain name in Traditional Chinese characters (i.e. used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) free of charge. Conversely, one can also buy a Traditional Chinese name directly and get an automatically assigned Simplified Chinese version free.

      Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like a non-Chinese user could type in .gongsi or .wangluo instead of traditional Chinese characters and get the same website. In other words, this system doesn't lock users in or out... I really don't see how this is that big of deal. Not to be a jerk, but do the editors read these articles? I'm not a very big fan of China's internet policies myself, but the newspost's threats of lock-in are totally unfounded.

    • Re:Dupe? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Enoch Root ( 57473 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @10:50PM (#12355165)
      Don't fret. Here's how this article came to be:

      - A random Slashdot reader stumbles upon an article;
      - Realizing it's about China, he suspects this could make the front page;
      - BUT! It's not anti-Chinese, just about allowing Hanzi URLs! What to do!
      - The random Slashdot reader adds a RANDOM ANTI-COMMUNIST BASTARDS slant. Voila!
      - Editors approve the article in the blink of an eye.

      And that, my friend, is how Slashdot front pages are made.

  • Quick! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:46PM (#12353440)
    What's "porno" in Cantonese?
    • roughly the same word as "summary execution and we send your family a bill for the bullet".

      No wait. That's Mandarin.

    • Re:Quick! (Score:4, Informative)

      by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @07:11PM (#12353639) Homepage Journal
      Please forgive the poor transliteration!

      Porn Video: haam di (hah-mm dee)
      Horny: haam suup (hah-mm s-uh-p) literally salty and wet

      At least, those are the colloquial expressions I'm told.

      • Horny: haam suup (hah-mm s-uh-p) literally salty and wet

        Sounds like: Ham Soup. So, obviously, it's salty and wet...

      • Re:Quick! (Score:2, Informative)

        by sydneyfong ( 410107 )
        As mentioned by a (currently) 0-score poster, this is Cantonese instead of Mandarin.

        Anyway, I'd like to say that for "Porn Video", the pronounciation is "haam dai" ("dai" rhymes with "fly")

        ("dai" in this context means "tape".)

        Hope that helps ;-p

    • Re:Quick! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Glowing Fish ( 155236 )
      It is "se qing", with se being a word meaning "form", but also meaning "lust". Qing means "passion". not neccesarily in a sexual sense, but sometimes in that way. So together, se qing means "pornographic".
      • Okay, that figures.

        During my internship last summer, I met a cute Chinese girl. Asked her for her name and number and she said it was Ping. I heard it as Qing, and wrote it as such, and she looked terribly flustered.

        Damn! If only I'd known then. :-/
      • Almost.

        You see, the Chinese language allows different characters (or rather, words) to have exactly the same pronounciation.

        The word in Chinese that means "form" is pronounced as "se" (mandarin), but it's not the same word as the "se" in the erotic sense.

        The correct word "se" means "color" (the more common use) and also means "erotic" (a tad bit different from lust).

        "qing" is "passion", "love", "feeling", etc. I might add it also has the meaning of "situation". (though I'm not exactly sure whether this
        • The characters for "se" are the same. In fact, there meanings are the same. "Form", "color" and "lust" are all different meanings derived from the root meaning.

          This is very parallel to the English word "sensation". "Sensual" has an erotic connocation, but "sensation", which is really the same word, can just refer to "sense data".

          "Qing" by itself has the same erotic meaning that "passion" has in English. Passion can be used to refer to anything from religion to sex, but it does have at least some connoctat
    • From babelfish: Simplified Chinese - see how
      Slashdot renders it.

      [] see in the brackets?

      se4qing2 in pinyin

    • In Mandarin porn is huang2de, or yellow.
      Same pronunciation as "imperial", but that is a different character. Lots of puns there.
  • Now only if I could speak Chinese...
    • Of course, you don't actually have to speak any Chinese to be literate in it. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. At least you can't misspell words.
  • About the characters... but I don't seem to be able to use them in a post. No fair! I went through a lot of work hitting ctrl-c ctrl-v, all for nothing!
    How am I supposed to properly discuss this topic if I can't even post the network domain characters?
    • About the characters... but I don't seem to be able to use them in a post. No fair! I went through a lot of work hitting ctrl-c ctrl-v, all for nothing!

      I think it is alt, then the 3 number code you want. That is how you get other characters.

      Try it. Alt-241 gives you ±, alt-142 gives you Ä.

  • KMT party chairman visits Beijing. I wonder how the PRC press handled that, characterizing the ROC as a rogue province as long as they have. Must have kept the censors on their toes, especially when he walked off the plane in a suit, rather than rags and waving a 'Death to China' banner and dripping blood from his fangs... or is it only North Korea who portrays others like that..
    • No, it also reminds me of... err nevermind, I maybe shouldn't say that out loud.
    • >
      KMT party chairman visits Beijing. I wonder how the PRC press handled that, characterizing the ROC as a rogue province as long as they have

      Easy. China has already cowered KMT to abandon the 'reconquer the mainland' policy. Now the KMT just wants to wait the mainland dictatorship to crumble down on its own. But on the other hand China's fear is now Formosan nationalism, and against that the KMT is an ally.

  • yeah (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "...a very effective addition to The Great Chinese Filtering."
    Did you mean the Great Firewall of China [wired.com]?

  • Ah... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan Up Baby ( 878587 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:53PM (#12353496) Homepage
    I love watching China shoot the wings off of its much-prophesied ascendency to world superpower, one authoritarian move at a time.

    Remember, CHINA: "It worked for the soviets, right?"

    • Re:Ah... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by elsilver ( 85140 )
      Well, it seems to be working for the US, so why shouldn't they give it a try? E.

  • tempest in a teapot (Score:5, Informative)

    by fliptout ( 9217 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:54PM (#12353508) Homepage
    I read tfa and saw nothing about locking in the chinese netizens.

    Look, English literacy is on the rise in China in a major way. With all the influx of foreign investments and foreigners into china, the chinese people are having more contact than ever with the western world. Filtering out everything but chinese characters, while a technical possibility, is simple improbable.

    I lived in china a few months last year, and I'm going back for the long haul soon- from what I have seen, the young, college educated Chinese like their access to information, albeit san porn, Taiwan, etc. To restrict their information flow even more would cause an outcry.
    • young, college educated Chinese like their access to information, albeit san porn, Taiwan, etc. To restrict their information flow even more would cause an outcry.

      I thought the point of the authoritarian state was that there was no OPTION of public outcry. Not to sound like a capitalist dog, decrying the glorious of our wonderful communist state, but what medium would this outcry be in? On the internet, where the government shuts down any site it dislikes? In the state controlled media? In protests th

    • and saw nothing about locking in the chinese netizens [...] albeit san porn

      You saw NOTHING??

    • Re:tempest in a teapot (Score:4, Funny)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @09:06PM (#12354395) Homepage
      The young, college-educated Chinese make up a tiny fraction of China's 1,300,000,000 people. The ones who speak English are an even smaller fraction of that, and consist mostly of those who have chosen careers in export trade. Let me guess, you were an English teacher. No surprise there...such a cloistered environment. Businessmen in manufacturing, like me, get out to the factories in the countryside and see the real deal.

      You don't get it. When have the outcries of people on the internet ever accomplished anything?

  • I'm not getting something (Score:5, Insightful)

    by coupland ( 160334 ) * <dchaseNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @06:55PM (#12353513) Journal

    How does allowing domains to be registered using Chinese characters have anything to do with censorship? The linked articles just prove that China already filters web traffic, regulates content, and shuts down sites they don't like. How is the ability to use Chinese characters in your location bar an indication of a sinister new plot? Sure, there is a sinister plot afoot, but I don't see how this is an astonishing new development...

    • You know, the place where the world is divided neatly into comfy extreme categories.

      Intel = evil
      AMD = good
      Windows = evil
      Linux = good
      MS = double-plus-evil
      Sun = good
      Apple = double-plus-good

      And of course, "China = double-plus-evil".

      It's a comfy system. One doesn't have to actually engage the brains or anything. If it's about China or MS, it _must_ be some nefarious, sinister plot. Even if the new piece was, oh, say, that China funds some research into curing cancer or AIDS, it _must_ involve some Fu Manchu

  • Some tech details, and a question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nstrom ( 152310 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @07:00PM (#12353546)
    These LGA people claim to require a browser plugin [i-dns.net] to use these Chinese domain names. However, it just seems that they're implementing the names using punycode [wikipedia.org] and some new (presumably non ICANN-approved) TLDs.

    For example, the domain name "." resolves via punycode to xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. Now we can check this domain via whois:

    $whois -h whois.i-dns.biz xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d

    i-DNS.net WHOIS Server Version 1-2-0

    This service may be used to query the availability of
    multilingual domain names. Please visit http://www.i-DNS.net/
    for more information about multilingual domain names.

    For help with the i-DNS.net WHOIS service, type 'HELP'.

    Domain ID: D1148313-IDNS
    Domain Name (Native): .
    Domain Name (ACE): xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d
    Created On: 14-Nov-2004 19:58:54 GMT
    Last Updated On: 02-Mar-2005 06:12:50 GMT
    Expiration Date: 14-Nov-2006 19:57:30 GMT

    ... [snipped to get past line-length filters] ...

    Name Server: ns1.i-dns.biz
    Name Server: ns2.i-dns.biz
    and we can actually resolve this name if we use the right DNS server:

    $dig xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d @ns1.i-dns.biz

    ; > DiG 9.2.2 > xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d @ns1.i-dns.biz
    ;; global options: printcmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. IN A

    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN A 203.81.44.27

    ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
    xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns1.universal-names.com.
    xn--eqro3ot1fkxx.xn--55qx5d. 86400 IN NS ns2.universal-names.com.

    ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
    ns1.universal-names.com. 117755 IN A 203.81.44.40
    ns2.universal-names.com. 117774 IN A 203.81.44.27

    ;; Query time: 821 msec
    ;; SERVER: 203.81.44.40#53(ns1.i-dns.biz)
    ;; WHEN: Tue Apr 26 19:49:06 2005
    ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 148
    The question raised here then is the following: why use a browser plugin at all if all is needed is to configure the user's DNS resolver to consult alternate root servers for the new TLDs? The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me suggests spyware, or something else that's not quite kosher.
  • ... as every famous person with an European/American name registered the Chinese character spelling (conversions available here [about.com])?

    Will names with lucky symbols [about.com] be outbidded for?

  • spam consequenses (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @07:03PM (#12353580)
    Great, instead of spam from a fake address at a pump-and-dump english domain, we can have spam from fake email addresses on domains that appear as a bunch of random characters to those without the language set.

    • Re:spam consequenses (Score:3, Interesting)

      by patio11 ( 857072 )
      No, it will appear as punycode [wikipedia.org] to you. You'll end up getting a domain name which looks like xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv (always starts with xn, tends to end up with a lot of - signs). Which is great for you, because if you work in an environment where its possible you can just redirect to /dev/null/ any messages which come from one of those domains, or set SpamAssassin to consider that a very spammy token.

  • It always happens (Score:3, Funny)

    by ded_si_luap ( 846428 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @07:14PM (#12353664)

    I look at a Chinese site, and an hour later I'm hungry again.

  • Would you like some FUD with that? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hunterx11 ( 778171 ) <hunterx11.gmail@com> on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @07:16PM (#12353678) Homepage Journal
    China is not implementing their own IDN scheme in an attempt to lock people into it. This is based on existing work on internationalized domain names. The largest country putting their weight behind IDNs is only going to encourage their rapid universal adaptation, and eliminate localization issues.
  • Ching chang chong! I can't understand yooooooou!
  • This seems like a GOOD THING! Honestly, restricting the DNS universe to a small subset of ASCII is simply arrogance. I want my umlauts and graves, durnit.

    Besides, if they already have ways of restricting access to Internet sites -- adding a character set to a level 7 protocol isn't a practical way to censor anything.

  • There are right now three Chinese nations: the People's Republic, Taiwan, and Singapore. (No, I will not count "occupied Tibet" because it is ethnically not China). Doing this will not "filter out" those from these countries, as well as other members of the Chinese diasporah worldwide.
  • They want their paranoia back.

    All this really is is simply a useful extention to an existing facility. Trust someone to turn it around and turn it into some sort of fearful conspiracy theory just because it's to do with China.

    • Re:The 60's called (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AHumbleOpinion ( 546848 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @08:38PM (#12354220) Homepage
      The 60's called. They want their paranoia back.

      Was Tiananmen Square in the 60s? No.
      Was the Navy EP-3 midair crash in the 60s? No.

      While you can argue that localized domain names are not much of an issue and that things are being blown way out of proportion, it is asinine to declare that the days of being wary of communist china are long gone. When the chinese citizens can vote anyone out of office then we can revisit the trust issue.

      • Don't forget, China isn't the -only- country with smears on its history. The United States also has a dirty history, as do most countries, communist, marxist, democratic/republic or otherwise.

        We could get into a "my list is bigger than your list" debate here but I see little point.
        • Don't forget, China isn't the -only- country with smears on its history.

          True, but we are not discussing who has smears on their history. We are discussing whether there is any evidence that the lack of trust from cold war days is no longer warranted.
      • An action is just the same action, regardless of who does it. Good is good even if China or MS does it, and evil is still the same evil even is Apple or Google were to do it.

        Judging an action by who did it, rather than for what it _is_, is the apex of stupidity and hypocrisy.

        The PRC is evil, yes, but localizing web pages and URLs is _not_.

        Every single western nation has its own localized URLs. E.g., as a random example, a German TV station's URL is "www.prosieben.de". They didn't translate it into "prose
  • now the legitimate root servers will be flooded with queries for these illegitimate top-level domains, as the names leak outside China, or people within China who attempt to use those names with software that hasn't been upgraded or configured to use the alternate root servers.

  • Just tried to register a domain... (Score:5, Informative)

    by L0stb0Y ( 108220 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @09:33PM (#12354616) Journal
    Ok, speaking pretty good Chinese, and for an experiment I just went through the process of registering a domain with these guys-

    Interesting things about the process:

    When you are registering, they state that the Chinese government has 30 days to reject your domain...maybe to keep domains they don't like the sound of from going live...

    They force you to a min of 2 years, and the cost is $125.00 - when you register a domain, they give you the domain plus the domain.cn as well (they call it a 'free gift')-

    After you register a domain they tell you that you have to install their software for your browser (no Mozilla, only IE)- With the plugin installed your new domain won't crap out when you type in characters (either GB or BIG5)-

    I'll post an update in my /. journal of the process - what happens, etc....

    Should be interesting at the very least to see what happens with this...
    • No, that's not true. Please provide the name of the registrar where you tried to register your domain. You probably get scammed by some unknown registrar outside of China.

      I own 2 chinese domain names (one for .com, the other for .cn). The registration fee is the same everywhere in China, namely, 280 RMB/year. That price is set by the government.

      And no, you don't need any other software. What's wrong with your Firefox/Mozilla?

      The only problem is, the government does not allow personal chinese domain name
      • From my reading of the grandparent, he got two domain names

        Domain 1 in the form yourchoice.newextension
        Domain 2 in the form yourchoice.newextension.cn

        Domain 1 is not a regular domain at all.
        Domain 2 is a subdomain of one belonging to this new registrar.

        I imagine the plugin is required for the new extension to work, in the same way as those con-artists over at new.net do it.
      • These are not the .cn or the .com names, they are pure Hanzi domains, already in use in China. From the article on slashdot yesterday....

        LosT

  • "Lock in"? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sydneyfong ( 410107 ) on Tuesday April 26, 2005 @09:41PM (#12354676) Homepage Journal
    Rather, say the InterNIC locks in the whole world by forcing netizens to use English characters!

    There is no reason why people have to learn English to use the internet efficiently, especially where there's more people speaking Chinese (Mandarin) than English.

    That's lock in.
    • I agree with the idea that everyone should be able to use the Internet in his native language. And I have no problem with using IDNs - actually I was involved in the discussions that led to the standardization and tried to minimize the potential for IDNs to break existing applications. But this action by China was taken rather recklessly and apparently without regard for the likely consequences. Having multiple roots with inconsistent sets of TLDs will lead to interoperability problems, as will a reliance
  • This is just another scam to make money, just like they do with new (pointless) third level domains.

    From TFA "We strongly suggest that companies in Singapore, particularly those with global or mainland China directed aspirations, to quickly lock in their business names and trademarks as Chinese domain names, before they find them legitimately taken by others"

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