Non roman chars in Web Domain names

trevorb
 October 29, 2009, 03:10 PM posted in General Discussion

This will be interesting,  No need for Tiny url's  when one character spells more.   look out for 中国点司 coming to a web near you  :-)

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/29/icann-set-to-allow-non-latin-characters-in-domain-names-half-th/

this may well be another good reason to learn chars as well as speech.

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andrew_c
 October 29, 2009, 04:34 PM

sounds great!

I wish this were widely supported in programming languages too (much more concise, meaningful code).

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kimiik
 October 29, 2009, 07:02 PM

Because of alleged phishing risk, the accented and non-accented latin letters are still considered as the same characters (e é è ë ê). But all the chinese characters are accepted even when very similar and hard to differentiate.

Where's the coherence ?

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simonpettersson
 October 29, 2009, 07:25 PM

I remember when it became possible to register Swedish domain names with å, ä and ö a few years ago. At that time, domain owners had the first chance of registering new domains for versions of the ones they already owed. So for example, the owner of registrera-doman.se had the opportunity to snag registrera-domän.se before anyone else could. I wonder if the same thing will happen here? That is, will tudou.com have the first opportunity to get 土豆.com?

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kimiik
 October 30, 2009, 11:55 AM

That's right, I didn't follow the evolution of the Domain Names. Since the implementation of the new IDN system (2006) and now the new IDNA (2009), the accented latin letters are accepted.

Btw, I checked the wikipedia page speaking about the problem of homographs in the IDN system as similar letters in different alphabets are coded differently.

As traditional chinese characters, simplified chinese characters and japanese kanji share many characters under different codes, I guess there's also a huge potential for spoofing attacks.

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trevorb
 October 30, 2009, 11:06 PM

I wondered if microsoft would be after 微软, I suspect they have to or someone will obtain it for fishing purposes.  

Its going to be really interesting to start seeing URLs with Chinese, turkish, korean etc chars.  Most native english speaking people will assume these sites are dangerous anyway and leave them alone.   We may differ slightly as we like the challenge but with up to date patches and AV we should be okay.