

The most important ICANN announcement: Introduction of non-Roman character domains - ilamont
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/08/chinese-arabic-and-hindi-domain-names-go-sale-finally

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vaksel
It seems like ICANN is doing everything possible to blackmail the big
companies into spending a crapload of money to cover their trademarks. First
the .google/.ebay, and now this.

English is supposed to be the universal language for the internet, what this
will do is make things a lot harder for everyone. We'll see brand dilution,
since instead of simply registering google.ru, google will need to also own
гугл.com/.ru/.net./org/.biz etc etc

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nickb
I saw this domain a while back and I bookmarked it: <http://www.εργασία.gr> So
greek letters seem to be allowed.

If you search for it, you can see few more domains with greek letters:
[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-
us&...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-
us&q=Εργασία.gr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

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biohacker42
Despite the fact that I am a native speaker of a language which uses the
Cyrillic alphabet, I am not at all happy about the coming phishing attacks.

How can you distinguish between Latin o and Cyrillic o?

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antiform
This is actually a browser issue, and was anticipated long before. A valid
workaround would be to allow for input in Unicode, but display the url output
in Punycode.

I'm pretty sure most popular browsers already account for this vulnerability.
At the very least, Mozilla-forked browsers should still have a built-in
defense against homograph attacks.
[<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279099#c135>]

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Hexstream
I have a feeling some domain squatters will rush to register the native-
language domain name equivalents of the top 500 sites for each country with a
non-roman script and then resell it to the expected owners for big profit.

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LogicHoleFlaw
That seems certain to me. I don't know how to get around it though. The long-
term benefit of moving beyond plain ASCII for URLs is key to continued growth
and success of the internet.

In China for instance, numeric URLs are becoming prominent where English ones
are too unfamiliar for many uses. That's a pretty poor state of affairs.

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Chris8535
how will users with North American keyboards access websites with characters
not on their keyboards?

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danw
This depends on the OS but you can usually just switch the keyboard language,
use alt codes or load from a character map app. Chances are if you don't know
how to write the script, you won't know how to read the language being used
either.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Unfortunately the default settings for the OSes I've tried are extremely
limited with respect to multilingual input. I can read and write some Spanish
and Japanese for instance, but haven't had the need to for a while now. So my
current laptop doesn't have an IME set up. I'm not even sure how I'd go about
doing so. (Though Japanese IMEs are pretty slick. Think code completion, but
for kanji.)

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danw
I had the same trouble, couldn't figure out how to get my mac to deal with
hiragana/katakana/kanji input a while ago when learning japanese. Anybody know
how to do this?

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antiform
This actually relatively simple on a Mac. All you have to do is go to
International settings in Preferences and select check Japanese as an input
language. Then you can select between the character sets and languages from
the menu bar (or your desired hotkey).

One of the major reasons I switched to a Mac was because font rendering was a
lot clearer for East Asian languages.

~~~
danw
Thanks for that, not sure how I managed to miss something so obvious back
then!

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dangrover
I always thought it was funny that <http://☭.com> was taken, and furthermore
that whatever software the squatters use was smart enough to put ads for
Russia-related things on the page.

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newt0311
I have mixed feelings about this. One one hand, this will promote wider
unicode adoption which imho is a good thing but this will fragment the
internet as regions split by language.

