New Russian ccTLD - .rf?

[sunja]

See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/03/internet.censorship

The problem for Russia is that its top-level domain - with the ASCII suffix .ru - translates into Cyrillic as .py, the domain name of Paraguay. That could pose security problems for Russian users. Kim Davies, who controls the domain names at the international domain naming agency Icann told the Guardian: "Russia has a second top level domain name of .ru in Ascii code, but is pushing for .rf in Cyrillic."

one to watch..

 

[DNWizardX9]

it will be an IDN ccTLD

 

[sunja]

oic.

 

[accent]

What a can of worms IDN TLDs would be if they did not also resolve from an ASCII address. The world has how many alphabets?

 

[kissedbymysweety]

Strange...

 

[Rubber Duck]

As there has already been a huge amount of utter cobblers talked on this subject notably by the Guardian Newspaper, most of which does not contain a grain of truth, lets just try to put this into perspective.

The biggest issue here is phishing, even though on balance the introduction of IDN will reduce the phishing risk globally, it will still increase it in America where even misinformed opinion carries disproportionate weight.

Russia is simply joining a process that is common to all major Euro-Asian countries. This is not a hidden agenda, just an attempt to ensure Local Web Content is accessible to those that want to access it. Those who don't see the need for IDN and think it will make part of the Web inaccessible to them are not only wrong, but probably would go anywhere near it anyway. If you never put Cyrillics into you Search terms you don't end up with Cyrillic results. If you don't type them in you are not going to be direct navigating, and if you don't understand how to translate the content, you are not going to be able to understand it. The Russians in common with half the World just want that bit of the Internet that is relevant to them to function in a normal manner.

Getting back to the RF issue it is the Americans not the Russians that are primarily exercised over the mixing of Cyrillic and Latin Scripts. The Russian in conjunction with ICANN have sought to avoid problems by only allowing Latin Keywords with the Latin RU extension and to introduce the Cyrillic equivalent of RF uniquely for Cyrillic Keywords. The Russian version of RF contains a Phi like character that cannot be confused with any Latin Script, so it is immediately recognisable as a Cyrillic extension. As it will only be associated with Russian keywords then everyone is protected from phishing, which is more than can be said for the Cyrillics in dot com. So they are actually way ahead of Verisign in taking the moral high ground.

So can we forget all this nonsense and try to only discuss factual matters rather some fictional works by under-worked journalists.

 

[sunja]

thanks for a well researched and sense-making post. Clears a lot of questions up.

 

[BostonDomainer]

As there has already been a huge amount of utter cobblers talked on this subject notably by the Guardian Newspaper, most of which does not contain a grain of truth, lets just try to put this into perspective.

The biggest issue here is phishing, even though on balance the introduction of IDN will reduce the phishing risk globally, it will still increase it in America where even misinformed opinion carries disproportionate weight.

Russia is simply joining a process that is common to all major Euro-Asian countries. This is not a hidden agenda, just an attempt to ensure Local Web Content is accessible to those that want to access it. Those who don't see the need for IDN and think it will make part of the Web inaccessible to them are not only wrong, but probably would go anywhere near it anyway. If you never put Cyrillics into you Search terms you don't end up with Cyrillic results. If you don't type them in you are not going to be direct navigating, and if you don't understand how to translate the content, you are not going to be able to understand it. The Russians in common with half the World just want that bit of the Internet that is relevant to them to function in a normal manner.

Getting back to the RF issue it is the Americans not the Russians that are primarily exercised over the mixing of Cyrillic and Latin Scripts. The Russian in conjunction with ICANN have sought to avoid problems by only allowing Latin Keywords with the Latin RU extension and to introduce the Cyrillic equivalent of RF uniquely for Cyrillic Keywords. The Russian version of RF contains a Phi like character that cannot be confused with any Latin Script, so it is immediately recognisable as a Cyrillic extension. As it will only be associated with Russian keywords then everyone is protected from phishing, which is more than can be said for the Cyrillics in dot com. So they are actually way ahead of Verisign in taking the moral high ground.

So can we forget all this nonsense and try to only discuss factual matters rather some fictional works by under-worked journalists.

Who asked you wise assk: Just kidding, thanks for posting and clearing that up. It's good to have informed people on this forum sharing what they know.

 

[wasistdas]

IDN is dead end of internet. Ukraine is also a cyrillic country but .ua administrator recently stopped accepting IDN applications. Right decision. We dont need internet to be divided into shards of Babel.

 

[Rubber Duck]

IDN is dead end of internet. Ukraine is also a cyrillic country but .ua administrator recently stopped accepting IDN applications. Right decision. We dont need internet to be divided into shards of Babel.

This is uninformed nonsense. The Internet already is divided into many linguistic zones. The Babel factor is already out there. What is missing is a rational addressing system. Names need to satisfying the following requirement:

Recognition
Recall
Reproducibility

Countries that wish to develop economically cannot afford to have a dysfunctional internet.

Ukraine ain't exactly the epicentre of the Universe at the moment. Denying it a full functional internet ain't exactly going to help matters either.

Yes, Dot UA probably has stopped accepting IDN registration for exactly the same reason that dot RU does not support them. That merely means things are about to move forward.

 

[DNWizardX9]

IDN is dead end of internet. Ukraine is also a cyrillic country but .ua administrator recently stopped accepting IDN applications. Right decision. We dont need internet to be divided into shards of Babel.

You are a joke... The internet is already broken into many languages... Why can' the same be done for urls? Hopefully they will all be dnamed too.

 

[PRED]

yes, i read this article other day.
seems the same subject
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/7563