Archive for January 2010

Tina Dam: First 4 IDN ccTLDs through String Evaulation

The first four IDN ccTLD requests has just been announced as having completed the String Evaulation portion of the Fast Track Process. These are associated with: Egypt, the Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. See the full announcement here: http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-21jan10-en.htm So what does that mean? It means that these may now initiate the […]

IDN ccTLD Fast Track String Evaluation Completion

The IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process was launched on 16 November 2009. As of that date eligible countries and territories were able to request their respective IDN ccTLD(s) through the process. The process entails three steps: (i) Preparations in country/territory (ii) String Evaluation, and (iii) String Delegation. All steps are described in detail in the […]

First IDN ccTLDs Requests Successfully Pass String Evaluation

ICANN is pleased to announce the successful completion of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track String Evaluation for four (4) proposed IDN ccTLDs. The requests are associated with: Egypt, the Russian Federation, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Details of the successful evaluations are provided here. The IDN (Internationalised Domain Name) ccTLD Fast Track Process was […]

Hong Kong to launch .香港 full Chinese IDN in 2010

HKIRC announced that ‘.香港’ registrations will be offered free to all ‘.hk’ customers in the second half of 2010 with the aim of helping them develop their sites with full Chinese domain names.  This is to increase the popularity of Chinese domain names and to maximize benefits to the Internet community, and ultimately to sustain […]

Investors in Foreign Domain Names Quickly Multiply

Seeking Next Treasured .com Name Overseas NEW YORK, New York, January 11, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — Domain name investors, having exhausted most of the possibilities in the U.S. are now heading overseas to stake their claims to as-yet unused domain categories. And language is not a barrier. With the Internet a truly global tool, not only […]

Bulgaria ‘Battles’ Brazil for Cyrillic BG Domain Name

The characters “bg” and “bgr” are the most popular for Bulgaria’s national internet address in Cyrillic, according to the results of an online poll conducted by the Ministry of Transport, Information Technologies and Communications (MTITC) in December 2009. Parvan Rusinov, Deputy Minister, has announced the poll results on Monday. He said that the answers would […]

DNS-Luxembourg announces the opening of IDNs

As of February 1st 2010 registration of domain names with special characters in them, like for example a letter with an accent, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) .lu will be possible. Acceptable special caracters are those communly used in Luxembourgish, German and French languages. There will be a two months sunrise period between February 1st […]

SGNIC Launched Chinese IDNs in Singapore

Businesses and consumers can look forward to using Chinese characters in their website address to better reach their customers or friends who prefer Chinese web addresses. The Singapore Network Information Centre (SGNIC), the national registry for domain names. This opens up new options for domain names, as anyone can soon register for Web addresses such […]

IDN Scaremongering: Mashable and Times Online Screw Up

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) might be a slightly “hot” topic at the moment following on from ICANN’s launch of the IDN country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) program recently.

However, IDNs are NOT a new topic.

Far from it.

They’ve been around for quite some time.

Unfortunately neither The Times Online or Mashable seem to have done any homework. Considering the amount of content available on IDNs that has been researched and actually proven—you know, factual information, it’s pretty amazing that not one, but two respected online publications manage to get something so completely wrong.

Andrew from Domain Name Wire explains very succinctly why both Mashable and The Times are wrong.

As anyone who actually bothers doing a bit of research into IDNs could tell you, the IDN projects have been discussed at length and from every imaginable angle.

Do the authors of those two articles honestly think that the DNS community hadn’t thought about potential phishing problems?

Do they think we’re all idiots?

It’s not as if we ever have to deal with phishing or any other DNS related attacks is it?

We’re just misinformed observers, like them, aren’t we?

And here I was thinking that The Times was a quality publication…

Oh well, back to the drawing board I guess.

Written by Michele Neylon, MD of Blacknight Solutions

Tunisia: upcoming launch of internet domain names in Arabic

TUNISIAONLINENEWS- With a view to making the internet more accessible around the world, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened the domain application process to non-Latin characters for website addresses with its inclusion of internationalised domain names. Following Egypt’s application for a domain name in Arabic on Monday, Tunisia has also […]