While NeuStar already has many Latin-based IDN languages in its portfolio, one may wonder why we would bother making the Venn diagram so complicated. Just define a Latin script-based table and be done with it! Well, since we tend to take a more conservative approach with IDN, it is safer to have each language table contain only the characters used by that language proper and nothing else¹. After all, we’re here to provide value and not to make a quick buck (at least that’s how I see it.)

¹ Language is constantly evolving. Often, it is not easy trying to determine if a character used in borrowed words is well-assimilated in the culture to be considered part of the language. There are no clear rules, do we follow the guidelines from the trademark offices’ of the countries in which the language is used? Or do we follow the ccTLD registry (if we do, does it make sense for a gTLD?) Or language institutions? Thankfully, there are many great resources to draw from.

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You may be wondering if there is any connection between our Korean launch and the localization of EchIDNA. Aside from yours truly being involved in both projects, it is purely coincidental. We have been preparing for the Korean launch for a few months, and in doing so have consulted with NIDA (National Internet Development Agency in Korea) and have adopted their language table (with 2,350 KS X 1001 Hangeul characters). The table is available here: http://www.neulevel.biz/idn/KR_Table.pdf and will be posted to the IANA Repository of TLD IDN Practices soon.

If you have a .BIZ Korean IDN and would like some free links, submit it to IDNSearch.net!

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So we just opened the flood gates for Chinese and Japanese IDNs for .BIZ. This has been my brainchild for the past half a year or so, and represents a significant step forward for our registry in terms of internationalization. As one might expect, no support for Chinese IDN is complete without bundling as specified in the JET guidelines and RFC4713.

The tricky part to supporting both Chinese and Japanese IDN within a single registry is that the two languages share a large repertoire of Han characters. While the concept of Simplified and Traditional Chinese is well-understood within the Chinese communities, Japanese generally do not use variants the same way. Two characters that may be considered variants by a Chinese user may be seen as distinct characters with different semantics from the Japanese’ point of view. To implement a registry that respects the culture and expectations of both language communities while offering a high degree of protection against homographic attack is a juggling act in itself. I dare say that NeuStar is the first unsponsored gTLD registry that Got It Right ™.

So, how does it work? Well, suppose you registered 電車.biz with the Chinese language tag, you will automatically get the simplified version of the domain, 电车.biz, placed into the DNS for you. No one can register any combination of variants of the domain, e.g. 电車.biz and 電车.biz.

What if you registered a mixed version 電车.biz, also with the Chinese tag? Well, you get that PLUS 電車.biz (traditional) and 电车.biz (simplified) giving you 3 domains in total! That is because we respect the registrant’s request, even if it looks like a mixed- traditional and simplified string. Whatever you asked for, if it doesn’t clash with another registered domain, will always be given to you.

If, however, the Japanese tag was used to register 電車.biz, that would be the only domain that you’d get. Once that is registered, other variations of the domain name in Chinese will not be allowed to register. This is a slight deviation from JPRS‘s appraoch, which treats them as distinct domains. We feel that this conservative approach offers better protection for the registrant.

So that was the skinny on our Chinese and Japanese Internationalized Domain Names offering. Is it me or do Han characters look very good with .BIZ? =)

Usual disclaimer about this being my personal opinion applies.

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Here’s a little success report about using JanRain‘s mpopenid module to protect certain restricted resources served by Apache. It works somewhat like your basic HTTP authentication, but instead of returning a 401 Authorization Required response causing the browser to prompt for username and password, it redirects you to the OpenID login page. Pretty neat eh?

--- mpopenid-1.2.0-pre5/mpopenid.py     Tue Nov 21 20:24:53 2006
+++ mpopenid-1.2.0-pre5-wil/mpopenid.py Sun Jan 14 16:12:16 2007
@@ -157,10 +157,17 @@
         url = s.strip()
         if not url:
             continue
-        parsed = urlparse.urlparse(url)
-        if not (parsed[0] and parsed[1]):
-            url = 'http://' + url
-        urls.append(urinorm(url))
+
+        if (url[0:6].lower() == "xri://"):
+            url = url[6:] # strip "xri://"
+
+        if (url[0] not in "=@!$+"): # doesn't look like an XRI
+            parsed = urlparse.urlparse(url)
+            if not (parsed[0] and parsed[1]):
+                url = 'http://' + url
+            url = urinorm(url)
+
+        urls.append(url)

     return urls