Internationalized Domain Names ("umlaut" domains)

Tuesday |

Domain names need to be recognized by the system; however, not all characters are able to be recognized through the typically used alphanumeric numbers. In this case, internationalized domain names have made text usage in DNS systems more flexible by means of including additional characters which the DNS can also read and translated. The intention of these domain names is basically to contained non-ASCII characters such as texts that contain diacritics and characters from non-Latin texts such as Arabic and Chinese.

As previously mentioned, these domain names, within the framework of the DNS, functions by means of representing the IP addresses through more recognizable name through text. Since that the text used is not necessarily universal, the tendency is that the initial system is restrictive.

The deployment of the IDN initially started in October 2002 when the Interet Engineering Streering group approved the publication of RFCS 34490, 3491 and 3492 which are the protocols on Internationaliing Domain Names in Application (IDNA). Basically, through the IDNA, the support for non-ASCII IDNs that are found within the DNS would be established. This will then allow the creation of DNS that do not have ASCII characters. By March 2003, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and a host of IDN-implementing registries developed a set of universal "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names” in which its fist version was published in June 2003.

One of the important factors addressed by these guidelines are the potential risks of cybersquatting and duplication of registered domain names which can bring confusion to consumers. In addition to this, the guidelines also made it a point to respect local languages and character sets that may be used in the domain names. Hence, one initiative was the deployment of language-specific registration and adminisration rules which can be accessed by the public. The registries also need to recognize the agreements with ICANN in addition to the fulfillment of requirements according to the guidelines.

Although initives on IDN seem to have only started recently due to the growing global response to the Internet, the idea was actually already conceived as early as 1996 by M. Duerst, with its implementation taking place in 1998 through T.W Tan and his team.

How the IDN works is initially to maximize backward compatibility. However, systems that support IDNA are only the ones that have the ability to read such domains although they can access non-ASCII sites. When an application is IDNA enabled, the system is able to convert from ASCII to non-ASCII and vice-versa, with the ASCII format utilized for DNS lookup. However, users are also able to read non-ASCII forms.

Conversions between languages are made possibel through ToASCII and ToUnicode which are both algorithms. In IDNA, each domain name level is applied separately per code. Each label can be also processed separately especially if a specific domain label is a non-ASCII; the processing of the conversion can be handled by different software such as Nameprep and Punycode.

It is also evident there are the advantages and disadavantages of using IDNA. Apparently, the IDN has allowed a more universal and flexible means to utilize language that are non-Latin in nature when it comes to the creation of domain names. However, the disadvantage can be found in the potential risks that come with the utilization of IDN application. These risks include cybersquatting and spoofing since that the utilization of full Unicode names can lead to the cretion of spoof sites or sites that replicate other sites. The challenge in this is that even the domain name and the security certificate can be spoofed in this format. What made this possible is not necessarily due to the faulty system offered by Unicode but rather the similarities of texts despite some interface differences; this shows that characters that look alike can be read similarly although the minor differences such as small punctuations and umlauts can be overlooked when reading certain data.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
‘Internationalized Domain Name’. 2007. ICANN. [Online] Available at:
http://www.icann.org/topics/idn.html
‘Internationalized Domain Name’. 2008. Wikipedia. [Online] Available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name#Internationalizing_domain_names_in_applications

2 comments:

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