An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian reports that the Kremlin may start an alternate top-level domain:.rf. According to the story,.ru in Cyrillic translates to.py, the top-level domain for Paraguay, which the Russian government feels leads to confusion. This is similar to a move by China, which has their own.net and.com top-level domains in their native character set along with.cn,.com, and.net in ASCII. Will.ru go the way of.su? Will this new top-level domain make it more difficult for phishers and spammers and scammers? Will this give the Russian government more control over the registration process and ultimately lead to censorship?" Link to Original Source
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Moving toward Unicode in URLs has pluses and minuses, both technical and cultural.
Technically, use of the Latin character set ASCII has provided simplification, and enabled people who may not know how to type, in this case, Cyrillic characters to get to URLs in Russia. The issue becomes even more complicated with character sets that contain more characters, such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (not to mention other alphabets with smaller footprints like Georgian, for instance). I can foresee scenarios i
Two-edged sword (Score:1)
Moving toward Unicode in URLs has pluses and minuses, both technical and cultural. Technically, use of the Latin character set ASCII has provided simplification, and enabled people who may not know how to type, in this case, Cyrillic characters to get to URLs in Russia. The issue becomes even more complicated with character sets that contain more characters, such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (not to mention other alphabets with smaller footprints like Georgian, for instance). I can foresee scenarios i