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[registrars] Multilingual names - of interest
See:
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000927/ny_worldna.html
Wednesday September 27, 11:29 am Eastern Time
Press Release
WorldNames, Inc. Ships Ready-to-Run Multilingual Domain Name
Registration
System for NSI Registrars
World-Class, Field Tested Multilingual DNS Technology Enables Registrars
for
.COM, .NET and .ORG to Start Accepting Registrations of Chinese,
Japanese
and Korean Domain Names in Early October
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 27, 2000-- WorldNames, Inc., a leading
provider of Domain Name infrastructure services and multilingual
technologies, today announced that its MultiLingual Domain Name System
(MLDNS(TM)) is now available for use by the NSI Registrar community.
This
world-class, field tested technology will enable ICANN-accredited
registrars
to start registering .COM, .NET and .ORG domain names using local
language
character sets, beginning with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean by next
week.
VeriSign Global Registry Services (formerly known as NSI Registry), a
VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN - news) company, has announced that next week it
will
launch a testbed for accredited NSI registrars to begin accepting
registrations of .COM, .NET and .ORG domain names using the Chinese,
Japanese and Korean character sets. The patent-pending WorldNames MLDNS
(TM)
system, or technologies similar to it, will be required for any NSI
Registrar to be able to participate in that testbed (see
http://www.nsiregistry.com/multilingual/announce/techinfo.html).
Presently, anyone who registers a domain name in .COM, .NET and .ORG can
only use English language characters when registering their domain
names.
With nearly 50% of today's 336 million Internet users coming from
non-English speaking countries, using only English (ASCII) characters is
no
longer acceptable. The inability to use local characters in domain names
limits branding efforts for local businesses in China, for example, and
creates frustration for users trying to locate non-English named
companies
on the web.
WorldNames also announced the release of a semi-general public license
(GPL)
source code license for MLBIND(TM), its multilingual version of BIND,
the
defacto-standard DNS software currently used by 75% of all Internet
sites.
The open source code license is available to all ICANN Certified
Registrars
for .COM, .NET and .ORG, regardless of whether they use the complete
WorldNames MLDNS(TM) system.
Said J. William Semich, WorldNames founder and president, ``We decided
to
make sure this important technology becomes available quickly to the
domain
name registrar and registry community, so we are granting a limited open
source code license for MLBIND to all the key providers of domain name
services on the Internet.'' The no-cost source code license is available
to
all ICANN-approved domain name technology providers, including the
Internet's Root Server managers; the managers of any top level domain
(current or future approved gTLD and ccTLD managers), as well as the
Certified Registrars. License terms are available at
http://www.worldnames.net/MLDNS.
According to Dr. Paul V. Mockapetris, who serves as technical advisor to
WorldNames, Inc., ``We are glad to be providing multilingual technology
to
the .COM, .NET and .ORG world. It's high time that we all got serious
about
internationalization. Maybe a bit of running code will help push along
the
acceptance of the standards.'' Dr. Mockapetris is former chairman of the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the inventor of the
Internet's
Domain Name System.
WorldNames' MLDNS(TM) is Unicode-based and supports all the established
multilingual encoding standards, including ISO-10646 (UTF-8), which has
been
adopted by Microsoft (in its Windows ME and Windows 2000 operating
systems
and Internet Explorer browsers), Netscape (in Netscape 6) and the
Unicode
Consortium, as well as emerging ASCII-based universal encoding draft
standards such as RACE (Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding - see
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-race-01.txt), and any
of
the requirements set by Verisign Global Registry Services for
multilingual
domain name registrations.
MLDNS(TM) includes four software components, all of which are necessary
to
give domain name users access to a fully functioning multilingual domain
name on the Internet:
1. ML Conversion Server(TM), a technology needed by domain name
registrars to verify non-English domain names prior to
accepting them for registration, and required to properly
encode and transform any local language encoding (Japanese
Shift_JIS or EUC, Chinese BIG5 or Traditional, Korean, Arabic
CP, ISO-8859-X, and scores of other local encoding standards)
into the standardized UNICODE character set for further
transformation in the UTF-8 and RACE character encoding
systems.
2. ML Whois Server(TM), which accepts queries from Internet
users in any local language encoding and responds with the
correct information about a registered ML Domain name just as
current Whois servers respond when queried about English
language domain names.
3. ML Webrouter(TM), a lightweight, robust HTTP server which can
accept HTTP requests using any local language encoding,
transform the queries into UNICODE/UTF-8 or RACE and redirect
the http requests to any ASCII-based web site, such as a
Geocities or Homestead site, while still preserving the
appropriate local language encoding in the URL.
4. ML BIND(TM), a fully multilingual enabled version of BIND
8.2.2 Patch 5, the defacto-standard DNS software currently
used by 75% of all Internet sites. This world-class
technology, which supports domain names registered in all
living languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Arabic, Hebrew, Icelandic, and Cyrillic has been field tested
for the past 9 months at http://www.worldnames.net, with
thousands of multilingual names already registered and
working on the Internet.
WorldNames, Inc.'s MultiLingual DNS system has been under development
for
over a year, and is currently being used to accept complete multilingual
domain name registrations and to provide DNS services for the .NU and
.AS
top level domains, with support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic,
Greek, Cyrillic and all other non-English language character sets
supported
by the UNICODE standard. WorldNames is participating in the Internet
Engineering Task Force's (IETF) IDN working group responsible for
developing
standards for multilingual technology, and is a founding member of the
Multilingual Internet Name Consortium (MINC). Based on UNICODE and
ISO-10646/UTF8, MLDNS(TM) has been designed to easily migrate to any
multilingual DNS standard adopted by the IETF.
About WorldNames
WorldNames, Inc., a US-based private corporation, provides Internet DNS
applications services to the Top Level Domain registry and registrar
business community. The company was launched to provide cost-efficient
DNS
technical support, infrastructure support and applications services to
gTLDs
and to ccTLDs which are migrating to a more commercial structure.
Strategic
partners and technical service providers for WorldNames, Inc. include
.NU
Domain, Ltd; NameEngine, Inc.; Genuity/BBN; Telia AB; AboveNet;
Telstra/Netlink; and GDNS, Inc.
For examples of WorldNames Multilingual Web Address Services on the
Internet
or to register your own Multilingual Web Address(TM)see:
http://www.worldnames.net
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
----
Contact:
WorldNames, Inc.
J. William Semich
+1 877-686-2637
bsemich@worldnames.net
or
MacSweeney PR
Laura MacSweeney
+1 781-395-6420
lauramacs@mail.nu
Bill Semich
President and Founder
WorldNames, Inc.
http://www.worldnames.net
bsemich@worldnames.net>
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