Russia accused of creating "Cyrillic ghetto"

[blastfromthepast]

Russia accused of creating "Cyrillic ghetto"

The American edition of The New York Times in an article accuses Russia of trying to create a "Cyrillic ghetto" - thus the newspaper responded to the idea of Russian authorities to create a Cyrillic internet zone. RF. From the perspective of the author's article, innovation is necessary only for the special services who want to limit access of foreigners.

The newspaper quoted the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, who noted that one of the reasons that a Cyrillic domain is necessary, due in part because of Russians' lack of knowledge of foreign languages - and this complicates their access to global network.

The newspaper, in particular, cites some residents of Tula, who believes that following the introduction of a new domain in Russia would increase censorship.

It is known that some large Internet projects have already abandoned the idea to use the Cyrillic domains - in particular, Livejournal.

http://www.rb.ru//news/society/2009/12/22/160001.html

[sarcle]

They quoted one average Russian Internet user's opinion in the NYT. I'd like to know how that constitutes as "Russians as a whole" or even a majority. Still trying to figure that one out.

I honestly thought the NYT was a better news outlet than the average gossip rag. But let them continue to put the "Red Scare" into everyone. My Russian domain traffic will keep going up, up, up!

[blastfromthepast]

They used some of the article comments as a source.

Here is the ghetto quote, coming from NJ.


jim, new jersey:
It is interesting to note that some in Russia now fear that a Cyrillic domain will result in a Russian "cyber-ghetto." This fear harks back to the cultural disputes between "Slavophiles" and "Westernizers" in the 19th century. At that time, the linguga franca of many Russian aristocrats was French, not Russian, which they considered a peasant language.

http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/world/europe/22cyrillic.html?sort=oldest&offset=2

[sarcle]

They used some of the article comments as a source.

The comments section for that article is the best part. Talk about a bunch of morons. :eek:

[blastfromthepast]

And the now famous IDN keyboard argument shows up too:

Raymond, Sacramento, CA: I think this issue points out the need for a true "universal" keyboard that can type the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic characters, Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, and character generation process used to "build" Chinese and Japanese characters all on the same keyboard. Given today's computer technology, I'm surprised they haven't done this at least five years ago.

[blastfromthepast]

Cullen, North Carolina: The Kremlin is irritated? The Kremlin has been irritated since 1917. Can't these clowns just join the rest of the world and play nice.

:)

[K.I]

And these are the Democrats.

[Rubber Duck]

With few notable exceptions:

American = Xenophobic Wanker!

[blastfromthepast]

Gone fishing in Rochester:

AR, Rochester, NY: Unfortunately, Cyrillic domains pose a security threat not just to Russian businesses. Since several Cyrillic characters (e.g. "A") are rendered exactly like Latin ones, it becomes very easy to create a fraudulent copy of a valid site and register it under a legitimate mixed Cyrillic/Latin address so that a URL link to it would look entirely authentic. Not many people will notice that a reference they received in an email message (e.g. http://www.chase.com") in fact contains a Cyrillic "a" in the middle unless their browser renders them strikingly different.

[blastfromthepast]

An idea:

Chickenz, California: I got a better idea. Why don't countries come together and create a new alphabet, based off the currently existing alphabets. This new alphabet could represent all possible human vocal sounds, and not all languages have to use all the letters in the new alphabet (ie, English would use the 26 letters of the new alphabet that derive from the Latin alphabet). With enough letters, the problem of the finiteness of number of sensible combination of characters for Internet domain names would be temporarily solved. And human language would be a step closer to being standardized.

[Rubber Duck]

An idea:

Very remeniscent of Esperanto. Whatever happened to that?

Why not just permit people do what comes naturally?

[sarcle]

Why not just permit people do what comes naturally?

Have sex in a public place?

[Avtal]

Russia accused of creating "Cyrillic ghetto"

The American edition of The New York Times in an article accuses Russia of trying to create a "Cyrillic ghetto" - thus the newspaper responded to the idea of Russian authorities to create a Cyrillic internet zone. RF. From the perspective of the author's article, innovation is necessary only for the special services who want to limit access of foreigners.

http://www.rb.ru//news/society/2009/12/22/160001.html

I thought the NY Times article was pretty good, all things considered. Remember that it was written by a generalist, and intended for general readers. The readers of this forum won't find anything new, of course. We already know about .рф, and we already know (from reading the Russian domain forums) that some Russians (the ones who own ascii .ru domains) feel that using the Cyrillic alphabet will cut them off from the world.

The reporter even managed to cover the recent generic-domain trademark scandal. He missed the .com / .ком issue, but so has almost every other journalist.

Contrast this to the "journalism" in rb.ru. The whole article is misleading, starting with the headline. It even puts in quotes ("Cyrillic ghetto") a term that actually never appeared in the NYT article, which makes me wonder what rb.ru thinks quotation marks mean.

My favorite quote, though, is from one of the Russians who commented on the NY Times' Russian-language blog (translation from Russian by the NY Times):


“Cyrillicization equals isolation. Who is more interested in that? Russia or the rest of the world?” Demographer


If I understand correctly, the author is implying that the .рф domain may be a foreign scheme to keep Russia isolated. If you want ignorance or xenophobia, read the US comments. But if you want deep-rooted paranoia, this comment is hard to beat.

Avtal

[domainguru]

the thing is, all IDNs do is give people a choice of which language to use. Nobody is forcing you to start using a Russian IDN for a Russian website. This isn't a dictate.

Anyone that can't accept people have a right to choose which language to express themselves in is just a racist, I can't put any other word on it.

[dave_5]

This issue was even discussed in a financial newspaper in Israel. Definitely not great exposure for idn’s.

[Rubber Duck]

the thing is, all IDNs do is give people a choice of which language to use. Nobody is forcing you to start using a Russian IDN for a Russian website. This isn't a dictate.

Anyone that can't accept people have a right to choose which language to express themselves in is just a racist, I can't put any other word on it.

Yes, isn't it great, especially when Americans are forever rattling on about China and Russia limiting access and denying freedom of speech. Obama's America is now the Evil Empire!

[blastfromthepast]

Anyone that can't accept people have a right to choose which language to express themselves in is just a racist, I can't put any other word on it.

Unfortunately Russian Federation law forces all 27 official regional languages of Russia to use Cyrillic as the official writing system no matter what the language (including languages that were written in Arabic, Tibetan and Latin characters.)

This is a controversial issue for many ethnic groups that don't want to use Cyrillic.

The Russian Empire never had such an issue — and let everyone use whatever writing system they wanted — Arabic script, Tibetan, Chinese, etc.