Iliya, thanks for this.

SWITCH will start a similar service soon (if they haven't already?)
for German Swiss.

Browser issue:  ITU blog
<http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/newslog/2004/03/02.html#a498> mentioned
that the Internet Software Consortium has a new IDN plug-in for
Internet Explorer.  Made available through ISC's open source software
IDN work.  No idea if this works with the new German service.
Perhaps DENIC would know.  The plug-in is described as an "alpha-2"
version, which I guess means it's buggy.

See <http://idn.isc.org/>

ITU and IDNs.  At the Internet governance workshop last week Netpia
spoke on IDNs.  If I understand correctly (not sure I do) Netpia does
not follow IDN standards so were perhaps a bit of an odd choice?

Thanks,

Adam



At 9:50 AM +0100 3/3/04, Iliya Nickelt wrote:
>There are probably many interesting things going on in Rome at the moment,
>but here is a quick sidenote:
>
>Denic has introduced the beloved German "Umlaute" äöü and many more letters
>to the .de namespace based on punycode. See
>http://www.denic.de/de/domains/idns/liste.html for a complete listing of
>the new letters -- with German commentaries, but at least the letters are
>international. They started accepting requests on March 1, at 10:00 on a
>randomized first come first served basis. Requests were processed via a
>signed emails (standard procedure). Even though there were several test
>runs, the email server went down after 70 seconds, and it took three hours
>to solve the technical problems. ".de" ist the biggest ccTLD with 7.2
>Million domains. So far, 550.000 IDN requests have been processed (see
>http://www.denic.de/de/domains/idns/start.html).
>
>It seems that it is not an easy thing to do, but it can be done. However,
>you will need a modern browser that follows international standards to open
>the IDN pages: Microsoft IE does, of course, not work, but Mozilla or Opera
>work fine. Also, you must figure out how to to access the letters via
>keyboard or operating system, or you use copy and paste.
>
>It is estimated, that about 70% of the new domains went to squatters. You
>can check that and also if copy and past works for you by going to eg.
>http://www.anwälte.de (German word for "lawyers").  The site says that
>"this offer is still under construction". However, the porno link below is
>already functional, I guess. BTW: The first domain registered was "öko.de",
>that's a German abbreviation for "ecological" (and that server is not up
>yet).
>
>         --iliya


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