Egypt Launches First Arabic Domain Name
PrintEgypt is making a bit of history by being the first country to launch an Internet domain name using the Aribc script. The announcement comes not long after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to allow non-Latin top level domains.
Casting a cloud over Egypt's run towards the record books, Reporters Sans Frontieres, which campaigns for freedom of press, had some harsh words for the Egyptian government as it relates to Internet censorship.
"Egypt is one of the enemies of the Internet and if Internet governance requires a degree of regulation, it should be of a liberal nature and not the kind that the Egyptian government would like to impose," Reporters wrote.
The group went on to say that Egyptian police recently arrested and beat two young bloggers, Mohamed Adel, 20, and Amr Osama, 19, along with their lawyer, Amr Ezz, for "spreading false news and rumors liable to disturb the peace."
About 15 million of Eypt's 80 million residents are Internet users. And according to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, even though there are over 300 million Arabic speakers worldwide, fewer than one percent of online content is in Arabic.
More like this
damicatz
November 17, 2009 at 10:07am
Do you know the difference between these two domains?
http://www.paypal.com
http://www.pаypal.com
They look exactly the same. But the bottom one is using a Cyrillic A.This nonsense political correctness has gone too far. This just opens the door right up for a whole new breed of phishing attacks. As an IT administrator, I plan to block all non-Latin domain names from my network. And I know of many others who plan to do the same thing.
JoeBlow
November 16, 2009 at 3:05pm
Well, this item goes off on some weird tangent. Quite ironically, Reporters without Borders, which on the face of it sounds straightfoward, in reality is a pretty disreputable organization with various axes to grind quite apart from a mission to defend "internet freedom," i.e., not a reliable source of information. I would any they say with a big grain of salt. So, from this we can conclude that Egypt is not the U.S. and the use the "Arbic" script. Check. Any other news flashes?
Techrocket9
November 16, 2009 at 11:50am
What is the domain? I want to copy-paste it and see for my self.
_____________________________________________________
An army of pacifists can be defeated by one man with the will to fight.
mimohos
November 16, 2009 at 10:07am
finaly we did something other than building the pyramids :D, joking
and well, the internet isn't censored at all in Egypt, the proof i can still watch ... :D, the isp(s) and gouverment though they lost a law suite but it was never executed because Egypt isn't iran !
and duhh a public strike for even hospitals is disturbing the peace !!!!!!
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