The move could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic.

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN - the non-profit group that oversees domain names - is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic - in which Russian is written.

"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.

The Internet's roots are traced to experiments at a U.S. university in 1969 but it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the general public.

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.

Enabling the change, Thrush said, is the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom - a former chief of US cybersecurity - said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread," he said.

Beckstrom, in earlier remarks to conference participants, recalled that many people had said just three to five years ago that using non-Latin scripts for domain names would be impossible to achieve.

"But you the community and the policy groups and staff and board have worked through them, which is absolutely incredible," he said.

ICANN is headquartered in the United States in Marina del Rey, California.

Source: Gulfnews

Non-profit corporation Creative Commons (CC) is making inroads in the Middle East by launching their first Arabic copyright licences in Jordan next month.

In the online content space, Creative Commons helps users retain copyright of their creative work, stating exceptions to allow for a ‘some rights reserved' copyright. Through its free licences, it instructs others on whether content marked can be either shared, remixed, used commercially, or combined as necessary.

In an interview with Creative Commons CEO Joichi Ito at the recent TEDxDubai event, he revealed that the first Arabic licences will be launched in Jordan on November 15th - a significant milestone for the internet and online content in the Middle East.

A public review for the Jordanian licences took about a year with "dozens of people" such as lawyers and active members of the CC community offering their input. There was also a lot of debate on what to call ‘Creative Commons' in Arabic and whether they should have it translated in the first place. Eventually, a decision was enforced on going forward with an Arabic equivalent.
Egypt is expected to be the next country with a CC licencing project and then possibly the United Arab Emirates if the corporation manages to get hold of the right partners.

"Each country has different laws and so we have to get a local lawyer who takes our licence and translates it into the local law. There's a very rigorous process where we then we make it open for public comment, we get lots of people to comment, we translate it back into English, and we have this global discussion about whether this UAE licence reflects, under UAE law, the spirit of the original agreement. It's very technical and takes a lot of work," Ito explained.

While most look upon Creative Commons as a movement, Ito is keen to get it recognised as part of the internet's infrastructure and is pushing copyrights in all fields, including science.

"The two new things are science and education, which I think in the Middle East are key. I think the content side is important but unlike the US, I don't think you have as big a problem here yet because you don't have Hollywood...it will happen, but with science and technology it's something you really do want to plug in to the rest of the world and having an open standard is important. I see universities (here) connecting networks together but I don't think they've really thought about the legal issues," added Ito.

The concept however is still new in the Middle East, except for some exposure through the Wikipedia community and the broadcaster Al Jazeera - a key supporter of the Creative Commons in the Arab world. Ito admits that there's a fundamental lack of understanding for CC here but believes that that will change given time.

"I think a lot of it is the service providers such as Maktoob and Google, and how much they expose it. Google has it but they don't expose it that much yet. It's a chicken and egg because they don't want to expose it till the users know what it is and the users won't know about it until they are exposed to it," Ito commented.

"In the US, bloggers played a big part in getting the message of Creative Commons out and Flickr was huge; but it's banned here. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens (here). One of the key things will be the relationship between different constituents because, at the end of the day, you want it to be completely apolitical," he concluded.

Source –ITP.net

When looking to boost excitement about a technology exhibition, there are fewer big opportunities than the release of the latest Windows operating system.

That wasn't lost on the Gitex team at the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) or on its CEO, Helal Saeed Al Marri, who said the company actually talked to Microsoft about rescheduling the week-long technology show to coincide with the global launch of Windows 7 on October 22. When that didn't work, the team at Microsoft's office in Dubai were to score a major coup: convincing the head office in Redmond, Washington to make Gitex the only place in the world where consumers will be able to buy the successor to Vista before its official release date. Microsoft will also be sending corporate vice-president Steven Guggenheim to Gitex to preview the new system.

"For us, it's amazing to have a preview [of Windows 7]," he said. "A lot of people are excited about it."

But the Windows 7 preview is just one example of the importance people and companies are putting on Gitex this year. Even people who haven't had much contact with the DWTC previously have been coming to talk to Al Marri about this year's show.

"Hotel managers have come to see me this year, a lot," he said. "They've never come to see me in the last four years I've been chasing them to get rooms. They've come to see what I'm doing, and what they can do to help and everything."

A lot of the new managers are people who were brought in to manage during the global turndown, Al Marri said. The managers aren't putting pressure on the show to help fill hotels, but they're are offering support.

Source : Gulfnews