Multilingual Web content has been around for years. Now Web domain names in non-Latin languages are finally arriving–including Arabic addresses launched in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month; Cyrillic, launched in Russia last Thursday; and soon Chinese–easing Web access for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

“This is the biggest change in the Internet in 40 years,” says Tina Dam, senior director of international domain names for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which is working on implementing 21 international applications for domain names in 11 languages. “You should have seen the Russian celebration of this, it was so emotional. Suddenly their own language can be used.”

…

Nevertheless, the impact will be enormous around the world, [Veni Markovsi, the Russian and eastern European representative to ICANN,] says. “Think what would have happened if the Internet was created in China, and we in the U.S. needed to write the Web address in Chinese. And suddenly the world Internet community says, ‘Well, now you can type your Web address in Latin characters.’ That is the same feeling is for people who don’t know Latin [letters]. Suddenly you will have people who might get online because they are not going to be afraid of the keyboard.”

To read more…

Discover

In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds got annoyed. He had bought a personal computer to use at home, but he couldn’t find an operating system for it that was as robust as Unix, the system he used on the computers at the University of Helsinki. So he wrote one. He posted it online, free for anyone to download. But he required that anyone who figured out a way to make it better would have share the improvement with everyone else who used the system. Torvalds would later tell Wired that his motives were not noble. “I didn’t want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work,” he said. “I wanted help.”

To Read More…

The latest issue of The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society includes:

• New Media Books: Can Innovation Pay? by Colleen P. Kirk.
• Corpus Linguistics Processing on Cavafy’s Poems by Katerina T. Frantzi.
• Effect of Mathematics Software Facilitated Teaching on Students Learning by Muhammad Tanveer Afzal and Muhammad Bashir Gondal.
• Frankenstein’s Monster: The Downsides of Technology by Peter B. Heller.
• Safety Culture Research, Lead Indicators, and the Development of Safety Effectiveness Indicators in the Construction Sector by H. C. Biggs, D. P. Dingsdag, P. J. Kirk and D. Cipolla.
• Knowledge-Based Organization of Project Work by Oleg Tilchin.