Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or 1800-flowers/glasses etc.
How do you input a number like that?
Using the old timey keyboard layout[1] (a relic of pre-touchscreen phones)
So 1800-flowers would be 1800-3569377
Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or 1800-flowers/glasses etc.
How do you input a number like that?
A lot of phones come with the English alphabet on the 12 keys, three letters to a key. Similar to older phones that had a physical dialpad. You could then dial the "word" you want by looking at the number on which the correct letter is. That's one way these systems could work.
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I now have the image of a man squatting over the pile of poo emoji. I accept I will never grow up.
I guess this site is relevant here: https://xn--ls8h.la/ ( .la) But apparently most TLDs don't support emoji URLs yet.
the biggest barrier, in my opinion, is the ugly punycode links. most browsers still do not render them properly, and if they did, it would have false positives. (i.e. there is no way to tell if a string is intended to be punycode or not)
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#24> The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively. https://9292.nl is an example of this outside China, taking its name from 0900-9292 (a phone number you can call to get public transport travel directions, now largely replaced by the website/app).
In Italy telephone companies customer service had (and still have) short numbers beginning with 1, so 187.it and www.190.it redirect respectively to Telecom Italia and Vodafone. Strangely enough, 190.it doesn't work...
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#25>Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888. It certainly added wealth to the phone number holder/assigner.
I always wonder how much lawyers in the US pay for their phone numbers... 444-4444 or 888-8888 and so on. I would guess it's even more?
I see bus ads for an accident lawyer in California with the phone number (800) 800-0000. I wonder if that phone number is more valuable than 888-8888.
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess this site is relevant here: https://xn--ls8h.la/ ( .la) But apparently most TLDs don't support emoji URLs yet.
the biggest barrier, in my opinion, is the ugly punycode links. most browsers still do not render them properly, and if they did, it would have false positives. (i.e. there is no way to tell if a string is intended to be punycode or not)
It's not as much a matter of "still not rendering them properly", but more that they are doing it on purpose to avoid homoglyph attacks. Earlier browsers more OFTEN used to render them "properly", I believe.
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#27Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day. So not being able to rely on search, people have to m…
bing is ok, it’s no google though but much better than say baidu
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#28> The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively. https://9292.nl is an example of this outside China, taking its name from 0900-9292 (a phone number you can call to get public transport travel directions, now largely replaced by the website/app).
Or https://www.1177.se for Sweden, the health care number/website. The NHS in the UK has https://111.nhs.uk as the URL for their new online emergency service.
Here's some more info about 1177 who recently had a security breach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19190346
It is a great service.
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#29The last sentence is odd: > You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American 250s to 0748. 250 = idiot 0748 = go die Which translates: > You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American idiots to go die. I'm not sure why the author felt the need to include that. (Edit: Am I wrong for questioning the article?)
It doesn't seem odd given the context of the full paragraph, which starts:
> Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a fundamentally American system.
It describes how URLs are frustrating and difficult to use for non-English speakers. Given that, it makes a joke about that frustration using the URL-hacks that are often used in China, which is what the whole prior article covers.
Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or 1800-flowers/glasses etc.
How do you input a number like that?
On many (American) phone keypads, 1 is blank, 2 is A, or B, or C, 3 is DEF, 4 is GHI, 5 is JKL, 6 is MNO, 7 is PQRS, 8 is TUV, and 9 is WXYZ.
So for FLOWERS you'd see that the F is on 3, L is on 5, O is on 6, etc. to get 356-9377. Note that both R and S are on 7, they map to the same number, so different words are likely to all map to the same number, like "Roses" and "Ropes".
Companies sometimes use longer or shorter numbers: you might see a number written with left-padded numbers, like "1-800-1FLOWER", for which you'd dial 1-800-135-6937. You might also see longer words, like 1-800-ARRANGEMENTS..you could type in 1-800-277-2643 63687, but the extra letters would just go into the recipient's PBX (like dialing an extension) and get discarded.