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Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

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Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#31

Post by tlrobinson »

coderholic wrote: post #29
RandomBacon wrote: post #14

The 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 use…

I get that the author wanted to express frustration and be clever, and he had limited examples of “number-based slang” to do so with, but I agree with the parent comment that calling Americans “idiots” and telling them to “go die” seems excessively hostile.

Though I also can’t imagine “go die” has the same force in Chinese that it would have in English if it’s a common slang.

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#32

Post by billyhoffman »

nerdbaggy wrote: post #2

I wonder if this will ever evolve in emoji in URLs. I watched a short video about a guy who is squatting on most of the emoji domains

This actually predates emoji (and was mentioned in the article). In the early 00's we got the ability to use unicode characters in a domain name. The example I always like was Unicode Snowman ;-)

http://xn--n3h.com/ (Funny enough HN is stripping the Unicode Snowman glyph, so using the puny code version)

Was a great way to break websites. JavaScript used for client-side validation usually allowed it, but backend code often didn't understand unicode for URLs, and would usually choke somewhere and (fingers crossed) give you a lovely J2EE or ASP.NET error page with some helpful stack traces and version numbers

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#33

Post by SiempreViernes »

0x0 wrote: post #26
Technetium_Hat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, this only helps against foreign letters, you still have people squatting or putting phishing on common typos of pure asci urls with basically the same result.

Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their native language :(

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#34

Post by kev6168 »

eiliant wrote: post #27
kev6168 wrote: post #18

Another 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

yeah, my default search engine is bing. But sometimes you have the feeling it probably has less stuff in its database than what baidu has crawled and collected. Out of habit I rarely use 360 or sogou so I don't know how they fair compared to baidu or bing.

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#35

Post by RandomBacon »

tlrobinson wrote: post #31
coderholic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

I get that the author wanted to express frustration and be clever, and he had limited examples of “number-based slang” to do so with, but I agree with the parent comment that calling Americans “idiots” and telling them to “go die” seems excessively hostile. Though I also can’t imagine “go die” has the same force in Chinese that it would have in English if it’s a common slang.

That's my thought too. Apparently HN does not agree which I think is sad. It's interesting information in the article, but being hostile just because the Internet was pioneered in the U.S. and thus a lot of U.S. customs are baked in seems excesive. I like anime, but I'm not hostile to the Japanese because the shows I like are spoken in Japanese with only English subtitles.

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#36

Post by kev6168 »

tlrobinson wrote: post #31
coderholic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

I get that the author wanted to express frustration and be clever, and he had limited examples of “number-based slang” to do so with, but I agree with the parent comment that calling Americans “idiots” and telling them to “go die” seems excessively hostile. Though I also can’t imagine “go die” has the same force in Chinese that it would have in English if it’s a common slang.

I think you are correct that '0748' is not a very serious/forceful phrase. Probably only a lighthearted slang used by young netizens in China.

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#38

Post by teknologist »

twiss wrote: post #3

> 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 the UK, 118118(.com) is a directory service provider that picked up a lot of popularity before mobile phones became the primary way to search for local businesses. They are still around though, and operate a website that is like a simplistic Yellow Pages / Yelp. They immediately came to mind because of their really catchy advertising back in the day.

Re: Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)

#40

Post by [deleted] »

tlrobinson wrote: post #31
coderholic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

I get that the author wanted to express frustration and be clever, and he had limited examples of “number-based slang” to do so with, but I agree with the parent comment that calling Americans “idiots” and telling them to “go die” seems excessively hostile. Though I also can’t imagine “go die” has the same force in Chinese that it would have in English if it’s a common slang.

[deleted]
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