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Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)
- blakesterz 8y agoMods, this is from 2014, maybe add that to the title?
- RandomBacon 8y agoThe 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?)
- coderholic 8y agoIt 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.
- tlrobinson 8y agoI 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.
- RandomBacon 8y agoThat'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.
- mikeash 8y agoAnime isn’t deeply embedded in society the way the internet is now. Imagine if you had to learn some Japanese just to access your bank account or buy plane tickets.
- RandomBacon 8y agoI have (Japanese, Spanish, and Korean). I didn't hate the host cultures because of it.
- mikeash 8y agoI don’t mean imagine if you had to do that in order to live in those countries. I mean, imagine if you had to do that in the US, to access your American bank down the street.
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- kev6168 8y agoI think you are correct that '0748' is not a very serious/forceful phrase. Probably only a lighthearted slang used by young netizens in China.
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- SiVal 8y agoIt's the New Republic, an intellectual fashion magazine for the American Left. As it says at the bottom of the article, the author is one of their staff writers. Comments about American hegemony and how other countries can't be blamed for wanting American idiots to go die are the kinds of intellectual fashion statements that the New Republic expects its staff writers to make.
- xvector 8y agoI am leftist myself, but these people are insane. "Yeah, let's just go ahead and hand over control of internet standards gift-wrapped to some of the worst human rights abusers in history. What could possibly go wrong?!" If Russia and China were sane, reasonable states that cared for any semblance of human rights, yeah, sure, maybe it'd make sense to make this not American-centric. But as it stands, the author just comes off as naive.
- bmn__ 8y ago> If Russia and China were sane, reasonable states that cared for any semblance of human rights America holding internet standards hostage can't be the answer to that, arrogant selfishness comes across as the motivation. Telephony interoperability standards are managed just fine by an international committee; this can serve as a role model how to govern control of internet standards. http://ITU.int/ITU-T http://ITU.int/ITU-T
- nerdbaggy 8y agoI 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
- mojo74 8y agoI now have the image of a man squatting over the pile of poo emoji. I accept I will never grow up.
- brndr 8y agoI guess this site is relevant here: https://xn--ls8h.la/ https://xn--ls8h.la/ (<pile of poop emoji>.la) But apparently most TLDs don't support emoji URLs yet.
- Technetium_Hat 8y agothe 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)
- 0x0 8y agoIt'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.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoOf 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 :(
- twiss 8y ago> 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 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).
- Cenk 8y agoOr https://www.1177.se https://www.1177.se for Sweden, the health care number/website. The NHS in the UK has https://111.nhs.uk https://111.nhs.uk as the URL for their new online emergency service.
- tapland 8y agoHere's some more info about 1177 who recently had a security breach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19190346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19190346 It is a great service.
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- stordoff 8y agoNitpick: 111 is the urgent but non-emergency service. The first page asks you to "Check it’s not an emergency" (signs of a heart attack/signs of a stroke/severe difficulty breathing/heavy bleeding/severe injuries/seizure), and to call 999 if it is.
- auscompgeek 8y agoIn Australia, http://131500.com.au http://131500.com.au is also a very similar example (in that it also borrows the PT directions phone number), although it redirects to Transport for NSW's newer domain name these days.
- croisillon 8y ago1588.lt in Lithuania ;)
- mc32 8y ago>Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888. It certainly added wealth to the phone number holder/assigner.
- blakesterz 8y agoI 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?
- mc32 8y agoOr 1800-flowers/glasses etc.
- Mirioron 8y agoHow do you input a number like that?
- occamschainsaw 8y agoUsing the old timey keyboard layout[1] (a relic of pre-touchscreen phones) So 1800-flowers would be 1800-3569377 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.161 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.161
- Mirioron 8y agoSo that's what the letters were for on phone keyboards.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoThe use for vanity numbers is a later development. Originally the three digit exchange "number" in North America was identified by a three letter code. On a phone with no dial you'd tell the operator the exchange codeword and the four digit number within the exchange if you didn't want to manually pulse the switchhook. For automatic switch dialed calls, the dial needed to also be marked for these letter codes so you didn't need to use a separate reference for the corresponding digit.
- fajr_rd 8y agoThis article has been discussed 5 years ago (at its release). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076
- leroman 8y agoThis is also an interesting way to go about dealing with the scarcity of domain names
- irrational 8y ago>though the U.S. recently agreed to hand it over to a “global multi-stakeholder community” in 2015 Hmm, it seems like the title should have a year after it.
- kev6168 8y agoAnother 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 memorize companies' urls, to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string. Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more important in China than elsewhere. Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.
- eiliant 8y agobing is ok, it’s no google though but much better than say baidu
- kev6168 8y agoyeah, 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.
- y4mi 8y agoCan't you use duckduckgo with the !g toggle for Google results?
- 000DC47F 8y agoYeah, I've found Bing to the best option when I'm in the mainland, only because all the local search are even more terrible at english. When I need to search in Chinese, baidu is the least terrible (but still really bad). Sogou isn't too far behind, but it's index is not as fresh, in my experience.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago> Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity. I'd rather them wait until they are no longer required to censor their results and track their users on behalf of the state security apparatus.
- ChrisArchitect 8y agoplease put the year [2014] after this title. Ancient as the Chinese culture it's about heh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694076
- ww520 8y ago420.com certainly works!
- wholien 8y agoI remember going to 4399 for games when I was an elementary student. Part of the reason why numbers are so pervasive, in the 51job.com sense, is that if you were to type out the pinyin for "i want a job" in Chinese... the url would be insanely long and unwieldy. 51job.com is easy to type and remember (also they have a billion ads everywhere). This means if you dont have numbers, you will try to use the initials for all the pinyins in your name. Jing Dong becomes jd.com 4008-517-517.com for McDonald's delivery is from their delivery phone number, which they had years before the URL. You would hear 4008 517 517 with a jingle on the radio all the time. The last time I heard it was probably 10 years ago but funny how the tune of these oft-heard ad jingles never fully leave your consciousness.