New French IDNs for Canada

Beyond ASCII: Canada's Domain Registry will soon adopt French Internationalized Domain Names.

Canada is one of the truly bilingual nations on earth with English and French languages being used almost in equal measure. The equality will now extend to the DNS. The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is preparing for the addition of diacritics that would allow French webmasters/Domain owners to be able to direct Internet users to their .ca domain names in proper French.

For example, the website for Quebec City would be accessible from both www.ville.quebec.qc.ca and www.ville.québec.qc.ca.

IDNs are already in common used in Europe and the Middle East. Until recently, only non-accented Latin-based characters that were recognized under the American Standard Code for Information Interchange(ASCII) have been allowed in domain names issued by CIRA and other global domain registries.


The roll out of Canadian IDNs comes after some policy deliberations by CIRA over the past year.
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Transport Canada website commemorating 100 years of flight now showing Turkish porn

I'm someone who likes reading in between the lines on "sensational" stories . While all news channels avoided(for a good reason) linking the URL of the website in question to avoid making this lucky and unethical guy richer, a quick Google search tells me that this is the domain in question http://www.canadiancentennialofflight.ca since the meta data still shows the  previous content that was hosted on the domain, I guess as recently as a few days ago.

This is someone who knew about the historical value of the domain and the content therein to Canadian users, especially those passionate about aviation, and it takes a real douchebag to turn such a domain into a tool for quick cash, with porn links.

It seems the domain is now parked with Namedrive.com and shows mainly aviation related contextual advertising links. This is a greedy guy who struck gold and to an extent, he's only half guilty. Someone at the Canadian Federal Transport department/agency simply did not do their homework well. How can such a valuable domain which hosted historical  content be left to expire? Companies should always go  for long term registration of domains for even up to 10 years so that they do not have to worry about an intern or careless employee letting a domain like this expire and fall into the hands of the vultures looking for ways to cash in out of internet users' miseries.

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