AP reports that Chinese police will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user’s browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content. The cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China ‘s top Internet portals, and by the end of the year will appear on all Web sites registered with Beijing servers. China stringently polices the Internet for material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening. But, despite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers.
Meanwhile, following up on action taken at its meeting earlier this month, ICANN is getting ready to take a major step toward Internationalization of the DNS by testing international domain name TLDs in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.