[HN Gopher] The Republic of Palau Becomes ITU's 194th Member State
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The Republic of Palau Becomes ITU's 194th Member State
Author : zinekeller
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-10-02 15:50 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.itu.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.itu.int)
| evanjrowley wrote:
| I don't know the full scope of what ITU does, but I do know they
| are responsible for the X.509 specification[0]. It's a
| cornerstone upon which Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is built.
| HTTPS, TLS, etc. would not be the same without ITU.
|
| https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-X.509
| woodson wrote:
| Their specifications include the technology used in telephony,
| such as encodings/codecs, link adaptation schemes, etc. They
| also publish reference implementations of many of the
| algorithms used.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| The deep lore is that most of the Internet's organizational
| structure was (deliberately) set up to be independent of the
| ITU, which was seen was captured by governments (including many
| authoritarian governments) and the telcos, which were at that
| time deeply opposed to the philosophy and practicalities of the
| Net. If you don't know much about the ITU it's because they
| lost that struggle.
|
| It's surprisingly hard to find links to this! You can get a
| flavor of it from this piece from 1996
| https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/?gad_source=1
| noobermin wrote:
| That article itself is a piece of history referencing
| netscape as a contemporary company.
|
| I guess most of us only really know about orgs like the IETF
| or W3C instead of this ITU, but a cursory look at the wiki
| doesn't really show a link between the two other than that
| they "cooperate."
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Fun fact: it is also the oldest UN agency.
| zahllos wrote:
| They had an idea that the internet would be based on a system
| of federated directories, which would be used to find X.400
| addresses for people and send them messages on the information
| superhighway.
|
| This never happened, but parts of X.500 are everywhere. X.509
| was one of the requirements for secure access to the directory
| which was recycled into certificates for the web by Netscape.
| LDAP is another offshoot, designed for organizations to have
| their own internal directory internally without needing all the
| other parts of X.500, and it shares some aspects of the data
| model with X.500 and so certificates. Active Directory builds
| on LDAP.
|
| Fun fact: Microsoft Exchange Server had X.400 messaging support
| up to I think 2016 edition and I have sent an X.400 message
| even. However the format is pretty cumbersome:
| C=CH;L=Zurich;O=Zahllos;OU=Zahllos Internet Commentary
| Division;G=Zahllos is not a nice way to present a contact
| address. If the C=CH,L=Zurich look a lot like LDAP attributes
| and/or fields in a certificate, they are.
|
| The ITU do many other things around telephony and
| communication, and the most obvious one is looking after
| country codes for phone numbers. If you decided to make a
| country tomorrow, the ITU would be where you'd go to get your
| country code delegation. E.164 is their standard for
| international numbers beginning with a +.
| balls187 wrote:
| Fun Fact: the malay word for "island" is "pulau."
|
| As in Pulau Penang.
|
| I always wondered if there was some Indonesian influence in
| places like Palau, Micronesia, etc.
| brudgers wrote:
| When making maps, describing features is simpler than naming
| things, e.g. Del Rio; Las Vegas; Sierra Nevada; etc.
|
| I suspect something similar at work. But I could be wrong.
| sddsdd wrote:
| Indonesian and all the Polynesian/Micronesian languages are in
| the Malayo-Polynesian language family and share a common
| ancestor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayo-
| Polynesian_languages
| tdeck wrote:
| Here's the Wiki etymology
|
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Palau#Etymology
|
| These are both austronesian languages and you can see they
| inherit from "proto-Malayo-Polynesian" so there is indeed a
| link, even if this specific word may have evolved from
| something different.
| noobermin wrote:
| So, going to dox myself since there are likely under 50k of us
| on earth, but I'm palauan. I told my malaysian colleagues this
| and they mentioned this very thing to me about the word pulau.
| Palau is anglicisation of the palauan world "belau" although
| the 'b' can be a soft 'p' or vice-versa in the language
| depending on the word.
|
| I haven't learned too deeply about what athropologists
| generally think of palau's original settlement and the
| carolines in general but likely my ancestors were part of the
| Austronesian migration as other commentors said, although most
| of the maps I see show it coming from the philipines instead of
| indonesia/malaysia, so it might be from the same original
| source albeit on different branches. We share some similar
| words (babii=pig and I find a striking similarity between
| "makan" and "mengang" which is palauan for "eating") but the
| language structure seems quite different to me than bahasa
| melayu/bahasa indonesia generally. Also, given the cross
| colonisation/migration of colonised people as labourers from
| before WWII, I'm not really sure which words are palauan or
| just imports from SEA generally in the modern era after
| european and japanese contact. For example, we eat rambutan
| which we call "rambotang" although I think the fruits were just
| imported by the colonisers.
|
| That said, I now live in singapore and the first time I saw
| images of Batak houses it was jarring because they look a hell
| lot like our traditional chief houses called "bai" [1], and I
| had never seen anything else like them in elsewhere in the
| world. Due to historical reasons since the end of WWII we don't
| have many dealing with indonesia today.
|
| [1] http://underwatercolours.com/travel-tales/the-palauan-bai
| metaphor wrote:
| > _...I had never seen anything else like them in elsewhere
| in the world._
|
| The indigenous people of the Mariana Islands built somewhat
| similar dwellings atop a foundation of large stone structures
| called latte[1]. The latte today is a distinct symbol of
| Chamorro[2] identity (e.g. prominently represented in the
| flag of the CNMI[3] and surrounded by a mwarmwar, a symbol of
| Refaluwasch[4] identity).
|
| P.S. Not Belauan, but sis-in-law is. Almost certainly just
| dox'd myself as well. I suspect the aggregate of us are truly
| ultra minorities in these tech backwaters.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latte_stone
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamorro_people
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_Northern_Marian
| a_I...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolinian_people
| kmm wrote:
| According to the etymology section on the Palau Wikipedia
| article, there is no relation. Palauans calling themselves
| Belau makes the similarity less remarkable as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palau#Etymology
| Gys wrote:
| Does not mention its LTD
| teractiveodular wrote:
| If you mean TLD, it's .pw, but this has nothing to do with the
| ITU.
| croisillon wrote:
| the "about" page in other languages returns a 401 unauthorized :/
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