Taipei will be one of the first cities around the world to have its own domain name, enabling local businesses and residents to start using the “.taipei” domain name next year, the Taipei City Government announced yesterday.
The city’s petition for the creation of a special suffix was approved earlier this month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California-based non-profit organization responsible for managing the Domain Name System and Internet Protocol addresses.
Taipei will be one of 52 cities to have their own domain names, along with New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said the approval for the city to use “.taipei” is a recognition of the city’s development of information technology, and a great marketing measure to put the city on the digital landscape.
“The ‘.taipei’ domain name is a specific doorplate for Taipei. We are very excited to be able to use the Taipei suffix so our city can be more easily recognized in the online world,” he said.
The city government must still run tests of the new domain name and finalize a contractor to manage the program.
Taipei Department of Information Technology Commissioner Chan Te-tsun (詹德存) said the overall operation and maintenance costs for the new domain name will be about US$60,000 per year, including a US$25,000 registration fee to the ICANN.
The city will first change the Web address of city agencies next year, before opening the use of the domain to businesses and residents.
Taipei 101 Mall and Asustek Computer have expressed support for the city’s move, and said they will register for the domain next year.
Taipei 101 spokesman Michael Liu (劉家豪) said the company is in the process of redesigning its Web site, and it expected to change the site’s address from Taipei-101.com.tw to Taipei101.taipei.
The city said the detailed plan for the domain registration will be finalized later this year.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide