My last post was a commercial one, announcing that 9ja Cosmos could offer Web 3 TLDs involving non alphanumeric characters.

This is more of an edu-com piece so I will bring it to Tekedia.

First a bit of history –

Now some may think that emojis came about because of an iconic 1994 film starring Tom Hanks as Forest Gump.

The film was about one Forest Gump, who sat on a bench narrating his life, with a sense of profound understatement, to various individuals who came to sit beside him over the course of the day.  The hapless and socially awkward Gump meanders through life, completely oblivious to his inadvertent contact with others having dramatic life changing, and in some cases history changing consequences.

The whole emoji phenomenon probably has its roots in the US due to a graphic designer named Harvey Ball in 1963. Within a few years, it became a symbol of anti-war protests, and the  US ‘hippie’ movement. It was initially used by the insurance company that hired him, by making badges to hand out at promos. Later it began to be used as T Shirts, decorative jeans patches and stickers.

The next evolution of this was the ‘emoticon’.  In 1982, one Dr. Scott E. Fahlman had a university noticeboard message, misconstrued. Those who read it, interpreted it without the humour he had intended and this gave it a different meaning. He then suggested that jokes and nonjokes be marked by two sets of characters we now recognize as standard emoticons: the smiley face :-) and the frowning face :-(

With the advent of the internet in the mid to late 90’s, and the first chat mechanisms, AOL, followed by Yahoo and MSN, further emoticons began to be added.

Sentiment doesn’t easily convey either a broader aspect of activity,  personal identity or business.

Emojis first became an expression of a Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. They released the earliest emojis  in 1997. It is no surprise that they came from this part of the world.

Languages based on phonetic words (sometimes called ‘Latin’ alphabet) are composed of characters that have inherent sound qualities.  These sounds may be fashioned by diuretics or rules of the language. Eastern languages have compound characters with meanings, and these meanings become modified and more specified by the additional characters surrounding them.

This is also how emoji’s work. Emoji’s go beyond sentiment and can replace nouns to bring fuller meaning.

Use in  Web 3 domain names

When using them to make a domain name, they need to reduce the size of the expression in phonetics and create a pictorial flow that everybody will instantly get.

This one means ‘football world cup’ and by making a Web 3 domain this way, which supports emoji’s and special characters, we can reduce a sixteen character string to 3.

While emojis and special characters bring new and interesting ways to express a business, or to express an individual either professionally or personally, many find it difficult to embrace the concept and get it very wrong.

Making a domain is very different from having a chat conversation.

I frequently loiter on a node to track the closing of domain auctions I have interest in, and I see a lot of crazy stuff.

Yes, someone actually wasted their time, and nodal capacity to create this. They did not even bother to be around for the closing of the bid to claim their creation. They could have got it for 0.001 HNS (about .07 of a kobo) because nobody else would be remotely interested in bidding on it.

Note the ‘xn--‘ and the ending ‘-ec942a’ :  this is the punycode that will represent the diamond, but it won’t show in actual usage. This could have been made a small bit less awkward by removing the word diamond in the middle and placing the emoji there instead. In a domain, duplicating words with an emoji is just reducing value and good practice.

In ‘domainland’ less is more.

Cross platform and ‘Alt IDNA Emoji’s

When we look at different platforms and social media environments we find that the emojis in various systems have unique proprietary appearances that differ slightly from the standard icon. Punycode is built around Unicode, and this allows emojis to display themselves in the native appearance of any environment when viewed.

‘alt’ is as it might suggest, ‘alternative’, and while there is no specific rule about using ‘alt’s it is best avoided.

The most recent well established unicode set is the 2008 specification which is guaranteed to cause a uniform character translation across platforms. Some ‘alts’ are the only alternative for what is needed, while others are contrivances to duplicate something already owned by someone else.

For example,

Liverpool is a world class City in UK. a small town in New York State US, (probably named after the former). a world class centuries old University, and an equally world class Football Club. ‘Liverpool’ can’t be registered. On attempt, a notice will come up – ‘

Reserved To ensure that Handshake is compatible with legacy DNS, existing top-level domains as well as the top 100,000 Alexa domains are reserved.’

The common ploy of replacing the ‘e’ with a ‘3’ is the ONLY way of securing this legally.

However, ‘streetcred’ is just an ordinary common noun with no such protections, and if someone attempts to make ‘str33tcr3d’ this will just directly come across as a ‘pirated’ version, and won’t hold much status.

There are all also ‘alts’ in emojis which are copies and not ‘the real thing’.

Here we see an attempt to clone a high value domain using the original ’emoticon’ type emoji. The correct Punycode for this is xn--h28h

There are other ways people try to contrive to recreate their own ‘version’ of a domain owned by someone else by varying the emoji slightly. For example, the red heart is the second most popular emoji of all time, and the default in any scenario where a heart is needed for a domain. There needs to be a reason or argument why an alternative is a more accurate choice in context. Because the red one is already taken isn’t a good enough reason.

Another example, is the card suit emojis, there are two red ones – hearts and diamonds and two black ones, clubs and spades. There is an alt emoji called the ‘white spade’ emoji and there have been instances where it has been used to clone a domain where the default black spade is in use.

The black spade is iconic, and there is no useful reason to pick the white one over it, except that maybe it needs to be used against a black or very dark background. In a domain, the use of the white spade is definitely suspicious.

Finally some of the newer emojis like the footballs (soccer, rugby and American) high voltage, rocket, world, money bag, skull, bank, volcano etc… are from a newer specification which hasn’t filtered down into all recognition systems yet, and are sometimes given false positives as ‘alts’ instead of ‘IDNA’.

Summary points, emojis in Web 3 domains should –

1. Use default norm choice unless there is a good reason not to, and never use a lesser known variant to ‘pirate’ an existing domain.
2. Convey meaning and be a good fit for text and other emojis around them. They are never justified in themselves.
3. Less is more, emojis should help convey a domains meaning while reducing the characters it would otherwise use with phonetic (Latin) text.
4. Bear in mind emojis are used differently in domains than while chatting.
5. As browser adoption of Web 3 domains and the use of emoji’s improves, the more popular emojis are more likely to see prioritized adoption over obscure ones.
6. If you are buying a domain which includes emojis, check that the Punycode doesn’t look suspiciously long.

9ja Cosmos is here… Get your .9jacom and .9javerse Web 3 domains  for $2 at:

https://www.encirca.com/handshake-9jacom/

https://www.encirca.com/handshake-9javerse/

Ref:

www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons

www.rd.com/article/smiley-face-invented/

emojipedia.org

Mr. John Aturu lives with his family in Maitama, Abuja. On the 23rd of July, 2022, there was a robbery incident in the neighborhood where Mr. John Aturu resides, and one of the neighbors swore to have seen a person who looks exactly like Mr. John Aturu as one of the Armed robbers. Some of the robbery victims confirmed that who they saw to be amongst the armed robbers is no other person than Mr. John Aturu, they claimed that in fact Mr. John Aturu was the leader of the gang, directing the robbers where to enter and where not to enter.

These testimonies by the victims of the robbery and other residents of the estate placed Mr. John Aturu as the prime suspect of the robbery. The Police went straight to the house of Mr. John Aturu to arrest him and the wife told the police that the husband is not around and that the husband had traveled to London for a business function on the 15th of July 2022 and he is not back yet.

Immediately, Mr. John Aturu got back to Abuja, he was immediately arrested by the police at the airport, on the ground that according to eyewitnesses, he is a prime suspect in a robbery attack that has taken place in his neighborhood. Mr. John Aturu corroborated the earlier statement of the wife that he had traveled to London a week before the robbery took place and he was not even in the country and there is no magical way he could have been involved in the robbery since he is thousand of Kilometers away from the crime scene the time the robbery took place.

Mr. John Aturu in corroborating this his claim of innocence of not being involved in the robbery provided his flight ticket which according to the date stamp proved that truly Mr. John Aturu flew out of the country a week before the robbery incident, Mr. John Aturu also provided his passport which indicated according to the UK immigration stamp that Mr. John Aturu was welcomed to London a week before the incident, Mr. John Aturu also provided his hotel reservations and the details of the hotel management which the police called and they confirmed that Mr. John Aturu was in their hotel as a guest in London the night the robbery took place in Maitama, Abuja, finally, Mr. John Aturu also according to his passport showing the date the Nigerian immigration stamped him into the country, which is days after the robbery has taken place, this proven that he was truly away in London the night the robbery took place.

This defense that Mr. John Aturu has put up, that he is nowhere near the crime scene or around the robbery scene to have participated in the robbery and bringing out documents and evidence to corroborate his claim is what is known in law as “Alibi”.

The word Alibi is of Latin origin which when translated to English means; “somewhere else”. Simply put, an accused or suspect is somewhere else when the incident took place and was never at the scene of the crime to have participated in the crime.

It is a defense; that at the time and place that a crime occurred, the accused was nowhere near the crime scene.

This defense (Alibi) is to be raised and pleaded at the onset of trial when the accused is required to enter his plea of guilty or not guilty.

If Alibi is successfully pleaded, the defense of not guilty will be entered for the accused and the accused will be discharged and acquitted.

The polity is heated up for the upcoming 2023 presidential election. Amongst the presidential contenders, the most notorious is the person of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. People describe him to be carrying a lot of loads around his neck; hence why it is difficult for his followers and party members to market his personality to the general public.

No doubt, he is a good politician but he has a bad personality, smeared with scandals, controversies, court cases, medical unfitness, etc.

Despite the fact that he is old and his appearances indicate that he is not medically fit to be contesting or join in an active campaign, he also chose to fly the same religion ticket (Muslim -Muslim); him being a Muslim also chose another man who is of the Muslim religion to be his running mate thereby showing a sign of religious bigotry, who may relegate other religion if elected to be the president. His running mate is someone who has in a series of investigations fingered to be a Boko haram terrorist apologist.

The supporters of Bola Ahmed Tinubu have done a great job in packaging their candidate as a saint and the messiah but it is a pity that once they cover up a scandal, another scandal rises up as a plague. show up. The current problem they are tackling now is the denial of Deloitte that Bola Ahmed Tinubu never worked for them, hence they do not have his employment record in their database. Bola Ahmed Tinubu had previously claimed to have worked for Deloitte and he stated that most of the money in his account was made while in active employment as a staff of Deloitte.

His involvement in the narcotics trafficking and money laundering scandal in the United States is also dealing a heavy blow to his presidential aspiration. Most of his followers have publicly defended him that he was never involved in drug trafficking but the certified true copy of the court documents stated otherwise.

No matter how much the followers and supporters of Tinubu want to twist it, I have gone through the 58 pages court documents over and over again, the court process did not just indict Bola Ahmed Tinubu for drug trafficking, he was also indicted for Money laundering, his wife, Oluremi Tinubu was also mentioned to be involved in the laundering scheme, hence why his bank accounts were confiscated and he forfeited a whooping  $460,000 which was deemed to be proceeds of crime, the crime being drug trafficking.

No matter the rule of interpretation you want to employ in interpreting the court documents or the technicalities you may want to involve to deceive the general public; The summary of the court document is that Tinubu was indicted for Drug trafficking and Money laundering and he was forced to forfeit $460,000 to the United States of America which is a proceed of crime.

It is embarrassing that People like Festus Keyamo, SAN, a respected senior lawyer will publicly want to deceive the general public and intentionally want to bend the truth just because of politics. He claimed that Tinubu only shared an apartment with Mueez Akande (the man who ran the drug empire), hence why he is mentioned and that Tinubu was never involved in drug trafficking. I’m quite sure he has gone through the court documents and just for politics threw caution to the wind to deceive the public and it is a shame. 

As can be seen in my last Aviation Law article (How to acquire an Air Transport Licence & Airline Operator License in Nigeria), the Nigerian Aviation Regulatory Framework has detailed specifications on how to procure certain participatory permits.

This article will be more focused on the topic of Aircraft registrations in Nigeria, with special focus on the topics of :-

– The Regulatory agencies in charge of Aircraft registrations in Nigeria.

– The Requirements for aircraft registrations in Nigeria.

– Who is eligible to register an aircraft in Nigeria.

Is aircraft registration compulsory in Nigeria?

Yes, it is, otherwise operating an unregistered aircraft can attract a wide range of civil and criminal liabilities.

Which government agency is in charge of aircraft registration in Nigeria?

The government agency responsible for aircraft registrations in Nigeria is the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). 

Who is eligible to have an aircraft registered in Nigeria?

An aircraft is eligible for registration of it is owned by:-

– A Nigerian citizen.

– An individual foreigner lawfully admitted for permanent residence in Nigeria.

–  A corporation lawfully incorporated and doing business under the laws of Nigeria if the aircraft is based & primarily used in Nigeria.

– A Nigerian government entity or political subdivision.

– A foreigner who has leased the aircraft to one of the persons described above provided that :-

a). the aircraft may remain on the Nigerian registry only for as long as the lease remains in effect;

b). the certificate of registration includes the names and addresses of the lessees;

c). the aircraft is not more than 22 years old and not registered under the laws of any state apart from Nigeria.

What are the requirements for aircraft registration in Nigeria?

After the aircraft has been evaluated and found acceptable for issuance of a certificate of registration it is required to submit to submit the following documents to the authority:-

– A certificate or notice of deregistration from the previous state of registry or a letter from the state of manufacture, if the aircraft is new and has never been registered in any other state, confirming non-registration. 

– Documentation to prove the aircraft ownership e.g. a bill of sale.

– A copy of a government issued means of Identification or any other Identification approved by the authority.

– A Certified True Copy (CTC) of a certificate of incorporation issued by the Corporate Affairs Commission if the aircraft is owned by a company.

– Names of the directors of the company owning or leasing the aircraft.

– A CTC of the lease agreement if the aircraft is on lease with evidence of payment of all applicable stamp duties. 

– A CTC of the Power of Attorney executed by the owner/lessor & the lessee of the aircraft.

– A CTC of an aircraft current insurance certificate.

– A proof of payment of the prescribed fees.

– A CTC of an Air Transport Licence (ATL), an Airline Operator License (AOL), or a Permit For Non-Commercial Flight (PNCF) .

What is the procedure for the allocation of aircraft registration marks?

Aircraft registration marks can be reserved after the payment of a reservation fee which will be valid for 6 months.

Aircraft registration marks will be allocated to applicants in sequence with the 5N- prefix.

Special Registration marks of the applicant’s choice can be allocated on request in writing when available and come with extra fee requirements in addition to regular Aircraft Registration charges.