I'm curious, why is it allowed to register domain names with mixed character sets? I am behind allowing Unicode characters in domain names for the obvious reasons, but are there compelling use cases for allowing them to be mixed?
Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
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Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#82Cool! I want a cool non-alpha unicode domain. I guess "square-root" is already taken, but there must be some cool domains left (even though nobody can actually type them in).
Actually, some of these would probably be nice aliases for some math / science oriented sites.
E.g. - .com
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#83Cool! I want a cool non-alpha unicode domain. I guess "square-root" is already taken, but there must be some cool domains left (even though nobody can actually type them in). Actually, some of these would probably be nice aliases for some math / science oriented sites. E.g. - .com
Meh. Markup ate my "radioactive pie" (9762 dec / 2622 hex) symbol :-(
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#84I'm curious, why is it allowed to register domain names with mixed character sets? I am behind allowing Unicode characters in domain names for the obvious reasons, but are there compelling use cases for allowing them to be mixed?
Technically, Unicode is only one character set. If you want to disallow mixing, you have to disallow it on some other basis, like script. There are many edge cases to consider, though, and many legitimate reasons to mix scripts.
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#85I'm not sure how feasible this is, but wouldn't it make sense for .com/.net/etc to be latin alphabet only and allow other domains to be localized with unicode? I wouldn't really have a problem with 新浪首页.cn, and I doubt I would confuse ɢoogle.ru or whatever with google.com
That defeats the purpose of an internationalized dns system. The whole point of getting unicode into domain names is so we can have 新浪首页.com so that it's no longer a latin alphabet centric system.
Doesn't that yield a whole class of problems though that we're trying to solve with obtuse solutions such as "let's make that character set in red so people don't get phished"? How is that any more international and/or easy to use?
It seems that putting the allowed character set into the tld would be a pretty user-friendly way of doing that.
Edit: As an added bonus, tlds are centrally managed, and are already western/latin encoded. So why not customize it with a localized abbreviation for the language or tld type?
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. The browser is behaving sensibly, since you can't register that domain. It's applying the same rules that the registrars do. ICANN require that registries follow RFC3491 and related RFCs for name prep before allowing a name to be registered https://www.icann.org/resources/unthemed-pages/idn-guideline... . What that one does is (among other things) NFKC normalization and case-folding: irb(main):016:0> "\ufeff\uf…
Interesting. So, out of interest, why is the same not being applied for ɢ? (When I ran it through Python's unidecode I got the roman symbol all the same).
Doing the "ɢ" conversion here[0], I get
xn--1na
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use blue, the most common types of color blindness are red-green issues(there's a really tiny percentage that doesn't perceive colors at all but really really tiny. And other than those, nobody has trouble with blue) Source: I'm colorblind(protanope) and red would definitely be an issue. Android studio, for example, is really annoying for me because the particular red they use for errors is very hard to distinguish f…
Isn't this a general argument against ever using red as a warning? Seems to prove too much. Especially in this case, where there is unlikely to be a specialized class of scammers who go phishing only for people with red-green colorblindness. So long as browsers implement a feature that stops the phishing in 99% of cases, the scammers will try something else.
It's an argument against using red as the only warning sign.
Compare to Chrome's https indicator- it turns the "https://" part of the URL green (which I can barely distinguish as different, so it is useless to me) and adds a padlock icon.
Colorblind-friendly graphs might use both color and symbols to distinguish elements.
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
-Tritanopes may beg to differ (regarding the blue not being an issue, that is.) Significantly less common than red/green deficiency, though - I only know of one more on the island I live on (pop. 15,000 or so)
Wasn't aware of that one. Significantly fewer people affected though(I think red-green is something like 10% of males)
-Yup, the affected population is so small I don't bother suggesting to websites and software publishers that they may want to adapt their colour schemes anymore
Kudos to my employer, though - after some discussion, I was given a small budget and our SCADA GUI frontends now sport colour palettes optimized for deuteranopes, protanopes and tritanopes.
We've got a couple of very grateful feedbacks - and, unsurprisingly, quite a bunch of 'Gee, did you have some colorblind sod do your GUIs? My display looks like a Grateful Dead cover!' from people who've inadvertently messed with accessibility settings...
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#89Web browsers should have an option to show non-ascii chars in urls in red.
This would be a great solution. Allowing unicode characters in domain names is just inviting trouble. I understand that people with non-Latin scripts want domain names in their own language and alphabet, but there are way too many unicode characters that will confuse people about legitimate-looking domain names. Showing non-ascii in red would be an easy solution for everybody.
Don't even show the suspect URL, show "THIS MIGHT BE A SCAM", with some kind of hover over showing the URL, and some way to click to more information.
Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com
#90This is something that's been bugging me for years. Why are there multiple representations of alphabet characters in Unicode? It seems reasonable to include accent marks, but what's the benefit in having a Cyrillic 'o' alongside a standard 'o' or the 2 or 3 other ASCII-lookalike sets of characters?
The most important reason is semantics. If "O" and "0" look alike in a certain font, should we use the same character code for both? No, because they have different meaning.
Here are some contexts in which this semantic difference is important: search (compare search results for "cop" and "сор"), alphabetical sorting, text-to-speech, spellchecking, case conversion ("ATOM" -> "atom", but "АТОМ" -> "атом", note the difference between t-т and m-м).