From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Sat Feb 12 2005 - 19:54:43 CST
Mark Leisher wrote:
> Perhaps I missed it - these discussions can get tedious and I
> sometimes avoid tedium through the holy power of the Delete key - but
> has anyone proposed addressing this by asking browsers to prominently
> announce the punycode URL when the mouse gets near a URL?
>
> The first time a URL is seen, provide a drop-down list of homographic
> variants to choose from and let the user determine the valid version.
> The chosen form is then used by default from then on.
Um, this is actually a very *good* idea, I think. If I'm about to click
on "paypal.com" and my browser shows me (on the status line, where I
always look, or else in a tooltip) that I'm about to go to
xn--paypl-7ve.com, that probably is a pretty good warning. It won't be
perfect, and won't catch, say, using non-Latin characters from one
script to spoof those in another non-Latin, but even if people know
little about Punycode, they ought to be able to see that the URL doesn't
look right.
~mark
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