From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Sun Feb 13 2005 - 20:43:08 CST
At 06:29 PM 2/12/2005, Christopher Fynn wrote:
>If there were a list of homographs maybe they could be treated as aliases
>for the purpose of URLs and domain name registration - so IRAQ.COM with a
>Latin Q and IRAQ.COM with a Kurdish Q would point to the same address.
>
>Registering a name containing a character or characters in the homograph
>list would automatically get you all the variants too.
We discussed this issue during a break at the UTC last week, and I
suggested pretty much the same thing. Rather than a true *homograph*
mapping, what's needed is a *confusables folding*.
If registration authorities could be convinced to use that to block all
'look-alike' registrations, the playground for phishers would shrink
dramatically.
Instead of having all variant spellings go to the same domain, it might be
cleaner to simply have the incorrect variants fail.
For ASCII, the confusables folding would fold 0 and O, 1 and l, as well as
l and I, which can be confused in many fonts.
For Latin / Greek / Cyrillic the set of confusables includes many true
homographs, but there are many more for the other scripts.
If someone is interested in creating a draft for such a folding, I'd be
happy to maintain it as part of my set of draft foldings for future
addition to UTS#30. (Speaking of the latter, once 4.1 is out the door, I'll
have the time to release the approved version of that UTS).
A./
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