Re: IDN problem.... :(

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2005 - 04:35:46 CST

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    On 18/02/2005 06:00, François Yergeau wrote:

    > Alexander Savenkov a écrit :
    >
    >> Suppose I *want* to visit XML-документы.com (which is not unlikely).
    >> My browser should *not* alert me. Never.
    >>
    >> The only solution to this seems to be for the registrar to check each
    >> new domain name by hand (not necessarily with mixed scripts).
    >
    >
    > I'm afraid that checking every registration by hand would be both too
    > error-prone and too work-intensive. You'll probably have to put up
    > with your browser alerting you. But perhaps good browsers will let
    > you build up a white list, so that you need to suffer the alert only
    > once?
    >
    The problem with this is that Alexander's example is neither unique nor
    improbable, indeed I would expect thousands of such IDNs to be
    registered, if they are allowed. In Cyrillic script and I think in many
    other non-Latin scripts it is common practice to insert Latin script
    technical terms, acronyms etc, especially for items relating to
    computers and other modern technology. Indeed this kind of usage has a
    long history, see
    http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode_mixing.html section
    2. So there is a real need to allow some kinds of mixed script IDNs for
    such circumstances.

    Perhaps one way for this kind of mixed script name to be distinguished
    from spoofing is to require a hyphen at the boundary between scripts,
    as in Alexander's example.

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
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