Re: Unicode and Security

From: David Starner (starner@okstate.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 15:10:04 EST


On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 01:21:29PM -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> I'm not sure Unicode can be fixed at this point. The flaws may be too
> deeply embedded. The real solution may involve waiting until
> companies and people start losing significant amounts of money as a
> result of the flaws in Unicode, and then throwing it away and
> replacing it with something else.

What else? As we keep pointing out, almost every character in Unicode
that normally has the same glyph as another is in Unicode with good
reason. To change that to something that would fit your goals will cost
billions right now just for the change, and then you end with a
character set that can't round trip all the others in common use, and
that is more painful to use for Greeks and Russian, and completely
unusable for mathematicians. I seriously doubt the world would go to a
massively inferior character set because of the security holes you're
talking about.

-- 
David Starner - starner@okstate.edu, dvdeug/jabber.com (Jabber)
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
What we've got is a blue-light special on truth. It's the hottest thing 
with the youth. -- Information Society, "Peace and Love, Inc."



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