3 ms·
This shows the problems with unicode in domain names. Some Cyrillic characters look exactly like Latin characters but have different codepoints, e.g. a (0x61) a
by foepys 10y ago
This shows the problems with unicode in domain names. Some Cyrillic characters look exactly like Latin characters but have different codepoints, e.g. a (0x61) and а (0xB0D0). This is pretty important for businesses whose domain include an a, like banks.
Google is now noticing that those malicious domains don't even have to be an exact visual match but a similar looking one is sufficient to trick users.
- usernam 10y agoIronically this is made worse by some fontsets such as Noto, that unify the look over a variety of scripts (which is something you normally _want_). This is going to be fun to watch. Unicode domain names are a can of worms.
- marcosdumay 10y agoThat's why browsers should color the backgrounds by the character codepoint. And do something crazier with multi-character icons.
- saghm 10y agoThis is a good idea, but I worry that non-technical people might not notice or care about such a minor difference. Thinking of my family and relatives, I'd imagine that almost none of them would think to avoid typing in their password if some characters in the URL bar had a different colored background but looked visually similar to domains they recognized.
- yaroslavvb 10y agoI found some fonts reuse exact same vector instructions for Cyrillic "А" and English "A" in the same file
- petercooper 10y agoPeople create parody or trick Twitter accounts using a similar trick with typical sans-serif fonts where capital I (I) and lower case L (l) look the same. (Note: This is not true with whatever font Hacker News uses.) So instead of @realdonaldtrump you could create @reaIdonaIdtrump and to the untrained eye, you'd think it was the same thing.