4 ms·

I'm not sure it would help that much. For example pop.ru and рор.ru look identical to my eyes in my current font.

by vostok 9y ago

baby 9y ago
same thing with google.com and google.com
frobozz 9y ago
Yes it's not bad but not great either. It would only help in certain situations (hello vs Ꮒello). It also becomes tricky if you permit Turkish, as you would have to allow mixing of ascii and the dotted vs dotless i. There are also good reasons to mix language in a name. US state abbreviations might be used to distinguish (e.g.) a diaspora community in Texas from their equivalent in Alaska.
- rspeer 9y ago
  Dotted and dotless i is a different issue, related to capitalization. Those are still Latin letters. Of course to support most European languages you have to be able to use ASCII and non-ASCII Latin letters together. That's not unique to Turkish. Think of the Spanish word "cañon", for example. It's not four English letters and one Spanish letter, it's just five Latin letters (four of which are in ASCII).
  - frobozz 9y ago
    There is a difference between ı and i in both cases. I don't know what you mean by 'related to capitalisation' The reason I raise Turkish specifically is that the similarity between the characters presents a potential homograph for a phishing attack in non-Turkish domains. (e.g. mıcrosoft.com). Characters with apparent diacritics are less vulnerable (e.g. öracle.com).
rspeer 9y ago
There was an example where еріс.com (whose domain is in the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet, and I think would be pronounced like "eris dot com") once got a security certificate that would be visually indistinguishable from one for epic.com. This was, thankfully, intended by its creator to demonstrate the vulnerability. The certificate has expired now, and additionally, browsers now show it as https://www.xn--e1awd7f.com/ https://www.xn--e1awd7f.com/ . Even HN rewrites it if I type it as a full URL in Unicode, actually.

I'm not sure it would help that much. For example pop.ru and рор.ru look identical to my eyes in my current font.

by vostok 9y ago

I'm not sure it would help that much. For example pop.ru and рор.ru look identical to my eyes in my current font.

baby 9y ago

same thing with google.com and google.com

frobozz 9y ago

Yes it's not bad but not great either. It would only help in certain situations (hello vs Ꮒello). It also becomes tricky if you permit Turkish, as you would have to allow mixing of ascii and the dotted vs dotless i. There are also good reasons to mix language in a name. US state abbreviations might be used to distinguish (e.g.) a diaspora community in Texas from their equivalent in Alaska.

rspeer 9y ago
Dotted and dotless i is a different issue, related to capitalization. Those are still Latin letters. Of course to support most European languages you have to be able to use ASCII and non-ASCII Latin letters together. That's not unique to Turkish. Think of the Spanish word "cañon", for example. It's not four English letters and one Spanish letter, it's just five Latin letters (four of which are in ASCII).
- frobozz 9y ago
  There is a difference between ı and i in both cases. I don't know what you mean by 'related to capitalisation' The reason I raise Turkish specifically is that the similarity between the characters presents a potential homograph for a phishing attack in non-Turkish domains. (e.g. mıcrosoft.com). Characters with apparent diacritics are less vulnerable (e.g. öracle.com).

rspeer 9y ago

There was an example where еріс.com (whose domain is in the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet, and I think would be pronounced like "eris dot com") once got a security certificate that would be visually indistinguishable from one for epic.com. This was, thankfully, intended by its creator to demonstrate the vulnerability. The certificate has expired now, and additionally, browsers now show it as https://www.xn--e1awd7f.com/ https://www.xn--e1awd7f.com/ . Even HN rewrites it if I type it as a full URL in Unicode, actually.