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I don't really have much pity for someone who goes to google.xxx expecting google.com for porn and becoming infested with malware. The risk of BigCo not owning
by Jach 15y ago
I don't really have much pity for someone who goes to google.xxx expecting google.com for porn and becoming infested with malware. The risk of BigCo not owning their domains in all possible TLDs is from phishing targets on their potential customers, email attacks. Apart from that, it seems really unlikely that target.xxx would outrank target.com in a search, so target.xxx would never be visited aside from idiots thinking it's Target With Porn or clicking an email link. So if the TLDs are a scam, the BigCos that play along are willing suckers.
- eftpotrm 15y agoThese aren't restricted to the old 7 bit ASCII character sets though, are they? We've already had cases where people were registering famous domains with one character changed so some high unicode value that was graphically but not conceptually equal to the original character. Net result, new domain whose address looks and reads identically (to a human at least) to the domain it's trying to impersonate. Hopefully there are safeguards in place but that happening at a TLD level would hardly be pleasant.
- Jach 15y agoThat still doesn't address the issue that no one will visit these domains except for phishing victims with incredibly poor spam filters. Even within ascii someone might register target.c0m or target.corn and be able to fool people in a void. Presumably search engines like Google use unicode and can distinguish the different o's.
- capnrefsmmat 15y agoMost modern browsers display Unicode domains only for TLDs that have a character set policy that prevents homograph attacks. Newer IDN TLDs (like .рф) also have restrictions -- .рф only accepts Cyrillic domains, for example.
- metageek 15y agoWhat's that stand for, Russian Federation?