Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Plays Down U.S. Influence
aychamo writes "The ICANN (the company that distributes most of the world's internet addresses) is denying that it gives the US government too much control over its operations. For instance, the US was the only country able to stop ICANN from using .xxx for pr0n domains, instead of .com. The ICANN is planning events to show that it is not US influenced." From the article: "ICANN's board of directors appears to favor a proposal for a new set of Internet addresses that end in .Asia, which would more easily identify Asia-focused Web sites. Approval of the new top-level domain could come during the ICANN board of directors meeting on Sunday. One other major development this week involves progress toward allowing the use of non-English language characters when steering a Web browser to a particular site. ICANN is now exploring a proposal to open Web browsers up to dozens of the world's other alphabets. Actual tests of just such a system are now in the works, Twomey said. "
Isn't it possible to abuse UTF-8 domain names for activities such as cybersquatting? It's easy to mistake www.microsöft.com for www.microsoft.com.
It's worse than that. For example: there are several characters in the Cyrillic script which look exactly like Roman characters, like C, K, O, P, M, H... But of course they have different Unicode character values. So a malicious individual could register microsoft.com using a blend of Roman and Cyrillic characters, and it would look completely undistinguishable from the real thing. There are a number of ways to protect against that, but none of them are particularly good.
Who invented the world wide web? Tim Berniers-Lee - An Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland (Thats Europe for all you Americans)