ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names

philalethiac writes "Millions of Chinese language users will soon be able to access the Internet using Chinese script following a decision today by ICANN's Board of Directors to approve a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names."

Comments

Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks

[Mattpw]

With all the non latin address character sets being approved I imagine there is a world of new opportunities which completely void all the "inspect the address bar" education which was pushed on the general public for so many years. ICANN has managed to turn the net into a pretty much anything goes place, almost every major company is practically extorted into buying the new extension flavour of the month to prevent spammers and fraudsters sending seemingly legitimate email and the general public is left completely confused with no guiding address principals.

Re:Time to revisit oldschool phishing attacks

[Trepidity]

There are some attempts to mitigate the problem, though you're right that it can be one. Some registrars are limiting the characters that can appear in their domain, and there's a push to make that more widespread. One approach is to limit to "local" scripts only, so e.g. Cyrillic or Latin in .ru, but no Telegu or CJK in .ru. That greatly limits the number of clashing pairs compared to allowing all of Unicode. Some registers also have policies on not permitting certain known clashes, such as allowing two domains to be registered that are identical, except for one having a Latin 'a' where the other has a Cyrillic 'a' (which look identical in most fonts).

Firefox and Opera will only display the internationalized Unicode name for TLDs that are whitelisted as having a "safe" policy on the subject, and will display the punycode for other domains. Here is Mozilla's current policy.

Re:compromise idea to prevent regional isolation

[_merlin]

However, my biggest concern is that the use of non-ascii characters in domain names breaks the whole International nature of the web

Requiring everything to be ASCII breaks with the whole international nature of the web by forcing everyone to use English alphabet characters.