Others have explained the unicode-in-URL aspect sufficiently, but I can speak to the author of the site somewhat. His or her blog posts have hit the fediverse several times before. They're often insightful and skeptical, highly privacy conscious. I hope they don't mind if I take this part from their FAQ:
Can I trust the information on this website?
No. And you should never trust any single website or entity. Especially not the ones that have sponsored content or have no academic/professional background in the topics they post about.
Take this information as mere pointers into different directions, that scratch the surface and ultimately provoke your itch to find out more about the individual topics. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s punycode, it displays as japanese characters in a real browser.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
1000020477
nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 month ago
For those curious, the characters are katakana (the syllabary often used in Japan for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc) and the characters read “ma-ri-u-su”, which is possibly intended to represent “Marius” under Japanese spelling conventions.
sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Which is a major security risk and you should avoid those “real browsers”.
by displaying Unicode characters an attacker can send you a link that clearly shows its yahoo.com and you see in the browser url that its yahoo.com but in reality its unicode letters that look similar to latin one.
that’s really bad
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Not everyone uses English. Many languages can’t be written with only ASCII characters.
sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I get why it was introduced. I am telling you why its dangrous
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m not aware of a modern browser that doesn’t render it by default. I meant a real browser as in a browser not a lemmy client
sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
you are right.
You could disable it though in firefox: “about:config” and find “network.IDN_show_punycode” and set to true.
forbes.com/…/chrome-and-firefox-adding-protection…
capt_kafei@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I didn’t know about that, thanks for sharing.
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Thx TIL