Comment on Thoughts on Cloudflare
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days agoI’ve heard it’s a security feature not ro render unicode in the url because otherwise people could use Unicode lookalike characters to spoof a domain.
Comment on Thoughts on Cloudflare
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days agoI’ve heard it’s a security feature not ro render unicode in the url because otherwise people could use Unicode lookalike characters to spoof a domain.
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it ruins what’s arguably the most important feature of DNS: providing human-readable names.
Using lookalike characters to deceive people has been a problem since long before anyone first got the idea to register paypa1.com but no-one ever seriously suggested abandoning human-readable names in order to avoid that problem.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
The term “Human” does not include people who primarily read non latin-based languages silly
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Note that everything outside of ASCII gets encoded in Punycode, so this also includes most languages written in the Latin script.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Shit, I forgot that Human now just means the native English-speaking world.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Ideally they should show both side by side.
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I’m unsure how that’d be useful to any normal user. Let’s say the UI shows something like this:
What’s the user supposed to do with that information, how would showing the Punycode here help any normal user determine which one of these domains is the right one that they want to visit?
Helping users identify the right domain name and avoid being deceived is surely a very important thing to do, I just find it hard to see how having users read Punycode would ever be a practically useful way to achieve that.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Let’s say that I go to google.com. The UI shows
https://google.com/. No punycode because it is plain ascii. Everything is as expected.Now let’s say I click on a link for googӏe.com. The ui shows `googӏe.com (googӏe.com) I’d be like, holy shit that is a shady URL!
That’s how I imagine it helping, although I am not a UI expert. There could be a better way. But that googӏe.com scares me – I can’t visually tell that it is not a normal lowercase “l”.