Proposed new Firefox IDN display algorithm

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Mon Feb 20 16:30:31 CET 2012



--On Monday, February 20, 2012 09:01 -0500 Vint Cerf
<vint at google.com> wrote:

> john, i assume meant "does NOT take being burned..."

Yes, sorry.
 
> Second, it does take being burned very many times (usually just
> hearing horror stories is sufficient) before people decide
> either that learning things is useful or that they want to
> avoid the risky situations entirely.

That was, indeed, my point relative to the presumably small
audience for tools that take a bit of knowledge and
understanding to use.

Of course, in this situation, "avoid the risky situation
entirely" means either completely avoiding IDNs completely or
learning to avoid any domain name that is not obviously based on
one's native language (and, in this case, I do mean "language").
The latter might easily have the interesting property of
inducing a false sense of security and making easier for the
phishers.  What comes after people get burned that way is
presumably abandoning DNS name guessing and/or typing in IRIs or
URIs entirely.  

best,
   john





More information about the Idna-update mailing list