[LINK] ICANN's non-Latin domain names

Marghanita da Cruz marghanita at ramin.com.au
Mon Jan 4 18:24:13 AEDT 2010


Kim Davies wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2010, at 12:07 AM, Fred Pilcher wrote:
> 
>>> Firefox showing the A-label form of the domain (i.e. prefixed with xn--) is their method of limiting the impact of homographic attacks. The idea is that for untrusted top-level domains, they will at least convert to the wire form and the end user might get that something is up when they see http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.com/ in their address bar after they type in paypal.com with a cyrillic 'a'. All top-level domains are untrusted (including .com), unless Firefox has whitelisted them. Its whitelist is quite small.
>> Thanks Kim - that was what I thought. So how come it's only displaying mañana.com for Richard and me? Or have I misunderstood?
> 
> Good question, and I don't know the answer. In Firefox you can inspect what your whitelist is set to by going to the URL "about:config" and scrolling down to the settings with the prefix of "network.IDN.whitelist"... there should be an entry for each top-level domain that is whitelisted. It could be there is a "network.IDN.whitelist.com" entry in there inserted at some point.
> 

If I cut the URL
http://www.mañana.com/
from Firefox and paste it here, I get
http://www.xn--maana-pta.com/
(that is www dot xn dash das maana dash 
pta dot com )

While entering the URL
http://www.mañana.com/ in firefox returns:
Address Not Found
Firefox can't find the server at
www.ma%c3%b1ana.com.
(that is www dot ma #c3%b 1ana dot com)

Marghanita
-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202






More information about the Link mailing list