New Internationalized domain names are coming [Telecom]

This may be a twofold mixed blessing (sort of tongue in cheek):

1. isolates the English-speaking world from the rest of the world (re: all the spammers in China, Korea, Russia, Nigeria. etc.), and
2. automatically blocks IFRAME (and other) exploits directing browsers to malware sites in China, Russia, etc. due to the failure of (old) DNS lookups resolving to domains using a non-Latin character set.

Like it or not, English is the de facto language of science and computing and anyone using a non-Latin alphabet is shooting themselves in the foot as far as I'm concerned.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I don't see how: the new system will allow domain names to be presented in other languages, but it won't preclude users who speak other languages from using the Latin alphabet as well as their own.

Of course, domain names in character sets other than Latin will be readable in any email or nntp client capable of supporting the appropriate character set, most likely UTF-8, so I don't think there will be any shortage of sights with IFRAME exploits.

Am I missing something?

Bill Horne Moderator

I'm not a DNS expert nor do I pretend to be one. However there was just a very signifant security hole plugged abuot a year ago in the DNS servers around the world. Quite impressive actually how all the major software vendors got together and fixed the problem in secrecy.

Thus there isn't much creaky, ancient DNS software. I hope.

Tony

No, IDNs are carefully designed so that the server software doesn't have to change at all. The internal codes are all of the form "XN--", followed by an ASCII-encoded version of the string which DNS servers handle without trouble. Most browsers are also already IDN compliant

-- try, for example,

which should show you some parked Russian pages.

The software that still needs to be upgraded is all of the other stuff that handles domain names, most notably e-mail where the standards for non-ASCII addresses have yet to be written.

R's, John

Copy'n'pasting the URL above into a browser's (Firefox, Safari, Opera, even IE8) URL box caused the browser to visited a page as you described.

Clicking on the URL inline in your message caused all my email clients to state (paraphrased) "the URL is not valid and cannot be loaded".

Unless there's something I'm not seeing (or understanding), the intent of the (new) proposed change is to permit someone to enter a URL in Cyrllic directly ("HaNDeM.com" (??????.com)), so who/what/when converts it to the Latinized "xn--80airorb.com" ?

I don't see this being a smooth transition next month at all, and it will be unusable for those without the appropriate language fonts installed, especially when many/most mail transport agents assume ISO-8859-1 character encoding AFAIK.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I just tested the URL with Thunderbird, and clicking on it brought up the web page. Please note, however, that _I_ added the "http://" in front of John's domain example, so that (most) news readers and email clients would show it as a clickable link. If that wasn't the right thing to do, my apologies to John.

N.B.: Since the "official" charset of The Digest is ISO-8859-1, and your post uses utf-8, I can't tell if your example will render correctly in all readers.

Bill Horne Moderator

The "http://" should be OK.

Interesting. My default is also ISO-8859-1 and, when sending, I wasn't alerted to a change to UTF-8 presumably due to actually including the Cyrillic version of the example URL. Hmmm, yet another problem to examine/fix.

With one month to go until the changeover, I'm surprised there aren't more heads-up posted regarding the changes about which I have a "gut" feeling will not transition smoothly (especially on legacy systems).

I'm glad I'm retiring this year. :-)

***** Moderator's Note *****

This post was also in utf-8.

This is so odd. I'm using News Xpress for Windows 3.1 (yes, it's ancient

15-year old software!) and when I double-clicked on the URL in the previous message it loaded the page just fine.

That's Windows' backward compatibility for you...

I asked for more info on the new top-level domains from another group: here's a reply from Dan Ritter of the Boston Linux & Unix User Group:

The slideshow and Bruce Schneier's blog give a very good introduction of the pitfalls that may lie ahead. My thanks to Mr. Ritter for his help.

Bill Horne Moderator