ICANN to Allow Non-Latin Characters in Domains
ICANN is tomorrow expected to approve the availability of domain names in non-Latin alphabets.
Switched this week reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is set to allow Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Cyrillic or Greek users create web addresses in their native character sets.
"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Switched cites ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush as saying at a press conference in Seoul, South Korea this week.
Approximately half of Internet users are native speakers of languages that do not use the Latin alphabet. If the motion is approved, we should see the first non-Roman domain names sometime in mid-2010.
Check out the full story here.
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spam is gona have a really good time.... i know what to do with a link that ends in : 23875346913t54f3456b26i5y6g2, but how da hell am i gona know what the other site is like? (although not knowing anyone who knows how to use those characters might help)
Spam is the least of our worries. Homographs are characters from different alphabets that resemble each other. So what are you going to do when some scammer registers a domain name that _looks_ like your bank's and starts sending very authentic looking emails with links to a convincing copy of your bank's web site at the homographically similar domain name? You're going to have to be on-the-ball to spot these, and the numbers of combinations are astronomical, especially with longer domain names. Scary times...
plain stupid idea...