1 (edited by ameenullah 2005-02-17 12:31)

Topic: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

"Netcraft has the story that Mozilla has decided to drop support for international domain names in future versions of its Firefox Web browser. The decision comes after demonstrations by the Schmoo Group that the feature can be used to aid in phishing scams and other browser naughtiness." From the article: "The attack can be disabled in Firefox and Mozilla by setting 'network.enableIDN' to false in the browser's configuration (enter about:config in the address bar to access the configuration functions). The Mozilla development team today made this the default setting. Users who want IDN support will be able to turn it on, but will be warned about the risks involved."

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 … p;from=rss

God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

What exactley does this mean for those of us that dont understand this article?

Indocron
$theQuestion = (2*b) || !(2*b);

3

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Gonna take a stab in the dark, but unless disabled, mozilla will not connect to international domains, such as .de and such. Except, I think they are going to have to allow some, like .uk and .de. Probably the lesser known domain names.

Do, or do not.

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

no, its for domains that have unsupported charaters i think, or translated or something

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

In my opinion, international domain names, e.g. domain names containing other than A-Z characters, was a bad idea from the start. How the hell am I supposed to remember, or even enter, the domain name of some russian site containing only cyrillic letters? Face it, internationalisation is evil. We should all learn how to speak english or spanish or something and then stick to it.

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

I seriously hope you're kidding, Rickard. tongue

I have a Japanese domain (using katakana), and one in Esperanto.  They're fantastic.  I understand where this article is coming from, but I can't say I agree with it.

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

I totally agree that everyone should speak one language. The problem with that is, which one?

If its not English, there is no way anyone in US would learn spanish or swedish, or any other language. We would keep on speaking English.
Its the same with almost any other country

Indocron
$theQuestion = (2*b) || !(2*b);

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Gary - Esperanto, maybe?

Don't tell me it's dead, I've been fluent in it for two years and have many friends who are the same.  Hell, my fianceé and I speak it at home.

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Here is the expl.. for IDN

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names or Web addresses, represented by local language characters. They have the potential to transform the Internet into a truly global and multilingual tool by enabling Internet users to navigate and communicate online in their preferred script. VeriSign, a pioneer in domain name technology and the source for .com and .net, is a leader in the propagation and adoption of IDNs to help global organizations protect and secure their brands.

God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily

10 (edited by ameenullah 2005-02-18 05:18)

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

The Mozilla development team said that it will disable a browser feature that allows URL spoofing and could leave users open to scams. Upcoming releases of the Firefox and Mozilla browsers will turn off support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) by default to protect users from the spoofing, which works in current versions of Firefox, Mozilla, Opera and the Safari browser for Macs. The affected browsers support IDN, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer does not.

The spoof exploits flaws in how the browsers interpret Unicode, a broad character-set used in IDN that allows URLs to include non-English characters. Unicode can be used to craft "homographic" attacks, in which two different combinations of characters in an HTML link can display the same URL in the browser, but send users to different sites. URL spoofing exploits are useful to Internet phishing scams, making it easier to trick victims into sharing sensitive information with bogus web sites constructed by fraudsters.

The attack can be disabled in Firefox and Mozilla by setting 'network.enableIDN' to false in the browser's configuration (enter about:config in the address bar to access the configuration functions). The Mozilla development team today made this the default setting. Users who want IDN support will be able to turn it on, but will be warned about the risks involved.

Source : news.netcraft.com

God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

To know more about the IDNs and to download it, Click here.

God wisely designed the human body so that we can neither pat our own backs nor kick ourselves too easily

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Jameslicious wrote:

I seriously hope you're kidding, Rickard. tongue

I have a Japanese domain (using katakana), and one in Esperanto.  They're fantastic.  I understand where this article is coming from, but I can't say I agree with it.

But what if I want to visit your Japanese domain?

Jameslicious wrote:

Gary - Esperanto, maybe?

Don't tell me it's dead, I've been fluent in it for two years and have many friends who are the same.  Hell, my fianceé and I speak it at home.

Sure, Esperanto is fine. Just as long as everyone speaks the same language.

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

13

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

The consensus at Mozilla at the moment is that the security risk outweighs the benefits of IDN support. I speak Japanese fluently and love the idea of international domain names, and yet I agree with Mozilla's assessment.

Don't get worked up over this. This is a short term step for them. They plan on re-enabling IDN support in future releases, assuming they can devise a solution to the spoofing problem in the long term.

14

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Gerv is hard at work devising solutions already:
http://www.gerv.net/security/phishing-b … ences.html

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Rickard wrote:
Jameslicious wrote:

I seriously hope you're kidding, Rickard. tongue

I have a Japanese domain (using katakana), and one in Esperanto.  They're fantastic.  I understand where this article is coming from, but I can't say I agree with it.

But what if I want to visit your Japanese domain?

You...type it into your addressbar? tongue

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

But how would I do that using English as my input language?

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Rickard wrote:

But how would I do that using English as my input language?

There are hundreds of programs out there that let you convert one language's keystrokes into another.  I use Mac OS X, and all I have to do is change the little Australian flag up there in the menu bar to a Japanese one (or an Esperanto one, or a French one, or a Chinese one, or even to the Dvorak keyboard).  There's a Japanese converter thing on Windows called JStar, I think.  Look it up, it's really simple.

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

I don't know, I just think it's stupid. The human obsession with speaking all these different languages just feels so "anti-evolutional". Imagine a world where we all spoke the same language and used the same currency.

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Imagine a world where we all spoke TWO languages - our native, and one common language that we used between those who didn't know our own.

Say, for example, that you're French.  You're proud of your French heritage, and see English as a parasite language that's a poison.  You refuse to speak it.  I'm Australian, and so I speak English.  I see the French language as too "poofy" and flowery, and I refuse to speak that.

However, if we both spoke ANOTHER language, such as Esperanto...we could communicate.  More than that, we could communicate on LEVEL GROUND.  I speak Japanese, and I speak it pretty well.  However, whenever I'm speaking with a native Japanese speaker, I always feel a little lower than them, and I know the reverse is true when they speak English with me.  But if we were both to use a language that we don't speak natively, neither would have an advantage over the other.

The cool thing about Esperanto though, is that it's so simple and easy that even though it's your second language, you can speak it as well as you speak your first.  I've got a Viet Namise friend with whom I speak Esperanto all the time - I kind of have to, as she speaks no English and I speak no Viet Namise.  It's really a phenominal experience.

But, I digress - I support world bi-lingualism, not world monolingualism.  Keep your own language and use that in your country and with people you already speak that with, thus preserving the culture your language has, and speak Esperanto (or another bridge language), that's neutral, doesn't give any advantages to any one country/ethnic group, and facilitates business and cultural understanding.

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Sure, bi-ligualism is fine by me. Just as long as we have a means of communicating globally. I'm afraid some people are still too ignorant to embrace such a concept though.

BTW, how does Esperanto sound? Somewhat like Spanish?

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

21

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

The only difficulty is that, cultural evolution being what it is, before long everybody would have developed their own dialect of Esperanto and we would be back to square one.

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Esperanto's been around for over 100 years, has millions of speakers, and it hasn't split into dialects.  This is because people tend to create slang and idioms in their own language, whereas with Esperanto, the idea is to be understood across all nations/countries/cultures. 

For example - in Esperanto, you can't say "it's raining cats and dogs".  That means, "there are cats and dogs falling from the sky"...it's literal.  You'd say instead, "pluvegas", that is, "there's heavy rain".  It's like if we were to say in English, "I've got a pig!", it'd mean just that, rather than "Man I'm lucky!" like it does in German.

Sure, there are diffferent ways of speaking, but it's not like the differences between British English and, say, Ebonics.  And we have slang (we're not THAT boring tongue), but not to such an extreme as there is in English.  For example, a tarted up woman is a christmas tree, and if you're drunk you're blue.  These usages are discouraged, though, but seem to be generally understood and timeless (unlike slang in English, which seems to change every generation)

On the sound of Esperanto, it DOES kind of sound like Spanish/Italian, mostly due to the high concentration of vowel sounds.  Words end in a or o depending on whether they're an adjective or noun, and e if they're an adverb.  Verb endings are done by as is os (present, past, future), and so yeah, there's a sort of Spanishy flavour.

23

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

I don't see how bi- (or multi-) lingualism ties in with international domain names.

I also support bi-lingualism, or rather multi-lingualism, but I think international domain names are a fundamentally flawed idea.
Now, I don't speak esperanto at all, so I'm not sure if it uses any non-english characters. If it does, then I think it's a pretty poor language to use as the one common language. The sweet thing about english (or any other language that uses only english characters) is that anybody can enter it using their keyboard, regardless of whether or not their language uses fancy characters.

As I said, I have no knowledge of esperanto at all, so it may suit the task (only english-alphabet characters).
But as far as I know, english is a more widespread language, especially among people who do not have english has their first language. In fact, a most people that I communicate with over the internet, in english, have english as their second or even third language, and it all works out pretty well.

I get what you're saying with esperanto being a sort of neutral middle-ground, but I don't see how esperanto would be different from english when you're learning a second language. In your example with the french person considering english to be a parasite language, what's to say they don't think the same of esperanto?

24 (edited by Jameslicious 2005-02-21 22:40)

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet (that's the same as English's alphabet), but doesn't use w, x, q, or y, and has a couple other letters with 'hats' on them, like the French do.  You can type it using any keyboard, and, if for some reason you can't use the hats (because you're not supporting UTF-8 encoding, *cough*), the official 'workaround' is to use 'h' after the letter, much like you use 'e' after a German vowel to show that it has an umlaut.

Esperanto is as widespread as English, it just doesn't have the same number of speakers...Esperanto is spoken in at least 85 countries and has an estimated 8 million speakers.  However, that number may be bigger now, as it's taken from my 1999 edition of "Teach Yourself Esperanto", but really it doesn't matter.  It's like asking, "How many people play chess?" - nobody knows, and it doesn't matter. 

As to you seeing Esperanto being no different from English as a second language...look at this:

Drink
Drank
Drunk

but not

Think
Thank
Thunk

Computer - Computers

but not

Mouse - Mouses

Eight different ways of pronouncing 'ough', 'g' sometimes being 'j', 'j' sometimes being 'y' and 'x' sometimes being 'z' or even 'sh'!  Irregularities among dialects (I didn't do anything vs I didn't do nothing), a vocabulary that's swollen rather than rich and it taking a lifetime to master rather than a few months/a year...et cetera.  It's just not suitable.

As you can see, English is full of irregularities, weird spellings and grammatical burdens.  Esperanto is streamlined, has a vocabulary common to all European languages and no irregular verbs/grammar rules at all.  It's the only spoken language of its kind, and is in the Guiness Book of Records as the only language with no irregular verbs.  With 16 grammar rules (yep, that's all...versus the countless number of rules in English) and 400 'root words', you can understand and be understood in about 80% of the language.  The rest you pick up as you go.  I became fluent in a year, practising only an hour a day.  It really is that simple.

Oh, and about the French parasite thing - I mentioned the French thinking English to be a parasite language because the English language is associated with American culture.  The French are a proud nation and won't tolerate that (they won't use our word "e-mail", for example, as they see it as too American.  They'll make up their own word instead.  Same goes for MANY techincal terms).  Esperanto belongs to no nation, has no cultural bias and is for everybody.  That is why they wouldn't see it as a parasite language.

25

Re: Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

Hehe, I don't know about you but I equate "widespread" with how many that speak it smile
If a language has five people speaking it in Australia and five people speaking it in Canada doesn't mean it's widespread, eventhough there are people on both sides of the globe speaking it smile

With "hats", do you mean the ^-character? As far as I know it's an ASCII standard character and it can be represented using ASCII (latin alphabet), so that fits the bill of being standard.

I'm not arguing against esperanto, I'm arguing against non-ASCII/latin alphabets such as the cyrillic alphabet being used for international domain names. How in the heck are the rest of us supposed to enter them? And I know that, like someone said in the thread, there are programs that convert from one alphabet to another, but is that really a solution to it?

I don't have to speak a language to be able to enter an URL in it, as long as it uses the ASCII/latin alphabet.

When is 'j' ever pronounced like 'y' by the way? I've never encountered that, sounds weird smile

Also, esperanto will most likely develop regional dialects when it's usage reaches the levels that english has reached. Regional dialects are not a function of the language used, but by the mentality of people. And I don't think you will change that any time soon smile