Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains (Page 1 of 2)

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

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

I seriously hope you're kidding, Rickard.

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.

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.

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

But what if I want to visit your Japanese domain?

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

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

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

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.

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?

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 ), 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.

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.