Brian Krebs writes on how browsers choose to display IDN. The issue here is of course spoofing valid URLs with visually similar letters. You probably would notice the lame attempt in the department line but some of the international characters are very similar or indeed identical. Depending on your personal preferences it might be a good idea to use punycode instead. Could save you a headache later.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/look-alike-domains-and-visual-confusion/
Here are some of the applicable RFCs:
(Score: 2, Insightful) by cocaine overdose on Sunday March 11 2018, @04:08PM (8 children)
And here we are. After years of appealing to mouth-breathers who couldn't remember 5 sets of 1-3 characters each (or 4 sets of 4 characters, woe is me), and facing the consequences, we're now at another absolutely avoidable exploit (it's an old one, Apple users were phished with it last year). The only two things domain names do well is: make it easier for retards to remember the Pinterest IP and make it easier for sysadmins to play hot potato with service providers. There's also the metadata aspect, but you can get past that with a little bit of finger grease.
Besides those, I cannot think of any other reason to use domain names (except making name squatters and "registrats" a.k.a licensed-squatters loads of dosh). But I can think of many reasons not to:
Abolish domain names. IPv6 addresses are the future.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 11 2018, @05:10PM (1 child)
Back in the day the only way to host multiple sites on just one box required that box to have multiple IP addresses
Everyone knew that hilarity would soon ensue so HTTP 1.1 enables multiple sites by putting the domain in the header:
GET /hello.jpg goatse.cx
Or something like that
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by cocaine overdose on Sunday March 11 2018, @05:41PM
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday March 12 2018, @01:01AM (5 children)
With what shall we replace them?
a. "On AOL go to keyword 'twitter'"
b. Google it... Uh, I mean, remember a google ip address and "number it" (we remember 8.8.8.8 for dns, ironically, so why not e.g. 1.2.3.4 for web search?)
c. DHT or the equivalent
d. Call us at 1-800-toll-free or visit our website at https://[2001:0db8:0a0b:12f0:0000:0000:0000:0001] [2001:0db8:0a0b:12f0:0000:0000:0000]
e. Other, please specify
I ask mostly out of curiosity. I have given namecheap a pretty good chunk of money over the years.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by cocaine overdose on Monday March 12 2018, @03:11AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 12 2018, @02:37PM
So someone at Google writes a script to request new keysigns until they get google again? And then discards the ready, or just hangs on to them for other purposes?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday March 12 2018, @03:11PM (2 children)
Well, onion domains are almost good enough.
Almost means "not".
(Score: 1) by cocaine overdose on Monday March 12 2018, @03:43PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday March 12 2018, @04:41PM
Purpose of DNS [business.com]: Translate unique easy-to-remember words or phrases to harder-to-remember IP addresses.
Number of onion domains that are easy-to-remember words or phrases: ~= 0 [imgur.com]
Number of onion domains that are indisputably easier to remember than arbitrary IP addresses: ~= 0 [imgur.com]
Scores (Any "No" means "Fails to provide functionality of DNS"):
Do onion domains provide unique mapping? Yes, the mapping is unambiguous.
Do onion domains provide easily memorable words/phrases? No, although onion domains may contain words or phrases as components, the domains themselves are either gibberish, gibberish+word(s), or word(s)+gibberish.
Do onion domains translate the domain to an IP address or other appropriate record type? Yes, but the IP address may well be easier to remember.
∴ Onion domains provide functionality of DNS? No. If there were no DNS and the world had to use onion or nothing, it's debatable which would win out. Slight edge to onion for potential to support things like MX records which bare IP addresses don't address; but then you'd be edging back into DNS territory.
Analysis: Like the unreadable punycode-gibberish solution, an unreadable onion-gibberish solution proposes to replace readable names of sites with gibberish, arguably with the goal of of improving the system, but unable to do so because of the fatal flaw of being made of unintelligible gibberish by design. Our current system has serious problems, but introducing additional problems such as removing human-readability is no improvement nor solution.