It’s a punycode domain, it’s how non-Roman characters in domain names are represented. Your browser will convert it to the actual Unicode characters in the address bar (and if you type them in yourself and hit enter, it’ll get translated into punycode for the actual request)
This is the Japanese katakana spelling out “Mariusu” so I’m guessing the author is called Marius
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it ruins what’s arguably the most important feature of DNS: providing human-readable names.
Using lookalike characters to deceive people has been a problem since long before anyone first got the idea to register paypa1.com but no-one ever seriously suggested abandoning human-readable names in order to avoid that problem.
I’m unsure how that’d be useful to any normal user. Let’s say the UI shows something like this:
A.com
Α.com (xn--mxa.com)
А.com (xn--80a.com)
What’s the user supposed to do with that information, how would showing the Punycode here help any normal user determine which one of these domains is the right one that they want to visit?
Helping users identify the right domain name and avoid being deceived is surely a very important thing to do, I just find it hard to see how having users read Punycode would ever be a practically useful way to achieve that.
Let’s say that I go to google.com. The UI shows
https://google.com/ . No punycode because it is plain ascii. Everything is as expected.
Now let’s say I click on a link for googӏe.com. The ui shows https://xn--googe-hof.com/ (googӏe.com) I’d be like, holy shit that is a shady URL!
That’s how I imagine it helping, although I am not a UI expert. There could be a better way. But that googӏe.com scares me – I can’t visually tell that it is not a normal lowercase “l”.
P.S. for the URL in question, https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/ (マリウス.com) I imagine that if I went to it frequently, I might begin to recognize the punycode, sorta like how people recognize rickroll URLs.
It’s a punycode domain, it’s how non-Roman characters in domain names are represented. Your browser will convert it to the actual Unicode characters in the address bar (and if you type them in yourself and hit enter, it’ll get translated into punycode for the actual request)
This is the Japanese katakana spelling out “Mariusu” so I’m guessing the author is called Marius
xn–gckvb8fzb
マリウス.com
Very interesting, today I learnt something cool and new ty
I’ve heard it’s a security feature not ro render unicode in the url because otherwise people could use Unicode lookalike characters to spoof a domain.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that it ruins what’s arguably the most important feature of DNS: providing human-readable names.
Using lookalike characters to deceive people has been a problem since long before anyone first got the idea to register paypa1.com but no-one ever seriously suggested abandoning human-readable names in order to avoid that problem.
The term “Human” does not include people who primarily read non latin-based languages silly
Note that everything outside of ASCII gets encoded in Punycode, so this also includes most languages written in the Latin script.
Shit, I forgot that Human now just means the native English-speaking world.
Ideally they should show both side by side.
I’m unsure how that’d be useful to any normal user. Let’s say the UI shows something like this:
What’s the user supposed to do with that information, how would showing the Punycode here help any normal user determine which one of these domains is the right one that they want to visit?
Helping users identify the right domain name and avoid being deceived is surely a very important thing to do, I just find it hard to see how having users read Punycode would ever be a practically useful way to achieve that.
Let’s say that I go to google.com. The UI shows
https://google.com/. No punycode because it is plain ascii. Everything is as expected.Now let’s say I click on a link for googӏe.com. The ui shows
https://xn--googe-hof.com/ (googӏe.com)I’d be like, holy shit that is a shady URL!That’s how I imagine it helping, although I am not a UI expert. There could be a better way. But that googӏe.com scares me – I can’t visually tell that it is not a normal lowercase “l”.
P.S. for the URL in question,
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/ (マリウス.com)I imagine that if I went to it frequently, I might begin to recognize the punycode, sorta like how people recognize rickroll URLs.But how would an average user know that
xn--googe-hof.comisn’t the right one?Because it does not match google.com
NGL that is a beautiful website