Technology

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[–] turbowafflz@lemmy.world 30 points 11 months ago (4 children)

It's punycode, it displays as japanese characters in a real browser.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

1000020477

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[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 10 points 11 months ago*

For those curious, the characters are katakana (the syllabary often used in Japan for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc) and they'd be read as "ma-ri-u-su", which is possibly intended to represent "Marius" under Japanese spelling conventions.

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[–] capt_kafei@lemmy.ca 5 points 11 months ago

I didn't know about that, thanks for sharing.

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[–] cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 months ago

Thx TIL

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[+] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works -7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

in a real browser

Which is a major security risk and you should avoid those "real browsers".

by displaying Unicode characters an attacker can send you a link that clearly shows its yahoo.com and you see in the browser url that its yahoo.com but in reality its unicode letters that look similar to latin one.

that's really bad

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[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Not everyone uses English. Many languages can't be written with only ASCII characters.

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[–] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

I get why it was introduced. I am telling you why its dangrous

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[–] turbowafflz@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

I'm not aware of a modern browser that doesn't render it by default. I meant a real browser as in a browser not a lemmy client

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/04/17/chrome-and-firefox-adding-protection-against-this-nasty-phishing-trick/

[–] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago

you are right.

You could disable it though in firefox: "about:config" and find "network.IDN_show_punycode" and set to true.

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[–] HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 12 points 11 months ago

Others have explained the unicode-in-URL aspect sufficiently, but I can speak to the author of the site somewhat. His or her blog posts have hit the fediverse several times before. They're often insightful and skeptical, highly privacy conscious. I hope they don't mind if I take this part from their FAQ:

Can I trust the information on this website?

No. And you should never trust any single website or entity. Especially not the ones that have sponsored content or have no academic/professional background in the topics they post about.

Take this information as mere pointers into different directions, that scratch the surface and ultimately provoke your itch to find out more about the individual topics. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.

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[–] NegentropicBoy@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

xn--gck...whatever is famous in some circles!

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[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

So, you monolingual? 🙂

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[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Woah are you a monophobe or something?

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[+] puppinstuff@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

[deleted]

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social [S] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

Its fine. Trust me /s

Actually probably good on you to not trust everything on the internet.

This individual has a strange url but generally has some really insightful articles.

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[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 15 points 11 months ago

It's not really a "strange url" it's just the way we decided to implement unicode into URLs, which for the purposes of phishing links is catastrophically dangerous, so it's never really been widely adopted and most sites choose by default to show the raw URL, for safety. This is why we can't have nice things (and instead need to have xn-dfg344jlb5jsdfl543sdfsd.com)