First non-Latin domain name goes live, trips out browsers
By Darren Murph 
posted May 10th 2010 5:16AM
posted May 10th 2010 5:16AM
posted May 10th 2010 5:16AM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
This is a good step forward.
Btw, both Opera 10.50 and Safari 4.0.5 views the URL correctly.
@JMagnusson
Opera 10.53 - Correctly Rendered
Internet Explorer 8 - Incorrectly Rendered
Firefox 3.6.3 - Incorrectly Rendered
Safari 4.0.5 - Corrrectly Rendered
Chromium 6.0.398.0 (46660) - Incorrectly Rendered
@MrGiGs And that is to prevent average user from succumbing to phishing attacks. We geeks can circumvent it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
@OKK77, worth noting that the linked article also mentions (at least for FireFox/Mozilla) how to whitelist the new TLDs for them to display properly, not in the punny code.
@JMagnusson Actually it's deliberate move on IE, Firefox and Chrome's part to stop spoofing attacks, such as the one that was carried out on paypal in 2005
@vidoardes. Mozilla does it that way: they have a whitelist of TLDs where IDN is allowed. Mozilla adds to the whitelist by default only those TLDs whose registries have anti-spoofing provisions. (User can add a TLD to the whitelist manually too.)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html
@JMagnusson funny that engadget did not know about Punycode, I thought it was a tech site.
@JMagnusson
There is no such thing as "correctly" redered. The reason why Microsoft wants to use the IDN-code is because of safety. People can set up a site at Mïcrosoft.com and spread viruses and other nonos through sites like that. Having the webbrowser show http://xn--mcrosoft-u2a.com/ instead makes them aware that this is not microsoft.com
@OKK77 i've seen a presentation from one of blackhat hacker conferences where a guy was able to register a domain name with a Unicode character "⁄". So his domain name was something like "com⁄login.cn", allowing him to make the full site's url look like http://www.paypal.com⁄login.cn/hackyou.php
@JMagnusson
Opera 10.53 here, works fine.
@DoctarPeppar
if it view the URL correctly, then you have to worry!
that ascii URL only trick in browsers is for anti-phishing attack. if your browser show unicode correctly, you might be phished easily.
@ericlin
I realise why it is done, but it must be quite disappointing (and not really the point of these domain names) if they just end up getting weird latin characters in their address bar instead of the nice Unicode seen in Opera and Safari. There must be a better way?
@JMagnusson IE8 shows it correctly as well. When you open the URL, you get an alert bar that says the URL contains characters that cannot be displayed by the current language settings. You click the alert bar, choose "Change Language Settings", and add Arabic (I added Arabic (Egypt)).
God forbid Engadget do more then enter the URL and immediately close the browser when writing a news post. The people who are meant to utilize these URLs most likely already have their language settings configured for their needs and, hence, wouldn't have an issue seeing these URLs as intended.
@MrGiGs
IE8 on Win7 works perfectly, renders perfectly. keeps arabic in address bar.
you did remeber to instal the locales when IE prompted you it couldn't redner the page - add arabic saudi & bharain and you will be fine
@JMagnusson Coolest news, hopefully this won't be a gate for a new hack on the box though. http://j.mp/hack-twitter-terrible
Great. How am I supposed to visit asianporn.com without a chinese keyboard?
@The Madman More to the point, how did Asian people get to it without an English keyboard? Imagine the reverse situation where Chinese was the dominant language and all Americans and Europeans had to have Chinese characters on the keyboard alongside the native ones but pretty much every popular URL was written in English and you basically had to learn another language to get to the content.
@The Madman
Go into settings, enable Chinese input, and you are all set.
@The Madman
Most Chinese use QWERTY keyboards with Roman letters. Input is done, typically, via Pinyin which is the most common Romanization of the Chinese language. Typically, you type the word then the tone number.
The written Chinese language isn't really very compatible with typed input. You'd need a huge keyboard to make it work, or you'd have to build the characters from strokes and that would probably be slower than Pinyin.
@The Madman
There's nothing call "Chinese Keyboard", Chinese in are using US Standard QWERTY, and works just fine.
btw, Japanese porn are way better, and again you don't need to have a Japanese JIS keyboard to type Japanese as well.
Cheers
@Chris Bell Actually, there is a way to enter it by strokes, and I think I read that even though it is harder to learn it is way faster than pinyin input for a skilled user.
Opera Mini and Safari on my iPhone handles the URL properly, without changing the domain to gibberish
@Jedijesse Another interesting implication of this is that a significant portion of the world is about to drop IE.
*prepares for IE marketshare to plummet like a ton of bricks once the Asian population catches wind of this*
http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/
Pronounced as: mowqae.wazart al-atsalat.masr
Translation: No idea, I can only read Arabic :P
@MrHashbrown The website has something to do with Egypt and Technology. It's a govt website. Thats all I can really understand.
@MrHashbrown
Translation,
Site of Ministery of communication, Egypt
@MrHashbrown
Translation: website.ministry-telecommunication.egypt
Which translates to real world use as:
www.ministry-telecommunication.eg
Now I don't feel special anymore :(
@MrHashbrown
Or you can click the "English" button on the page and have it translated for you. As others have said, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Egypt.
@FallenArms3
انجادجت.كوم
thats engadget.com :P
@MrHashbrown
Serious question, what does the al- bit mean that they use a lot?
@ilh
Al in Arabic means "the"
It's combined with the word that follows it rather than being a separate word.
@Jabriiiz
أو ممكن إنغاجيت
@lennonbarret06
او انقادقت :P
@MrHashbrown
It means the website of the ministry of communication , of Egypt. .
do arabic writings got "." dot and "/" characters?
Yes.
نعم.
@ThomasK the dot "." is used to mark the end of the sentence.
@MrHashbrown
The dot in the Arabic yes should be on the left of na'am.
@ThomasK i know but my pc was forcing it to the right for some reason.
@MrHashbrown yes, that's a common weird problem and I don't know how to solve it.
If you're typing some arabic text and you entered a character that is available in both languages, it is treated as an english character and goes in the other direction, it can even mess up the whole arabic text and make it look as if it was originally english text with some arabic characters, not the other way round !
The Egyptian Ministry of Info and IT Base on where the big "English" link leads.
@Dpmt Yeah...that.
@Dpmt Communications I mean. I should not comment at 3 in the morning.
Yeah, Engadget.. works fine in Safari. Didn't test it quite thorough enough did you? Or do you have a ban on Apple these days?
Does Engadget have a ban on Apple these days?
If you live in Bizarro Land, then Yes. Yes they do.
Their English site with full story about domain. http://xn--4gbrim.xn----ymcbaaajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/whatsnew.aspx
yeap on safari it loads as
http://موقع.وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر/ar/default.aspx
so not all arabic
@jpm can filenames be in arabic?
@MySchizoBuddy no idea