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Re: Non-English Domain Names Likely Delayed

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Tue Jul 19 10:14:31 2005 
On 19-jul-2005, at 15:03, Brad Knowles wrote:


 The public key crypto that powers the authentication in SSL.



    But that has nothing to do with the DNS.




:-) That's exactly the point: DNS tricks won't buy you anything
(except denial of service) in the presence of SSL.




"protecting" users agains the fact that similar
looking/sounding names actually map to completely different things
ultimately can't be done, so it's better to not do it at all so users
get burned by relatively harmless examples of this phenomenon
(www.gougle.com and the like) so they understand it and foster the
appropriate level of distrust.





    Actually, that's a statement that I can agree with.



Excellent.




 My point was that, if you're going to try to protect the users
against homophone/homograph attacks, you need to do it in a
standardized way.



And my point is, that in the absence of a standardized way a non-
standardized way will do temporarily.




 Morover, the standards for controlling that need to be held by
separate entities from those who are creating the tools which will
implement those standards -- witness Microsoft's recent downgrading
of Claria/Gator as a malware vendor, simply because they're looking
at buying the company.



Sure, why not. I'm not convinced it will help, though. (Giving in to
the conspiracy theorists doesn't work: they'll just think it's a
conspiracy.)