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CIRA IDN Consultation

I may update this with further thoughts later, but I wanted to get this up so people became aware of it....

Check it out, get a chance to have your thoughts heard:

"When a domain name works with any character beyond the a-z alphabet, it's called an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN). CIRA is considering the implementation of French character IDNs so that .CA domain names can be written correctly in French. Find out more about IDNs and about our proposed launch policy."

While I think this is an interesting idea I see lots of problems with implementing this change.

  1. Lots of software will have to be updated to accommodate the change (DNS server software, DNS client software, all kinds of security packages [AV, FWs, IDS, IPS, etc])...

  2. Adding other characters to DNS just BEGS FOR ABUSE. Think of the phishing possibilities using Domain Names with accented characters?

  3. The change requires user education that will NEVER happen. it's hard enough to get users to pay attention to standard English domain names...

  4. Companies will now have to pay for and maintain registrations for even more DNS entries for actual translations of their name and the numerous misspellings (assuming they care that a malicious individual may squat on such and ruin their name etc).


I haven't been able to find out but I doubt that anyone has actually done any analysis vs. Canadian HoneyPots/HoneyDNS to see if users are actually trying to use accented characters for DNS. It seems like this is going to "fix" something that isn't broken or add support for something that the community doesn't really need or want.

If the greater community actually wants to do this why don't we go full foreign character support at the same time? Fix/enhance software to handle all characters at the same time (instead of piece-meal), etc.

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