Thoughts on its role and impact on the web’s landscape.
  • nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    it’s a real bummer, yeah.

    but a free tier CF account has the potential to completely solve your AI scraper traffic problems with very little configuration.

    • 9point6@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      3 days ago

      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

        • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          181·
          3 days ago

          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.

          • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            41·
            2 days ago

            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.

              • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                2·
                1 day ago

                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.

                • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                  1·
                  1 day ago

                  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.

    • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      151·
      3 days ago

      Yes, it’s not very user friendly of Lemmy to display the Punycode encoded URL instead of the human readable form. While only a fraction of all people on the internet are able to read Japanese, there aren’t any at all who are able to read Punycode fluently.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
      41·
      3 days ago

      The FQDN is only a translation lookup between a human readable name and an IP address, it doesn’t say anything about the trustworthiness of the content or its operators, it’s just a name. DNS exists for convenience not establishing trust.

  • Sips'@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    What an awesome website! Its literary a goldmine of good information on privacy tips!