i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, just decided to allow top-level domains to be written in Unicode rather than ASCII, which will for the first time enable a full URL to be constructed out of non-Latin characters, which should improve accessibility for users in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.  It will also open up a new trove of domains to register; some Icann officials claim there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use.

Unicode domains have also caused some problems, though.  In 2001, two Israeli researchers isolated an exploit they called "The Homograph Attack," where they used a URL composed of Unicode characters to spoof an ASCII URL.  In 2005, hackers exposed that they had spoofed paypal.com by registering a domain that substituted a Cyrillic "a" for a Latin one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/technology/31net.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss