Small-minded Mozilla Mocked By Wider World

[prathapml]

Full story: The Register

An exuberant Mozilla Foundation has been brought back down to earth with a bang by the world's internet organisations.

Flushed with the success of its Firefox browser, the Foundation has clearly come to believe it is an important voice in the internet community. But following a hasty decision regarding the resolving of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), it has been publicly criticised by the groups representing domain registries in both Europe and Asia, as well as the US-based internet overseeing organisation ICANN.

The issue stems from a security warning over IDNs, in which a group of so-called security experts at Shmoo.com "discovered" a problem which the rest of the internet community had been aware of for several years and created guidelines to deal with it.

Put simply, the method by which the English-based domain name system is expanded to encompass different languages from around the world provides a window of opportunity for others to mislead people. By using numbers and letters similar to others, it is possible to make people think that a domain they click on is in fact a different one.

The simplest and clearest example comes within the English language itself - a lower-case "L" can look exactly the same as an upper-case "i". And to stretch it further, the numeral "1" can be made to look like both.

With IDNs this potential for confusion is increased as domains are rendered in different nationalities' own languages. To get from one language to another, more additional numerals and letters are added. Thanks to add-ons within browsers these strange combinations are rendered into decipherable letters. But at the same time, a strange combination can be used to give a misleading impression. Shmoo managed to create an apparent link to "www.paypal.com" that actually went to its own domain.

Unfortunately, within a week Mozilla decided that the only solution was to decide to disable support for IDNs. It was a short-term solution to "protect our users", the foundation said, and it made it clear what would need to change in order to support to be restored: "If people want to see full, unrestricted IDN back in Mozilla and Firefox, the best way is to put pressure on the world's registrars and registries to fulfil their obligations to their customers - both domain owners and internet users - and commit to implementing the ICANN guidelines."

The world's registrars and registries didn't agree. CENTR - the Council of European National TLD Registries - called Mozilla's post a "hasty ill-considered response". Centr represents "over 98 per cent of domain registrations worldwide" and "believes such strong reactions are heavily detrimental to the effort to introduce non-English languages and scripts to the internet, and could have lasting repercussions on the ongoing effort to internationalise the DNS".

[Nanaki]

1. It's a 0.0.x release, so clearly temporarily.

2. Just change the pref back, sheesh.

[DigeratiPrime]

this was the smart move no doubt.

[SiMoNsAyS]

this was the smart move no doubt.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i agree, that's not a problem of firefox or opera, is a idn's problem by itself.

[iwod]

this was the smart move no doubt.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i agree, that's not a problem of firefox or opera, is a idn's problem by itself.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And they are blaming firefox? Does Ie have the same problem as well? ( I seems to remember that IE doesn't support IDN at all )

[Alanoll]

IDN was never enabled in IE. You have to download a plugin from the Windows Marketplace for it to work properly.

Firefox was the first browser to have builtin support for it (as far as I'm aware). Though the internet registars should all follow the same guidelines regardless of language and nationality, otherwise we could have a bit of a mess on our hands with people registers msfn with other characters (like the spanish n) or something.