[ga] Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains - Well almost...

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All former DNSO GA members or other interested stakeholders/users,

  An interesting but relatively insignificant development for the
DNS and the "Culture and Diversity" folks...
Netcraft has the story that Mozilla has decided to drop support for
international domain names in future versions of its Firefox Web
browser. The decision comes after demonstrations by the Schmoo
Group that the feature can be used to aid in phishing scams and
other browser naughtiness." From the article: "The attack can be
disabled in Firefox and Mozilla by setting 'network.enableIDN' to
false in the browser's configuration (enter about:config in the
address bar to access the configuration functions). The Mozilla
development team today made this the default setting. Users
who want IDN support will be able to turn it on, but will be
warned about the risks involved.  It will be interesting to see
if MS and Netscape will follow suit.  If MS does, it will be a
much more concerning and impacting development.
See:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/02/15/firefox_to_disable_idn_support_as_phishing_defense.html

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" -
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liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by
P: i.e., whether B is less than PL."
United States v. Carroll Towing  (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947]
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