Archive for January 2008

Say yours on .eu IDNs

The European Registry EURid has published today an invitation to participate in an online survey about the upcoming introduction of Internationalized Domain names in the .eu namespace. It´s gonna be a huge enterprise, as EURid plans to introduce support for all 23 official languages of the European Union in one go.
The questionnaire is open to [...]

Internationalization

InternationalFlags_Small.jpgRecently, we were thinking about purchasing new domain names for Imperva’s web site in languages other than English. This was a trigger for me to do some reading on ICANN’s International Domain Names (IDNs). Although I was already familiar with the general IDN concept, I knew that it is an evolving standard and I wanted to go back and re-examine the potential impacts on our WAF product. I didn’t find anything too interesting, but I did come to understand that there are some major security implications associated with this standard.  More importantly, no one has yet taken real responsibly for dealing with them.

But before I get into that, here’s a crash course in IDNs for those of you who are not familiar with the concept:

1. International domain names are becoming more and more available as more registrars and ISPs are implementing the IDN standard, which allows registering domain names that include non-ASCII characters.  

Will there really be a new Russian Internet?

There have been some reports in the past few days about possible “division” of the Internet in Russia, tied in with speculation that the forthcoming Cyrillic domain names will be used to grant the Russian government more control over its citizens. The source of this speculation appears to be an article published in UK newspaper [...]

Kremlin eyes internet control…

The growing cold war with Russia has a new front besides oil fields and undersea territorial claims: the internet. Russia’s government is pushing for greater control over the Russian-language part of the net – and its aim seems to be to create a web that operates in Cyrillic, completely independent from the wider web. The [...]