This misuse of Unicode to make symbols look like ascii was predicted some 10 years ago in the spam wars. It was not about fake news, but with an URL being sent by a spammer to many, where the domain in the URL used the Unicode. It wasn't really common then, because most browsers at the time could not handle Unicode in the URL. [Some of you on this mailing list may well know more about this than me.] But I remember reading forecasts that if the URL is broadened with i18n to encompass Chinese, JP, Hindi etc, then this could become more common. Don't get me wrong. I certainly think it is beneficial that someone in the Middle East [for example] can read an URL in Arabic. The global outreach on this is good and inevitable. On a tangential note - the proliferation of TLDs in the last 5 years (and this is ongoing) leads to a similar phenomenon, where instead of using Unicode to look like ascii, spammers mimic goodsite.com with (eg) go0dsite.[TLD]. (Around 2006, I cofounded metaswarm.com. We did antispam, so that's my background on this topic.) On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 12:23 PM, Dharma Dailey <dharma.dailey@gmail.com> wrote:
Among the many articles recently about the proliferation of fake news, a few have touched on the use (or misuse) of URLs to fool people.
For example, this story claims that a unicode character was swapped to make people think google was supporting a particular US candidate in the recent election:
http://mashable.com/2016/11/21/fake-google-domain/#C87rdUV2IaqL
Are any of you following this angle?
Dharma Dailey
Graduate Research Assistant emCOMP Lab Human Centered Design & Engineering University of Washington
------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
Visit the NARALO online at http://www.naralo.org ------