[Update - Note: A coworker pointed out that it's really Fussball or Fußball, since it's a noun. I knew that, I'm just using the lower case here because domain names get lower cased, which is a seperate issue and I didn't want to complicate the example.] IDNA2008 (which is something of a misnomer...

The EAI Working Group ( http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/eai/charter/ ) is making rapid progress toward standardizing Unicode email addresses. Unicode email addresses are a terrific feature for people in many countries that don't use Latin/ASCII as a native script. Ironically, in the US its easy to miss...

http://موقع.وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر (I don't know what it is, I don't read arabic, I'm just pointing it out as an example.) http://президент.рф (for a cyrillic example, apparently the president of Russia web site). -Shawn

This is old news, but I didn't blog about it yet. 4 IDN ccTLDs have been approved: http://icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-21jan10-en.htm Cyrillic Script Russian Federation (RU): рф Arabic Script Egypt (EG): مصر Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات

I was pointed to this article http://www.microsofttranslator.com/BV.aspx?ref=Internal&a=http%3a%2f%2fwww.bortzmeyer.org%2fidn-et-phishing.html about IDN and homographs, which points out that most of the fear around IDN and phishing is unfounded. Seemed like a good reference (thanks, Mark), so I'm...

Some people have asked what they should do to support IDNA2008 on Microsoft platforms. We provide IdnToAscii() and related functions in the Windows SDK. That's available natively on Vista+, and through idndl.dll on earlier platforms. Idndl is shipped with IE 7, or through "Microsoft Internationalized...

A couple months ago I blogged about EAI Email Address Internationalization/Internationalized Email Addresses (EAI/IMA) and felt like blogging again. China's been very interested in non-ASCII email addresses for some time, and is working hard to adopt the EAI standard. I've heard a target of November...

I wrote about IDN & Security before http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste/archive/2005/03/03/384692.aspx but thought I'd share some of my more updated views about security of URLs/IDN/Unicode/Email addresses. People haven't really bothered much with DNS or character based security when it was limited...

With the IDN work for Internationalized Domain Names using characters beyond ASCII, it is only natural to tackle the problem of Internationalized Internet eMail. Some smart people have been working on an IETF working group to figure out how non-ASCII email would work, and I encourage people to take...

There's a reasonably new RFC 4690 ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4690.txt ) that raises a bunch of questions about IDN names and Unicode regarding such things as confusable characters and other issues. Some of those are also discussed in Unicode TR36 "Unicode Security Considerations" http://www.unicode...

[Update: I now have a couple that use IDN TLDs] http://президент.рф/ http://موقع.وزارة-الاتصالات.مصر/ A colleague gave me some URLs to use for testing IDN. I don't vouch for any of these sites, and some are obvious ads and some may be inappropriate (since I can't read them), but maybe they'll be...

Recently I've seen a spate of bugs involving client-server web applications related to the user locale. Windows Vista has added a ton of locales that weren't there in XP or Server 2003 or Microsoft.Net v2.0. Additionally users can create and use their own custom locales. Lastly, they've always been...

Recently it came to my attention that arbitrary implementation of IDN can break existing networks. Particularly on Intranets machine names have not always been restricted to ASCII. In many of our markets it is quite common to have non-ASCII machine names. So in some cases there are existing deployments...

I'm often asked why particular strings fail the IdnToAscii function. The answer is "because its not a legal IDN name, that's why" :-) But why aren't some strings legal IDN names? Some rules act on the "label" level. In www.microsoft.com www, microsoft & com are each separate labels. IDN...

Since we (I) didn't provide a .lib file for the "Microsoft Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Mitigation APIs 1.0", you'll have to explicitly link to the IDN Mitigation API dll, which means you'll have to make your own header & code something like: [5 May 2009 - updated with Siva's comment, but...

Today we posted some APIs that convert to & from IDN Punycode, provide some mitigation functionality for those APIs, and provide Unicode Normalization support. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E289BB2C-D111-4331-8FB2-CC6C5A026C93&displaylang=en See the documentation...

I’ve divided this into a few parts: About IDN IDN & Security Homograph Thoughts Conclusion About IDN: My interest in IDN is that I’m the SDE for the System.Globalization.IdnMapping class in Whidbey . I also think its pretty nifty for the users in countries that use more than the basic Latin letters...