Recently it has become a problem that optical twins of legit URLs exist, where some letters have been replaced by alike letters (homoglyphs) from different alphabets, see e.g. the list in this link.
Edit: Edge and Vivaldi seem to replace those letters by Punycode automalically, where in Firefox network.IDN_show_punycode needs to be enabled in the about:config. bleepingcomputer.com
Should transform to https://🌽.ws/ when you click it. The xn— is the punycode prefix.
Here’s how Punycode works:
Unicode characters are first converted into a series of code points, which are represented as a series of numbers.
The code points are then converted into a series of ASCII characters, using a specific algorithm.
The ASCII characters are then prepended with “xn–”, which is a special prefix that indicates that the following characters are encoded in Punycode.
For example, the Unicode character 快 (which means fast in Chinese) is represented as the code point “U+5FEB”. This code point is then converted into the ASCII characters “2s5v”, which is prepended with the “xn–” prefix to give us “xn–2s5v”. This can then be used as part of a domain name.
When the domain name is displayed to a user, the Punycode is converted back into Unicode characters, so that the user sees the original characters rather than the encoded version. This allows users to use and read domain names in their native scripts, even if their computer or device doesn’t support those scripts.
Huh. Well, I was watching the URL bar the entire time and it only moved directly from the emoji to the X tweet; I never saw your decoded URL, unless it simply happens that fast, or I’m misunderstanding your last paragraph and that’s what was supposed to happen.
Recently it has become a problem that optical twins of legit URLs exist, where some letters have been replaced by alike letters (homoglyphs) from different alphabets, see e.g. the list in this link.
Edit: Edge and Vivaldi seem to replace those letters by Punycode automalically, where in Firefox
network.IDN_show_punycodeneeds to be enabled in theabout:config.bleepingcomputer.com
I’m pretty sure ff shows punycode automatically. I’ve never had to touch it at least and I get punycode.
Tbf, the article is from 2018. It possibly has changed in the meantime.
Dang. Is there an equivalent Firefox add-on that checks for this stuff?
No Homo Graphs was last updated in 2020.
URL unicode verifier was last updated in 2023 and only has 1 review.
It’d be nice to find something more recent.
Ff shows punycode. The article is quite old.
I don’t even understand what it is, really; do you have an example of it in action?
🌽.ws
Should transform to https://🌽.ws/ when you click it. The
xn—is the punycode prefix.https://www.link-assistant.com/seo-wiki/punycode/
Huh. Well, I was watching the URL bar the entire time and it only moved directly from the emoji to the X tweet; I never saw your decoded URL, unless it simply happens that fast, or I’m misunderstanding your last paragraph and that’s what was supposed to happen.
Also, that’s one heck of a short link, haha.
Might be because it’s a redirect… or maybe Firefox shows emojis directly but not other punycode?
How can the configuration be done on the Android phone ?