Perhaps a bit off-topic, but some folks might get support calls...
(that's Arabic for <Ministry of Communications>.<Egypt>)
Regards,
-drc
Great progress and interesting addition to the root, only issue is
that after all the work with IDNs you land on a page written in
english (web browser lang does not matter, name resolves to the same
IP as the original URL). Hope they soon take advantage of the new name
...
Cheers
Jorge
The page shows up in Arabic for me in all three of Safari (in which the URL bar also shows the Arabic name), Chrome and Firefox (in both of which the URL bar shows the encoded US-ASCII characters for the domain name). I tested using the Mac versions of these three browsers, and English is set as my preferred language. Arabic doesn't appear until much farther down on the list.
The Safari experience looks nicer, but I suppose it leaves its users more susceptible to maliciously-constructed domain names that look similar to well-known ones. I wonder if they've addressed that issue in some way. I haven't been checking recently.
- Geoff
Hi Geoff,
yes, as I reported through other channels today the new IDN based URL
started landing on the Arabic version of the page. Kudos for the folks
in Egypt that are now taking advantage of the new ccTLD.
I noticed testing with IE8, Chrome, FFox and Safari, that Safari is
the only one that keeps showing the original URL in Arabic in the
navigation toolbar, all the others switch to the ASCII encoded one.
I guess there is more work/configuration to be done on the client side.
Cheers
Jorge
Geoff Adams wrote:
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but some folks might get support calls...
http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/
(that's Arabic for <Ministry of Communications>.<Egypt>)
Great progress and interesting addition to the root, only issue is
that after all the work with IDNs you land on a page written in
english (web browser lang does not matter, name resolves to the same
IP as the original URL). Hope they soon take advantage of the new name
The page shows up in Arabic for me in all three of Safari
When I first checked this site yesterday, I saw a page in English[1]. The same page is in Arabic today, in the same browsers that displayed English when I checked yesterday. I assume the server admin waited until the domain went live before implementing language display selection based on the URL used to reach the site, and now it's working correctly.
[1] Such as I see when I use this URL instead: http://www.mcit.gov.eg/
jc
I'm getting three different behaviours from Firefox
- I have the page open in a tab. The tab header is in Arabic script.
(And the page itself renders fine in Arabic.)
- When I go to that tab, the main Firefox window title shows boxes
(i.e. "don't have the font for this.")
- When I go to that tab, the Address Bar shows ugly punycode xn-format junk.
I agree Safari experience looks much nicer and yes whole host of potential
malice to arise. Firefox shows punycode
http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/ar/default.aspx
Now if I understood arabic only and was travelling or happen to use Firefox
which showed punycode how would I trust it? If it was directly translated to
latin characters I could trust it with verification from someone I know who
understands english. I would not trust puny code because an end user does
not know what it means, I think there is potential for a lot of issues here.
Zaid
I agree, that seems like nonsense.
The answer for non-Arabic-speakers who are concerned about whether an Arabic URL is a phishing site is presumably just not to follow any Arabic URLs. They're surely intended for people that don't have that problem.
Joe
David Conrad wrote:
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but some folks might get support calls...
http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/
That actually looks quite handsome. 
This is indeed a security issue, and the behaviour in Firefox is currently that way by design.
To fix it, the .eg / .xn--4gbrim TLD registrar needs to contact the Mozilla Foundation in order to inform the Foundation of their official IDN name allocation policy, so that the native-script URL display can then be switched on for their domain.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=564213 and http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html
-- Neil
Neil Harris (neil) writes:
To fix it, the .eg / .xn--4gbrim TLD registrar needs to contact the
Mozilla Foundation in order to inform the Foundation of their
official IDN name allocation policy, so that the native-script URL
display can then be switched on for their domain.See 564213 - Add .<Egypt> to IDN whitelist and
IDN Display Algorithm - MozillaWiki
Wow, talk about layer violation.
Is there a central place where various TLDs' IDN policies will
be maintained ? I see a scalability issue if TLDs have to communicate
to every single application maintainer out there what their policy is.
Cheers,
Phil
To fix it, the .eg / .xn--4gbrim TLD registrar needs to contact the
Mozilla Foundation in order to inform the Foundation of their
official IDN name allocation policy, so that the native-script URL
display can then be switched on for their domain.Wow, talk about layer violation.
Yeah, security can be like that. Things which technically are treated
the same are often semantically very different.
Is there a central place where various TLDs' IDN policies will
be maintained ?
Yes, of course. See Repository of IDN Practices
It doesn't have the new IDN TLDs yet, but that's not surprising since
ICANN didn't bother to tell the registries in advance that would be
making the TLDs active. See
R's,
John
Wait until the FCC, FTC, and IRS finish taking over the Internet.
Yeah I was experimenting around with that yesterday. Imagine a zone
file full of such domain names. Ack! "Did I accidentally hit x in
the middle of that name in VIM? Better run it through the converter
to make sure." Yay yet another level of complexity in DNS
management. Some of the names look as ugly as the contents of DNSSEC
RRs. 
Wait until the FCC, FTC, and IRS finish taking over the Internet.
You forgot FBI, NSA and CIA, just to mention a few more three letter
agencies ... k'mon gimme a break.
Cheers