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February 11, 2005

IDN support

All browsers supporting even vaguely modern concepts (so, anything but IE...) these days seem to support IDN. Which I suppose is nice if you want to register a domain name with a biohazard symbol in, or you want to use the vast wealth of characters available outside of ASCII for your domain names, perhaps because your native language uses some other alphabet. Great, sounds really useful, and every credit to the people rushing to support it. Unfortunately, domain name registrars are pretty slack about checking what they let people register, it seems, and the cunning people at Shmoo.com have found a clever trick which would let phishers exploit this.

If this worries you, and you don't generally need to use sites with fancy schmancy unicode characters in their names, consider switching off IDN support in your browser. In firefox, this means going into about:config, filtering by "network", and disabling "network.enableIDN" (thanks to Chris for pointing this out). Unfortunately, this setting won't stick across restarts of firefox, in the stable released builds; according to boingboing the latest builds fix this.

This has been a public service announcement.

[Update: The nice people at Mozilla seem to have found a third way. (via Hacking for Christ)]

Posted by James at 12:07 | Comments (2)
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February 09, 2005

Three times is enemy action

So, my housemate's girlfriend's housemate (did you follow that?) turns out to have the same birthday as my Dad. Fair enough, not an entirely unheard of coincidence, 4 people in every 14611 share that birthday. But then I discover that her dad has the same birthday as me!

Freaky.

1 assuming a uniform distribution, yadda yadda.

Posted by James at 09:15 | Comments (2)
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February 04, 2005

Did you ever hear...

... about the two men arrested for telling jokes in a courthouse?

Posted by James at 01:02 | Comments (0)
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