ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
just approved using non-Latin characters in ccTLDs (country code top-level domains).

Now, when you click on that link,
there's an even greater chance[1] that it could be sending you to a phishing site
which has used characters (e.g. from the Cyrillic alphabet)
that only LOOK like English.[2]

...and it doesn't matter
that the email looks like it came from your friend/bank/whatever;
address books have been hijacked on Windoze boxes for years.


[1] It's been eons since tricksters started using link text
that displays something different than the actual URL of the link
in an effort to deceive you.

NEVER CLICK LINKS IN EMAIL.
If you want to go to the site,
CUT AND PASTE the link into your Address Bar and **examine** it.

Nowadays, it would be a good idea
to paste it into an ancient, mostly-useless app (like NotePad)
which doesn't understand non-ASCII characters.
That quickly shows the Roman-looking text to be otherwise.

[2] Standard browers make such characters look like gibberish in your Address Bar
--but only **AFTER** you have gone to the site.
e.g. http://google.com/search?q=Ćuk+Čuk+Cúk
should come back as 
q=%C4%86uk+%C4%8Cuk+C%C3%BAk

For your amusement, note also the number of inane guesses
that Google makes with this search string (especially after about the 14th item).


You can also expect a lot of URL-parsing software to break after this.

Tip: Run a free scan for common Windows errors ad

re: Yet another reason to never click links in email Friday, October 30, 2009 at 4:50 pm Posted by dhm (1069 messages posted) Yes, there already was a www.mícrosoft.com and a www.mìcrosoft.com. In case you missed it, that was not www.microsoft.com it was: www.mícrosoft.com www.mìcrosoft.com Of course, a zoom feature can reveal that. Now there can be 2 www.ebay.coms and 3 more www.annoyances.orgs because Cyrillic has its own lower case "a" that looks just like the ASCII "a" but is somewhere else and will not be read as the same site. I heard of this specific problem about 4 years ago when ICANN rejected Cyrillic. But on the other hand, a friend of mine sent me an ecard as she always has at Halloween. I used that link. It's as I figured out a long time ago that with computers a lot of it depends on who you can trust. I keep different email IDs for different purposes. In one club I am in the new chairman of my committee has decided, against my warning, to put his own ID on the club's webpage. I told him about the ID I had created with the committee's name a year ago so I could filter commercial contacts with our work. I only had a couple but it has accumulated a good deal of spam. One of them was for yRolex watches. That could be useful. If we could get them for 25¢ apiece we could give them out to every participant. But no, he's going to get himself spammed up. Maybe worse. [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows 98 Discussion Forum