Ironically this is made worse by some fontsets such as Noto, that unify the look over a variety of scripts (which is something you normally _want_).

This is going to be fun to watch. Unicode domain names are a can of worms.

Yep.

"Unicode is too complex to ever be secure" - Bruce Schneier

Could be made a standard to signal non ascii chars by programs. A (red squared g)oogle might grab attention. Maybe a full underline ..

That might be nice for you but it would be annoying for those of us who use non-latin scripts.

Good point .. maybe a dual set based on the user locale..

That's why browsers should color the backgrounds by the character codepoint. And do something crazier with multi-character icons.

This is a good idea, but I worry that non-technical people might not notice or care about such a minor difference. Thinking of my family and relatives, I'd imagine that almost none of them would think to avoid typing in their password if some characters in the URL bar had a different colored background but looked visually similar to domains they recognized.

People create parody or trick Twitter accounts using a similar trick with typical sans-serif fonts where capital I (I) and lower case L (l) look the same. (Note: This is not true with whatever font Hacker News uses.)

So instead of @realdonaldtrump you could create @reaIdonaIdtrump and to the untrained eye, you'd think it was the same thing.

I found some fonts reuse exact same vector instructions for Cyrillic "А" and English "A" in the same file