For the situation in the article it would not have changed anything. As the fake domains were just adding an 's' to the end of the domain.

Also I'm not sure what effect that will have for Chinese users. It might make many of their URLs look strange to them.

See: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7ul9p3/why_is_netw...

I'm not aware of any Chinese websites that don't just use Pinyin for their domain name. Some random person is squatting on http://xn--wxtr44c.xn--fiqs8s/ (百度.中国), but Baidu doesn't seem to care. They use http://www.baidu.com/ as their primary address.

> I'm not aware of any Chinese websites that don't just use Pinyin for their domain name.

There are tons. One prominent email provider is a three-digit number. There's a job board at 51job.com.

(What's 51job? Read in Mandarin, that would be "wǔ yāo job" [five one "job" (the English word)]. This is felt to sound similar to "wǒ yào job" 我要job [I want a job].)

I should've written "... that don't just use ASCII characters instead of Hanzi." Of course domains using numbers or English words aren't Pinyin, but the point is that they don't require Punycode to represent.

Why is 1 = yāo? It is yi isn’t it?

一 yi (tone varies based on phonological context) is the ordinary word for 1.

幺 yāo is a common word for 1 when vocalizing a stream of digits. (Such as a phone number / credit card number / account number / etc.) I am told that this originated as a way to easily distinguish 1 from 7 (七 qī) when communicating over a low-quality connection. In the presence of static, yi and qi could sound similar.

CC-CEDICT has a good gloss ( https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=... ):

> one (unambiguous spoken form when spelling out numbers, esp. on telephone or in military)

Thanks!

The other day I was browsing a list of all my country's domains and noticed a bunch starting with xn-- and you just made me understand what these are.

None of them seem worth phishing for. In some cases when you google the site name, google will show results from sitename.tld and when you visit the site with the show_punycode true, it will actually load pages from the xn-- equivalent. So it looks like the "original" domain isn't even indexed or online at all.

In another case both the xn-- and "normal" domain sit side by side on the same server. I guess there's no harm in posting these:

cadzandie.be and xn--cadzandi-01a.be. Note there's no ë in the first domain

Another strange one is

xn--rembours-i1a.be

When you type in remboursé.be it actually redirects (?) to the xn-- equivalent.

I'm fascinated but having a hard time seeing sense in this.