Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the worl...
by thorax on Saturday February 28, 2009 @01:46PM
(#498378)
What version/build of Firefox do you have? Firefox/3.0.6?
Also, check your about:config and filter by IDN, you should see a lot of settings there. Any of them not set to default?
Especially check this one: network.enableIDN
by default it is set to True.
What other Firefox addons do you have that might be parsing URLs before you visit them? Any?
Thanks a lot for the feedback!
Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on TinyArro.ws? Tiniest urls in the worl...
by bd on Saturday February 28, 2009 @01:59PM
(#498392)
Firefox 3.0.6
network.enableIDN;false (user set)
Addons that can modify urls: NoScript, AdBlock Plus
I guess it's probably NoScript that disabled IDN (internationalized domain names). I don't remember doing it manually.
In one discussion here on HN I figured out it's probably because of some security measure to prevent phishing. There are some Unicode characters that look like normal ASCII letters (for example in Cyrillic alphabet), so if Unicode worked in urls, you could create malicious sites that would look like real ones:
http://EXAMPLE-ВANK.COM (fake)
http://EXAMPLE-BANK.COM (real)