* ɢᴏᴏɢʟᴇ uses all Latin Small Caps
* ᏀᎤᎤᏀᏞᎬ uses the Cherokee block
* ԌООԌӏЕ uses Cyrillic block
Not perfect, but would you notice them in the small type of your typical address bar?
Requiring that all characters come from the same block certainly doesn't solve the problem but it would help make it a little more obvious - your examples above are much easier for me to spot as suspicious vs the ɢoogle.com in the article.
I hadn't thought about latin small caps before, that's an interesting one - although perhaps that block could be blacklisted entirely.
Overall it's a bit of a mess, isn't it!
For example, thèta.com might be a French fighter jet company, while théta.com could be very easily confused as the same thing, especially to non-French speakers. So I think registering that weird version of google.com should never have been possible, since the Gs could obviously be confused by a layman.
Also, in general I think web browsers need to be more machine learning backed. The browser should warn you when you're about to do something dumb or when you're reading lie-based propaganda. We're trying to teach laymen to be intelligent enough to check for HTTPS and to be discerning enough to figure out what news is false, but I don't think a majority of our population is able to do so.
I don't understand the love for voluntary infantilism. Why is it such an impossibility to have to learn a system before using it? I don't think anybody here would argue that using a keyboard is too difficult. But couldn't we just back it with machine learning and let that algorithm figure out what we want to type when we just hit random keys?
At some point informed people just throw up their hands and start making it harder for people to hurt themselves or others.
Because people seek leisure and ease and going against that means the competitor who recognizes this is going to beat you. Also on a more pedantic front, did you write your own operating system or create your own cpu? What does "learning the system" mean here? Its arbitrary. Even a hard code dev today would seem like a child to the guys in the 60s who had to do literally everything by hand.
>I don't think anybody here would argue that using a keyboard is too difficult.
Ever watch someone learn a keyboard for the first time? Its painful. The common layouts are questionable and lots of keys are extraneous. I dont need a sysrq or break key, thanks. Look at mobile. When I use a mobile device I either use voice or a swipe keyboard. When I'm at home I use my Google Home and Amazon Fire via voice instead of a hunt and peck virtual keyboard. Keyboards are actually fairly terrible, but right now for a lot of tasks are the least of the worst.
Enforcing all of one subset makes more sense to me, though even that's not foolproof because the above example uses both B and ß in the same language. But at least it'll reduce the attack surface, I guess.
A Domain Name Name Service - DNNS!
I don't think I've ever accessed one, and if I ever do it will probably be accidental - something illegitimate like this.
If I regularly used a site that legitimately used such a character, I imagine I'd be more in tune to it and less likely to fool for it.