1 comments

  • TacticalCoder18 minutes ago
    Honestly that is just sad. Extremely sad.<p>Bruce Schneier wrote about it more than two decades ago:<p><i>&quot;Unicode is too complex to ever be secure&quot;</i>.<p>Systems created by people who have zero understanding of security and who cannot realize that complex systems cannot possibly ever be secure is already bad.<p>But to then see the same people implement &quot;security mechanisms&quot; for the mess they created for in the first place is just sad.<p>FWIW I love Unicode, where it belongs: in translation &#x2F; properties files.<p>I&#x27;ve got hooks verifying that all source code files are ASCII-only.<p>I&#x27;ve got rules for my LLMs to only ever emit ASCII in source code.<p>I&#x27;ve got firewall rules blocking any domain using punnycode (aka Unicode domain names). A bit tricky to do that one.<p>I&#x27;ve got my editor configured so that any single non-visible ASCII char (except space and enter) and every single Unicode character appears in bold fluo magenta on a dark background. All zero-width chars are forced to have a width.<p>I wonder how people who disagree with those who believe that Unicode is too complex to ever be secure reconcile with the fact that we have something titled:<p><i>&quot;UnicodeĀ® Technical Standard #39 Unicode Security Mechanisms&quot;</i><p>The question is: how the heck did we end up here?<p>What mindset led to this clusterfuck?<p>Who, in his right mind, decided that it was a good thing to have Unicode chars in URLs? Certainly not security experts.<p>The homoglyph attacks were predicted by Bruce Schneier (and others) decades ago. Countless people got tricked and lost their live savings because URLs allow an &#x27;a&#x27; to not be an &#x27;a&#x27;. It&#x27;s sad.<p>And it&#x27;s of course not the only attack using Unicode: there are plenty.<p>It&#x27;s really just all a sad joke and many of us saw it coming from day one.