[idn] Re: Unicode and Security

[John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>]

At 10:21 2/7/2002, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

>I'm not sure Unicode can be fixed at this point. The flaws may be too
>deeply embedded.

What flaws? The fact that glyphs in different scripts may be similar or
identical in some typefaces, and misrepresentation is possible because
Unicode separately encodes these glyphs as distinct characters? I'm
sorry,
but that is the nature of writing systems, and Unicode's encoding of
these
characters is inherited from existing standard character sets. Is this a
flaw? Is this as great a flaw as glyph-based encoding would have been?
Is
it as great a flaw as hampering backwards compatibility with other
encodings would have been?

In your examples, you seem to ignore two things:

1. The software industry has already devised mechanisms to protect
against
e-mail forgery, e.g. private-public key encryption.

2. What you describe is criminal fraud and there are laws to protect
against such 'spoofing' and to punish those who perpetrate it.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

>... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.

>... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
                                               Walter Benjamin