Kagi has quickly grown into something of a household name within tech circles. From Hacker News and Lobsters to Reddit, the search provider seems to attract near-universal praise. Whenever the topic of search engines comes up, there’s an almost ritual rush to be the first to recommend Kagi, often followed by a chorus of replies echoing the endorsement.
For those curious, the characters are katakana (the syllabary often used in Japan for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc) and they’d be read as “ma-ri-u-su”, which is possibly intended to represent “Marius” under Japanese spelling conventions.
Which is a major security risk and you should avoid those “real browsers”.
by displaying Unicode characters an attacker can send you a link that clearly shows its yahoo.com and you see in the browser url that its yahoo.com but in reality its unicode letters that look similar to latin one.
Others have explained the unicode-in-URL aspect sufficiently, but I can speak to the author of the site somewhat. His or her blog posts have hit the fediverse several times before. They’re often insightful and skeptical, highly privacy conscious. I hope they don’t mind if I take this part from their FAQ:
Can I trust the information on this website?
No. And you should never trust any single website or entity. Especially not the ones that have sponsored content or have no academic/professional background in the topics they post about.
Take this information as mere pointers into different directions, that scratch the surface and ultimately provoke your itch to find out more about the individual topics. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.
It’s not really a “strange url” it’s just the way we decided to implement unicode into URLs, which for the purposes of phishing links is catastrophically dangerous, so it’s never really been widely adopted and most sites choose by default to show the raw URL, for safety. This is why we can’t have nice things (and instead need to have xn-dfg344jlb5jsdfl543sdfsd.com)
No fucking way I am clicking that URL.
It’s punycode, it displays as japanese characters in a real browser.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
For those curious, the characters are katakana (the syllabary often used in Japan for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc) and they’d be read as “ma-ri-u-su”, which is possibly intended to represent “Marius” under Japanese spelling conventions.
I didn’t know about that, thanks for sharing.
Thx TIL
Which is a major security risk and you should avoid those “real browsers”.
by displaying Unicode characters an attacker can send you a link that clearly shows its yahoo.com and you see in the browser url that its yahoo.com but in reality its unicode letters that look similar to latin one.
that’s really bad
I’m not aware of a modern browser that doesn’t render it by default. I meant a real browser as in a browser not a lemmy client
Not everyone uses English. Many languages can’t be written with only ASCII characters.
I get why it was introduced. I am telling you why its dangrous
Others have explained the unicode-in-URL aspect sufficiently, but I can speak to the author of the site somewhat. His or her blog posts have hit the fediverse several times before. They’re often insightful and skeptical, highly privacy conscious. I hope they don’t mind if I take this part from their FAQ:
So, you monolingual? 🙂
Woah are you a monophobe or something?
Hey Monnie! sneer voice
xn–gck…whatever is famous in some circles!
Its fine. Trust me /s
Actually probably good on you to not trust everything on the internet.
This individual has a strange url but generally has some really insightful articles.
It’s not really a “strange url” it’s just the way we decided to implement unicode into URLs, which for the purposes of phishing links is catastrophically dangerous, so it’s never really been widely adopted and most sites choose by default to show the raw URL, for safety. This is why we can’t have nice things (and instead need to have xn-dfg344jlb5jsdfl543sdfsd.com)