In a recent move ICANN decided it would be just fine if domain names used non-Latin characters. Since the inception of online domain names, all addresses had to be in the Latin characters most of us are familiar with (and that you are currently reading).  The ICANN decision will mean addresses could use, for example, Russian Cyrillic or Asian characters. While this seems all well and good on the surface, there’s a problem lurking. It could let the bad guys run more effective phishing schemes.

A unicode font supports multiple languages simultaneously and can be a real help, but display a Cyrillic word in a Unicode font, and it may look completely different. It may even appear to be an English word. If you expect to be on a certain domain, you used to be able to just check the domain name. Did you expect to be on ‘amazon.com’, but instead the domain is ‘secret-hacker-site.com’? You might want to hightail it out of there.

With non-Latin characters about to start popping up in domain names, it might not be so easy to tell where you are anymore. Below, we see an example of how the Cyrillic characters for “raural” can become “paypal”. If the domain appeared to be ‘paypal.com’, most people wouldn’t think twice about putting in their credit card number. A little concerning? Yeah, we thought so.

Image via Gizmodo

Egypt is making a bit of history by being the first country to launch an Internet domain name using the Aribc script. The announcement comes not long after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to allow non-Latin top level domains.

Casting a cloud over Egypt's run towards the record books, Reporters Sans Frontieres, which campaigns for freedom of press, had some harsh words for the Egyptian government as it relates to Internet censorship.

"Egypt is one of the enemies of the Internet and if Internet governance requires a degree of regulation, it should be of a liberal nature and not the kind that the Egyptian government would like to impose," Reporters wrote.

The group went on to say that Egyptian police recently arrested and beat two young bloggers, Mohamed Adel, 20, and Amr Osama, 19, along with their lawyer, Amr Ezz, for "spreading false news and rumors liable to disturb the peace."

About 15 million of Eypt's 80 million residents are Internet users. And according to Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, even though there are over 300 million Arabic speakers worldwide, fewer than one percent of online content is in Arabic.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the prevailing lords of Internet naming, have decided it’s time make the web a little less English-centric. It is expected that during it’s meeting in Seoul, ICANN will allow Internet addresses to be in non-Latin scripts. This would permit addresses in languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Greek, Korean, and Cyrillic.

The Internet presently has 1.6 billion users worldwide, with more than half using languages based on alphabets not using Latin characters. “This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature."

The change is expected to be approved Friday, after which ICANN would start accepting applications for non-English domain names. The first such names would appear in the system mid-2010, along with a translation system which allows the different scripts to be converted to the right address.

Image Credit: ICANN

ICANN, the non-profit group who oversees a number of Internet-related tasks, including IP address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, making decisions on root server systems, and pretty much everything else that has to do with the Web, has signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) that puts the organization in the hands of an international committee.

According to the Affirmation Agreement, the international committee of parties who will now run ICANN will be chosen by the chairman of its Governmental Advisory Committee, who represents 100 countries around the globe.

"One world, one Internet, everyone connected -- this is our goal at ICANN," said Rod Beckstrom, chief executive office of ICANN. "This agreement gives international stakeholders an even more powerful voice in our activities moving forward."

The move, which was universally praised across the industry, doesn't completely remove the U.S. government's influence, but it does give other countries a much bigger say in how ICANN's policies moving forward.