[Wikipedia-l] Will wikipedia.org in Hebrew, Arabic etc be registered?

[Chad Perrin]

Tomer Chachamu wrote:
> "Wikipedia" in Hebrew: xn--7dbcbqab9ewa.org
> "Wikipedia" in Arabic: (I'm guessing) is xn--mgbbv2fyambbb.org (I took
> this from the Main Page in Arabic; it's the text in quotes)
> 
> Are there plans to register these domains? What about Japanese, etc, etc?
> 
> Is Punycode even commonly used in the countries of those languages? I
> know that in Israel it is common to see latinised domains
> (http://www.shesh.co.il http://www.walla.co.il http://www.nana.co.il
> etc) instead of domains in Unicode.
> 
> Internet Explorer does not appear to support Punycode.

It doesn't.  Unfortunately, punycode (for IDN support) presents a huge 
security vulnerability for browsers at this time, so even on non-IE 
browsers a lot of people are turning off IDN support.  The problem is 
that punycode allows easy spoofing of many domain names by using 
character homographs in the URL.  I, for instance, have IDN support 
turned off in Firefox.

--
Chad