Some of those non-Latin characters can have the same appearance as
Latin characters, especially if used in certain pairings. For years,
scammers and phishers have taken advantage of that fact and registered
mixed-language domains with the purpose of confusing victims into thinking a site and URL they visit are legitimate.
This image showcases some of the characters that can be confusing from various non-Latin alphabets.
By
bringing non-Latin character support to Gmail, Google knows that there
is the chance that this could also happen with email addresses. That's
why Google is implementing
new spam filtering techniques to mitigate the potential for this kind of abuse.
On
its blog,
Google explains that Gmail will begin rejecting email with combinations
of characters the Unicode community has identified as suspicious or
misleading. Gmail will use the Unicode Consortium's
"Highly Restricted" designation to figure out what characters and combinations will be filtered.
Google says it hopes others in the industry will follow suit.
The Internet should be global, not just one that exists in Latin characters
The Internet should be global, not just one that exists in Latin characters.
That globalization still must be balanced against the profit motive
to use those characters and how they are rendered by Unicode fonts for
harm.
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