TIL you can't enter non-ascii character as username on IRC ( Libera Chat )
TIL you can't enter non-ascii character as username on IRC ( Libera Chat )
I tried to enter my name "哎满" and it didn't work. I asked in libera chat and they said you can't enter non-ascii chars in IRC, only few IRC instances supports it since it could be easily abused.
Erroneous Nickname: 哎满
Unicode has a lot of "lookalike" characters, so if you're allowed to select characters as a unique identifier to other users, permitting selection of arbitrary Unicode characters opens the possibility to impersonate users.
I believe that there is some system for dealing with this for domain names, as they permit for Unicode and being able to uniquely identify domains is important. I don't know if this could be generalized to other Unicode-using applications.
The system for domain names is called Punycode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
But it's still combined with domain registrars rejecting names like "αpple.com", which ultimately needs a human to approve names.
There could also be a system like here on Lemmy, where there's a separate display name, but it still doesn't really solve the impersonation problem...
Some TLDs don't allow full unicode either. Country TLDs usually just add their own special chars, for example .se (sweden) allows åäö.
The whole thing has a name as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack