Beware of Greeks bearing spammy small omicrons, says Google

G ဝ ဝ g l e

No more G ဝ ဝ g l e D ဝ ဝ d l e s ?

My favourite website (mybonk.com) has been taken offline. Is this related?

stab at classically-based joke

"Greek small omicron " - there's a Greek small small "O" ?

The Unicode consortium's permitted combinations of character sets are a bit odd. Their "highly restrictive" level will ban identifiers that mix Latin and Arabic or Latin and Hebrew or ... well, you get my drift, while explicitly permitting Latin and far eastern scripts. That's just weird. It's fairly common to see text in random scripts with Latin numerals embedded in them.

And in the "moderately restrictive" level they single out the combinations of Latin + Cyrillic and Latin + Greek, which would ban things like Αθήνα2004 or Со́чи2014.

I know why they're doing it, but they're still going to end up hitting an awful lot of legitimate addresses and domains with this.

Use .co.uk to reduce your phishing risk :)

I cant think of a sensible way to prevent this other than maybe an option to have all non-ascii characters printed as inverted so it screams scammy url, thats the best i could come up with.

I just checked and llοydsbank.com ( xn--llydsbank-r1g.com ) and nаtwest.com ( xn--ntwest-3nf.com ) both appear to be available, the other uk banks i checked, Barclays and Santander appear to use a .co.uk domain which seems sensible since nominet doesn't support internationalised domain names.