Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  >  > I agree, but the issue discussed here is different:

  > I have to disagree.  The issue is about *any* technology that can be
  > used to convince the user that one URL is being accessed when in fact
  > another one is.

In general, yes, but at present we're looking at two specific cases
of that.  They made need different solutions.

1. There are magic bidi characters inside the URL.

2. The bidi context of the URL could cause the URL to appear strangely
even though the URL itself does not contain any magic bidi characters.

Mixing up these two cases has caused a lot of confusion in this
discussion.  Things said about one of them were mistakenly applied to
the other, resulting in nonsense.

I proposed checking the URL for bidi magic, for case 1, and someone
interpreted the suggestion based on case 2 and said it would be
ineffective.

For case 2 I proposed the user could insert newlines around the URL to
see what it really says.  Someone replied that this would be
ineffective because he interpreted it based on case 1.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
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Boston MA 02110
USA
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