Hey, what’s with those squiggly URLs?

This is indeed a historic development in Internet technology, and emanating for a change out of the Gulf.

BBC News – ‘Historic’ day as first non-Latin web addresses go live

Arab nations are leading a “historic” charge to make the world wide web live up to its name.

Net regulator Icann has switched on a system that allows full web addresses that contain no Latin characters.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first countries to have so-called “country codes” written in Arabic scripts.

The move is the first step to allow web addresses in many scripts including Chinese, Thai and Tamil.

More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

I suspect that the chief consequence for non-European-language web surfers will be the appearance of URLs that are even more phishable. If you have trouble figuring out which links to click in your email, wait till you start getting URLs in Arabic or Cyrillic!

Qatar must be mortified it didn’t make it into the first round.