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Discussion (9 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
My suspicion is that the spam filter programmers didn't do a comprehensive evaluation of every code point on every plane of Unicode because... well that's a massive job. So your "sanitize and denormalize" tasks are actually massive mappings which were likely imperfectly created.
I realize ASCII was limited, but one thing I like about it is I can understand every single character code, and program to handle all the edge cases with certainty.
There was a rationale (ISO country codes to modify a flag to display that national flag).
Maybe the problem wasn't the proposal, but the lack of the ability for others to reject it for being insecure.
It's great for teaching and other things, but everyday life is filled with many characters, is the suggestion we'd have one ASCII per language where there is more distinct characters, or what would we do? I don't see what else we could have done, that would have worked for the world, but I'm curious to hear ideas.
But it's not simple enough for every company/app to independently research the entire Unicode code point space (which is MASSIVE) to find out what kinds of "fix ups" that app needs to do to clean the data it consumes.
It's complicated or at least has difficult tradeoffs. Maybe you invest a lot of time carefully surveying all of the Unicode planes and decide which ones you care to keep unchanged and which ones you filter/strip. For every code point you reject or change, there is going to be some user who is confused or dissatisfied with the limitations of your app.
What I arrived at:
- I should never hand out my actual email address. As in, should be all proxied, every contact reaching me via a different address only known to them. Ideally, these aliases would be generated using a CSPRNG, and would be of sufficient length. Allows for tracing contact provenance in "space".
- I should rotate that address periodically, if possible. Allows for tracing contact provenance in "time".
Together, this would tell me who's the source of particular influx of strange mails, and when did they leak the contact address provided to them (willfully or otherwise).
I was really taken by this idea, even wondered why this has not been baked into the underlying protocols over the years, to make it readily deployed and available for all, making it effortless.
Because boy is there an effort involved! Several years later, I now avoid spam mail by simply no longer reading my emails anymore...
Sometimes I wonder what corporate IT thinks when I pass their anti-phishing test a month after the test campaign.