
The Sad Story Of The Unicode Snowman - treitnauer
http://☁→❄→☃→☀→☺→☂→☹→✝.ws
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burgerbrain
I really can't wait until the phishers get their hands on this. It's going to
be a gas.

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gjm11
Known problem: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack> .

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lwhi
Maybe browser vendors could agree to render non-ASCII characters in a
different colour?

That way the characters are respected, but the user is alerted if a very
similar (non-ASCII) code has been used to dupe a user.

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JoachimSchipper
That'd be fine for Americans (or other people using ASCII) faced with a
Russian а, but how about a Russian faced with an ASCII a? You could hardly
flag every use of ASCII, and creating a table of which characters go together
seems a a lot of work ( _and_ it would be hard to do properly).

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lwhi
Would it really be a lot of work? I'd imagine the effort expended towards
security in general exceeds what you're proposing.

EDIT: As I understand it, Cyrillic languages use code page 866 as an
_extension_ to ASCII <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_866>. Is this
correct?

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JoachimSchipper
I'm sure that _something_ would be extremely painful. Some sort-of-independent
tribe/people that uses one or two letters that are "really part" of another
language. In short, politics.

To the best of my knowledge, Cyrillic languages don't use the Roman script
(except where letters appear to be similar). The ASCII subset of codepage 866
is for "cd C:\", not for Cyrillic.

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lwhi
I agree - it could be tricky politically, but I'm not sure if the alternative
of representing the characters via punycode conversion is more culturally
supportive / sympathetic?

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thought_alarm
Back in the 80s one would be very excited to find a BBS that supported
enhanced Apple IIe Mouse Text for drawing graphics, symbols, and menus at 1200
baud.

I suppose this is the Stanley Kubrick 2010 version of that.

~~~
js2
Does anyone here remember the graphical BBS client that ran on the Apple II?
It ran in hires mode. Wikipedia indicates it might have been called PixelTerm.
Whatever it was called, I seem to recall it was written in assembly, as I
remember printing out the source listing on my Epson MX100 and spreading all
50+ sheets out on the floor to learn assembly. Ah the days, and sorry for the
tangent. :-)

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davvid
On a related note, does anyone remember the graphical dos BBS client from the
90s called ripterm?

My first modem was 2400 baud so I'm a youngin' by some standards, but wow,
seeing incremental graphic drawing was pretty cool back in the pre-AOL days.
It was neater than progressive-jpeg because you'd watch the vector image get
constructed on the fly: first the background outline, then a floodfill, then
some more shapes, a few more flood fills, some detail lines, etc.

Before that I do remember using a modem in 3rd grade (circa 1988) and reading
ascii-art emails from my principal. It was a green monochrome display so it
was probably either ASCIIExpress or ProTerm, but I'm just guessing based on
context.

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tptacek
I remember RIPscrip not getting much love on the BBS scene while ANSI got more
and more elaborate; like a very juvenile microcosm of the war between bitmap
and vector graphics.

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enneff
It might be because while RIP graphics were technically superior, they were
just another lo fi graphics medium. PCs had better graphics in games etc,
while ANSI art has an enduring oldschool quality about it. Also it degrades
gracefully to monochrome ASCII. :-)

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tptacek
High-end ANSI art did _not_ degrade well, for what it's worth. Beyond that,
towards the end of the trend, BBS banners were really only legible in
TheDraw's high-res mode.

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m_myers
Ha! Excellent. Although I might like to add a ♨ in there (technically the hot
springs character, but it could also be melting snow).

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dlsspy
I wonder how many twitter clients are going to recognize that as a link:
<http://twitter.com/#!/dlsspy/status/18062117684903937>

Twitter itself does, but tweetdeck does not.

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rythie
FriendBinder does, I remember fixing it for the <http://tinyarro.ws> link
shortner

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kinghajj
I don't get it. Could someone explain the story?

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jawee
☁→❄→☃→☀→☺→☂→☹→✝

One cold night, when the temperature was just at that comfortable temperature
below freezing, clouds began to form in the heavens. Before long, these clouds
let forth a surplus of unique, sticky snowflakes. These snowflakes came to
litter the ground. A child looked out and observed his frontyard which had
been transformed into a winter wonderland. Rushing outside, he rolled the snow
into 3 large orbs descending in size; thus he made the snow into the likeness
of a man. The sun was shining warm as he worked. All was happy.

However, as the sun continued to come out, the falling snow quickly turned to
rain. The rain came down upon the snow, and working with the sunlight, the
snow quickly went away. As the snow disappeared, so too did the snowman. The
snowman bore a slow death as he melted to the ground. Such sorrow was wrought,
until the final death had at last approached.

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treitnauer
LOL, that's awesome :)

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sliverstorm
Neat, but I can't help thinking "oh goodie, URL's I can't type..."

I mean, there's always Unicode tables/charts you can copy the symbol out of,
or perhaps keystroke combinations, but Unicode has 65,533 characters.

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CWIZO
Can somebody post a screen-shot for those of us who only see squares?

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palish
Why do you only see squares?

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spydum
lack of international language support likely.. I see the same thing.

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mukyu
I was expecting a story about how/why it was introduced into Unicode (many
parts of it have interesting stories). This is completely content-free.

