this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Privacy

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I didn't know my city was cool enough to put signal flyers.

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 5 months ago (2 children)

QR codes essentially just encode text, as long as you're using a sensible QR code reader and check any URLs before opening them there's minimal risk to scanning a QR code.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Well not really, it's a good way to do a IDN homograph attack

[–] [email protected] 70 points 5 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Oh is that like bankofarnerica.com or whatever, hoping the r and n look enough like an m for at least some people to click?

edit: under absolutely no circumstances click on the above link. Your bank will be robbed and your foreskin soldered shut. To very don't.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Or xss/sqli/etc attacks on vulnerable sites that don't sanitize url query parameters

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Or maybe a fraudulent signal app.

I mean, generally speaking, just don't click on random links. This is a random link. Qr codes are valuable but we're conditioning society to just be cool with clicking on random shit without putting much thought into it.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Respectfully I think this is a minimal attack vector in this case due to the limited character set of urls. But thanks for the callout, I didn't know there was a name for this sort of attack.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Punycode enables you to encode any Unicode character as ASCII. Almost all browsers support this.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Modern browsers happily show you the actual characters, while sending their encoded entities to the server. So, from a user perspective there is no ASCII limitation. Case in point: söhne.at (just some random website, I have no idea what they are or if they are legitimate)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They'd still resolve via DNS to an address in ASCII though, right? Wouldn't that only be an issue if ICANN didn't have a monopoly on DNS registration? i.e what we already depend on for a semblance of convenience without totally compromising opsec

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It utilizes punycode under the hood. The actual DNS entries still use ASCII.