But the challenges posed by the change aren’t just technical. Adding support for the thousands of new characters required an overhaul of the DNS system, the backbone of the Internet that gives each connected computer its own unique ID in the form of an IP address.
The EU official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was «some time pressure» to figure out the detail or else previously agreed oil restrictions take effect from December, and for petroleum products from February.
We won’t have too long to wait before we start seeing the new URLs. The change should make the Web more democratic and global, since non-English-speaking surfers won’t be forced to use domain names that don’t reflect their own language. ICANN says that it will accept applications by 16 November, and sites will be online by 2010.
‘This is the real challenge for investigators right now, they want to find this person, because this person is perpetrating extortion against an international company, and is in possession of a huge amount of personal data,’ he said.
The sanctions would also bar Europeans from sitting on boards of Russian state-owned companies, sever all ties in cryptocurrency trading and make circumventing sanctions the basis for being blacklisted by the EU, among others.
They will also stop more exports from the EU, including cameras and processors, as well as blacklisting 37 more individuals and entities, including those involved in organising what the West denounced as Moscow’s «sham» annexation votes.
Up to 10millions Aussies are at risk of having their private and sensitive information sold online after a hacker infiltrated the telecommunication giant’s system and raided the details of its current and former customers.
That means URLs will go from using 37 possible characters to over 100,000. ICANN has been massaging the DNS system for a couple of years to get it ready to handle Web addresses with non-English-language characters, encompassing everything from Arabic and Chinese characters to accented letters in French.
While the Eurasia consultancy said that amounted to a watering down of previously agreed sanctions, EU diplomats and officials said the new approach would have broader consequences, while mitigating risks for the global industry.
The huge range of new characters will also give scammers a newly loaded gun for firing off spoof Web sites. Because some characters look similar or identical in different languages, scammers could replace a letter in a URL with another to try to redirect visitors to the wrong site. The scam would be very difficult for users to detect because, at first glance, the URL would look correct — only a computer could see that the letter ‘a’ in PayPal (why not find out more).com has been replaced with a Cyrillic letter ‘a’, for example.
New restrictions on trade in goods with Russia mean a third of the bloc’s exports to and nearly 60% of imports from Russia would be cut compared to exchange levels prior to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb.24, said EU officials.
As the government prepares to introduce new cybersecurity measures, Mr Albanese said the new protections would mean banks and other institutions would be informed much faster when a breach happened so personal data could not be used.
BRUSSELS, Oct 6 (Reuters) — The European Union on Thursday gave a final approval to its eighth batch of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, but said implementing a price cap on Russian seaborne oil included in the package required more work.
Oil producing countries grouped in OPEC+, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, agreed production cuts on Wednesday and Moscow said it may cut output to offset any negative effects from Western price caps.
«The implementation of the oil price cap is still being discussed, we need to be sure it actually works, there must be checks for operators to show the price was actually below the cap — all of that is not easy,» said one EU official.
The price cap on Russian seaborne oil deliveries to third countries would align the bloc with the United States and the G7 group of the world’s most industrialised countries, which last month agreed in principle to go ahead with such a move.