Unless there is some killer feature, or the distribution is tailored well to a specific niche, I am quite bored with the "yet another Linux distro" articles

perhaps they don't want to admit that they don't know how to work the damned thing. Truncheons and battering rams fine, but computers are a little tricky

He could be working on an open source project

Like!

Just identify the wrong decision and they are bond to pick it ;-)

The Romans would even understand the Mayor's ramblings

Isn't that the plot of Dune?

Anonymous Coward is appearing so much that s/he will soon be on the most wanted list

TFA says 40% have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” So the Unabomber would fall into this category, as would someone who had expressed a desire to set of a bomb, or someone who says "as a member of the blah blah group I am committed to terrorism" (if there is no recognised blah blah group).

To be fair they do have different script values so would be identified by the proposal

Actually Unicode does make a good effort of classifying characters into scripts, with some "common" characters that can appear in any scripts and some "inherited" characters (like diacritics) that belong to the character that they are applied to. Thus the Cyrillic"Es" looks like a Latin "C" but is a different Unicode character, one belonging to the Cyrillic scripts and the other to the Latin script. The different languages using the same scriptis a red-herring, it doesn't matter that both French and English use the capital "R", what does matter is that you can't put a Cyrillic character into the middle of a Latin script string to make something that looks like a certain name but isn't. Checking whether a name contains characters from more than one script is easy. there are methods in some languages that trivialise this.

I don't think that would work in protecting users against attacks unless you said that only users if gmail.ru could receive emails from users with Cyrillic characters in the name, etc.

What?Where do you get that from? TFA gives examples where the whole email address is in international characters (katakana)

Of course there is probably someone in China or Korea thinking "why do I have to use this special keyboard mode with characters I don't understand to write emails".

I think that's the way to go - only allow characters from a single unicode script in the username and in the domain name. The domain name part is currently handled by registras so that may not need any additional rules.

However this really should be part of the RFC, or else anyone banning mixed names would be "non compliant". If the RCF does not specify this then the best that gmail (or any other system could do) would be to prevent people registering mixed names themselves and giving a warning (and maybe colour characters) if email is recieived from an address with mixed scripts.