The Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance, whose members are experts from the Поддерживаю.РФ [Support.РФ] project, summed up the 2022 work and published its annual report.
In 2022, due to an increase in tasks related to software import substitution and establishing Russia’s technological sovereignty, the working group regularly monitored the development of domestic analogues of popular software solutions, as well as the work on the creation and development of Russian platforms for hosting open source software and GIS. Last year, in order to inform the technical community about the availability of standards, technical solutions and the need for their implementation in existing and developed software products, systems and services, the experts of the working groups formed a focus group with certain categories of domestic software to further build technical interaction. This activity will be continued by the working group in 2023.
During the year, interested parties were given the opportunity to get Cyrillic e-mail addresses in the .РФ domain to help check software, being used or developed, for compliance with the universal acceptance criteria for internationalized domains and emails.
In order to develop technical cooperation with Russian universal acceptance software and service producers, speeches and thematic discussions were organized at specialized IT events, together with education events: online seminars for system administrators and hosting providers, as well as speeches at Russian and international specialized conferences.
The working group analyzed the main user experience problems involved in using internationalized domain names and email addresses. As a result, manuals and practical recommendations were developed and published; in particular, instructions were issued on possible ways to copy Cyrillic links from the address bar of a browser, and recommendations were published for users experiencing problems when using a Cyrillic email address on any site, or in an application or service; detailed instructions were developed on how to enter the @ symbol on the Russian keyboard without switching layouts for different operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux).
The working group participants developed research on the use of homoglyphs in internet identifiers based on their study of the cybersecurity aspects related to the introduction of universal acceptance.
The full text of the annual report, as well as documents and detailed information on the working group are available on the official website, универсальноепринятие.рф.
The Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance was created in 2020 in order to assist in the implementation of technical standards related to supporting internationalized domain names (IDN) and email addresses (EAI), to help with the implementation of the concept of universal acceptance, and raise the level of awareness of all interested parties. The working group includes representatives of Russian organizations, as well as independent experts interested in improving technical support for internationalized domain names and email addresses in all applications, systems, and services in Russia.
