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International domain names: where does https://meßagefactory.ca lead you?
- andy_xor_andrew 4y agodomain names can get pretty weird. Case in point, I got excited when I realized I could purchase this one: https://löcal.host/ https://xn--lcal-5qa.host/ (Hacker News renders it as described in the article, but once you navigate to it your browser will show it)
- BonoboIO 4y agoThats pretty funny. Sounds like an ikea Product Name
- O5vYtytb 4y agowhat the heck are the images on there? AI generated?
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33407397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33407397
- codetrotter 4y agoThat’s awesome! This is what I like to call internet art, and it reminds me of the vibe of the old internet, the way it used to be before social media like Facebook etc became a thing. Kudos to the author! I recently tried to do something similar on my own website. In terms of bringing back fun and exploration I mean. My own website has very little content as of yet though. The most relevant part of my website here is a directory listing of text files that I have. But it only has a couple of files in it yet. One of which is a json file actually because I allowed myself to compromise a little on what is acceptable as “text”. I might compromise a bit more soon, in order to make the viewing experience for that section of my site more enjoyable on mobile devices. After all, the goal is not specifically for me to restrict myself technologically to the web as it was, but more so to be about like I said, a general vibe of fun and exploration. I want my site to be something someone can run across randomly, be intrigued by, and find themselves exploring for some time. And preferably that I will make enough content that visitors will come back the next day or the next week to explore a bit more.
- smcl 4y agoThis is a really neat idea! It's a shame it didn't get more attention at the time, you should resubmit it.
- m348e912 4y agoDefinitely AI generated. I describe those images as how I see people/things in my dreams. Recognizable, but not really. (ya creepy I know)
- paranoidrobot 4y agoThe javascript[1] that's adding/removing the umlaut really messed with me for a bit. I was wondering what was broken with my browser/gpu/monitor/whatever when I noticed it in the footer, first. [1] https://xn--lcal-5qa.host/js.js https://xn--lcal-5qa.host/js.js
- vbezhenar 4y agoUnrelated but localho.st is very useful.
- DonHopkins 4y agoFor finding local sex workers in São Tomé?
- gnabgib 4y agoSeems to skip over that with the Canadian top level domain, only the characters `é, ë, ê, è, â, à, æ, ô, œ, ù, û, ü, ç, î, ï, and ÿ` are allowed[0][1] (not all unicode points/not all valid punycode). And, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) supports "administrative bundling" (all variants including plain ASCII are reserved for the same registrant) so, for example, cira.ca has 18 possible domain variants in total[2]. meßagefactory.ca is presently invalid. [0]: https://www.cira.ca/blog/byron-holland/internationalized-domain-names-and-ca https://www.cira.ca/blog/byron-holland/internationalized-dom... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain [2]: https://www.cira.ca/ca-domains/register-your-ca-domain/domains-french-accented-characters https://www.cira.ca/ca-domains/register-your-ca-domain/domai...
- jesprenj 4y agoThis is great! It's usually more expensive to have a non ASCII leter in your surname, as you have to register two domains. And if we'll ever ditch punycode for real UTF-8, one will have to buy three for backwards conpatibility with punycode. My national registry does not do administrative building - I have a domain with a (correctly) placed š, but some other guy has the š in his surname substituted with a s in the domain he owns (: does CIRA actually register alternative domain representations or just reserve them and wait for you to pay?
- vasco 4y agoI'm sorry but I have accents in my name and your choice is not smart. Probably will have a hard time getting to your site, might even think it's a mistake. The guy that used the normal s did the right thing, you have the equivalent of a novelty domain with an emoji on it.
- Trombone12 4y agoWhat the hell, how can you be so colonial you think it is normal to deny someone the right to their name just because it doesn't come from that one language you ever bothered to learn?
- chrismorgan 4y agoThe article doesn’t investigate which behaviour is correct, or whether both are justifiable. A very quick, probably flawed investigation suggests the Chromium-family behaviour (meßagefactory → messagefactory) might be correct, and Firefox and Safari (meßagefactory → xn--meagefactory-m9a) incorrect: RFC 3492 (Punycode) defers to RFC 3491 (nameprep), which is a profile of RFC 3454 (stringprep), explicitly using its mapping tables B.1 and B.2, and table B.2 says to map ß to ss (“00DF; 0073 0073; Case map”). I welcome correction or more detail from anyone more knowledgeable on the matter. It’s fiddly stuff and I haven’t dealt with this stuff very much, so I could very easily have missed a trick.
- belorn 4y agoIf the ß character is a forbidden character then the Chromium-family behaviour is correct. If its a legal character then the Firefox and Safari behaviour is correct. If it is a forbidden character then registrars will not allow you to register xn--meagefactory-m9a.ca, and thus the problem will never exist.
- Svip 4y agoAccording to the German (.de) NIC, Chromium's behaviour appears to be incorrect,[0] though it appears to be the old IDN standard. While for the most part, one can reasonably normalise ß into ss, it can be used to distinguish words, like Buße (penance) and Busse (buses). [0] https://www.denic.de/en/know-how/idn-domains/ https://www.denic.de/en/know-how/idn-domains/
- rippercushions 4y agoThis has not stopped the Swiss for ditching the ß entirely. Then again, the Swiss are also crazy people who say nonante for 90, instead of being French and saying quatre-vingt-dix (4x20+10).
- sofixa 4y ago> Then again, the Swiss are also crazy people who say nonante for 90, instead of being French and saying quatre-vingt-dix (4x20+10). That's not crazy, it's just common sense that for some reason the Académie Française, the authority on the French language, refuses to have.
- buildbot 4y agoGolfing for single letter International domain names are a fun way to spend an hour, though not sure what I will do with 𐰡.cc
- thebetatester 4y agoYeah, I'm not clicking on that
- Alifatisk 4y agoI’ll do it for you
- thebetatester 4y agoI read .ca as .cn which was a big part of my hesitation. Thanks for making the (not so) risky click for me
- CryptoBanker 4y agoLink doesn’t even load on my iPhone in safari
- agwa 4y agoThis is a difference between what's called "transitional" and "nontransitional" IDNA processing. The WHATWG URL standard mandates nontransitional processing, which says meßagefactory.ca becomes xn--meagefactory-m9a.ca. Firefox and Safari follow the standard. Chrome and Edge are still using transitional processing. Here's the Chrome bug to switch to nontransitional processing (which appears to be very close to shipping): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=694157 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=694157 In 2021, Go's HTTP client switched from transitional to nontransitional processing and the relevant issue is quite informative: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/46001 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/46001
- ttepasse 4y agoThe transition in case is from IDNA 2003 processing to IDNA 2008 processing. The internet was and is rather late in adopting the latter. Just ten years ago it wasn’t a sure thing that it would be adopted in the WhatWG spec and in browsers: https://annevankesteren.nl/2012/11/idna-hell https://annevankesteren.nl/2012/11/idna-hell
- nl 4y agoUnicode domains are interesting. I registered nick<ninja unicode character>.eth as an ENS domain (which is allowed by the ENS spec[1]). It's pretty hit and miss what services will work with it and what won't. https://xn--nick-ow14c.eth.xyz/ https://xn--nick-ow14c.eth.xyz/ does work though. I actually had to edit this comment because HN strips the <ninja unicode character> out. [1] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions#what-about-foreign-characters-what-about-upper-case-letters-is-any-unicode-character-valid https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions#what-abo...
- raffy 4y agoFYI, there is a new ENS normalization spec on the horizon: https://github.com/adraffy/ens-normalize.js https://github.com/adraffy/ens-normalize.js https://adraffy.github.io/ens-normalize.js/test/resolver.html#nick%F0%9F%A5%B7.eth https://adraffy.github.io/ens-normalize.js/test/resolver.htm...
- nl 4y agoVery nice work! Just noting that the ".link" "check" link on https://adraffy.github.io/ens-normalize.js/test/resolver.html#nick%F0%9F%A5%B7.eth https://adraffy.github.io/ens-normalize.js/test/resolver.htm... isn't working. Unclear is that is a problem with my domain or with .link
- fortran77 4y agoFor a while we had a Hebrew domain name (rendered in punycode) that redirected to our main company website with an English alphabet domain name. (We have offices in Tel Aviv and Sunnyvale.) I looked at the logs after and noticed that the only hits to the Hebrew one were from me. I don't bother with it anymore. The fact that browsers inconsistently resolve them makes it an idea not worth considering for most countries/languages.
- Eleison23 4y agoRemember when we vainly attempted to train people how to distinguish between legitimate and spoofed domain names, such as in phishing emails? Remember when big tech companies started sending confirmation/survey emails with links to domain names indistinguishable from spoofed ones? 1drv.ms, I'm looking at you. Now good luck convincing anyone that "xn--meagefactory-m9a.ca" is totally legit.
- Trombone12 4y agoYeah punycode is a bad "solution", it just makes most url look suspect. The comment about the Canadian rules shows that the confusion problem should be handled on the registrar level rather than the url bar.
- MrGilbert 4y agoSlightly offtopic: Don't know if that's just overly nerdy, but I giggle when I think about the folks over at messagefactory.ca, that are now seeing a spike in page visits, wondering which campaign helped them getting more visibilty.
- mcv 4y agoI think allowing unicode in domain names is a mistake. It does make sense to allow more characters, because ascii is very limited, but there's a lot of characters in unicode, including some that look deceptively like different ascii characters, which could really mislead people. I wouldn't mind if browsers gave some warning for non-ascii domain names.
- xdfgh1112 4y agoThis is a known problem and registrars are handling it. For example, forbidding multiple mixed scripts in a domain. Of course, typosquatting and similar characters are an issue in English too. The registrar deals with it. While I understand your position, it is very anglocentric. Other countries don't use the Roman alphabet at all and shouldn't be forced to use it, especially when a simple whitelist of Unicode characters would have solved the security issue.
- mcv 4y agoMy position isn't specifically anglocentric (I'm not English myself), and like I said, it makes a lot of sense to allow more characters, but it opens up a lot of pitfalls. Banning mixed script is definitely a great idea.
- ttepasse 4y agoThe ß is not really mixed script: It’s a (mostly) normal character in the german language which itself is based on latin script. It’s part of common words in the language and part of personal names, including mine. I’d rather like having the ability to register a domain with my last name and was rather annoyed that the Internet infrastructure made that difficult, first with ASCII–centrism, then with IDNA2003 and now with a decades long transition.
- thiht 4y ago> This is a known problem and registrars are handling it Nitpick: registries are handling it. Registrars usually just use the IDN tables provided by the registries. Mixed script rules in particular are a nightmare to implement perfectly when the tables are not given directly by the registry (for some ccTLDs mainly). For gTLDs these tables are directly available on iana: https://www.iana.org/domains/idn-tables https://www.iana.org/domains/idn-tables
- meindnoch 4y agoSlightly off-topic, but does anyone know why this works on macOS? $ echo "foo" >"ß.txt" $ cat "ss.txt" foo
- ArnoVW 4y agoIn German you can write 'ss' for 'ß'. So 'spaß' (fun) becomes 'spass' . And the 'e' can be used to encode a diaeresis. For example 'spät' (late) becomes spaet'. It makes sense to apply this encoding for filenames, since not all software may support Unicode filenames. The file may one day be transfered to anorher OS, etc.
- ttepasse 4y agoMac OS’ default filesystems, HFS+ and APFS, historically have been case-insensitive, although case-sensitive variants exist. In the Unicode database the uppercase variant of ‘ß’ is recorded as upper('ß') → 'SS', according to most recent and common usage. A capital ẞ exists, but is rather new. One can assume that your filesystem does their filename comparisons and possible storage with `lower(upper(filename))` or such. Another pitfall of Mac filesystems are Unicode normalizations of precomposed characters, which changed between HFS+ and APFS I think.
- nwellnhof 4y ago> One can assume that your filesystem does their filename comparisons and possible storage with `lower(upper(filename))` or such. The correct way to compare Unicode strings case-insensitively involves "case-folding" which directly maps "ß" to "ss".
- meindnoch 4y agoGotcha! The crucial piece I was missing was that Unicode case-folding can turn a single codepoint into many. One more thing to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about Unicode I guess :-)
- seszett 4y agoI've noticed that when the .fr TLD opened up to domains less than three letters long. I already had ssz.fr which I occasionally accessed through "ßz.fr", and then ßz.fr became available for registration. I contacted AFNIC but they never really understood what I was talking about. Not that it's a real problem anyway, nobody uses ß in domain names and surely not for .fr domains.
- shortlived 4y agoAnyone else seeing this behavior in Safari mobile? Safari cannot open the page because the server cannot be found.
- rurban 4y agoIn programming languages it's much worse. Identifiers can either be unidentifiable, and if so everybody has a different opinion what "identifiable" means. Even the standard on identifiers, UTF-39, is buggy and has too many interpretations, leading to a complete disaster. https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/blob/master/doc/c11.md https://github.com/rurban/libu8ident/blob/master/doc/c11.md In punycode domain names it's quite simple still. With other names, it's even worse. No-one cares. Linkers do not, username and filesystem drivers do not. The Apple HFS+ did care a bit one day, until someone in the higher ranks decided that no-one needs unicode security anymore and switched the new APFS to unsafe again.
- jgalt212 4y agoHow to steal money from old people via unicode obfuscated domain names.
- sebmellen 4y agoOnly today did I learn you could use ｡ as a separator. https://google｡com https://xn--googlecom-0w64c (which is google ｡ com without the spaces) actually leads somewhere.