Re: ICANN Approves Non-Latin Domain Name Characters

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> > It's a genuine, non-corrupt reasonable demand that you should be
> > able to have your own language in DNS.
> If it's only about language, it's not reasonable at all.  "com" isn't
> English,

gTLDs are another fettle of kish entirely.

> "de" isn't German,

Hm?  I thought the point was that it _was_, that .de came from
"Deutschland" - that's why it's .de rather than .ge or some such.

> (Poor FYROM.  There are '"'s in the country's official name, so it
> can't be put into DNS even with IDNA.)

Huh?  The DNS supports labels containing all 256 possible octet values;
the only sense in which it's not fully binary-transparent is the
historical botch of treating uppercase ASCII as equivalent to lowercase
ASCII.  (To my mind, that's the biggest issue with internationalizing
the DNS: reconciling the historical behaviours of case-folding the
ASCII letters but not any of the various non-ASCII letters.  It seems
more than passing strange, for example, for snörf to be considered
equivalent to SNöRF but not to SNÖRF.)  Some octets are difficult to
use (eg, 0x2e, ASCII '.', or, worse, 0x00), but those are interface
issues, not protocol issues.

The only reasons you can't register åøëí.com is adminstrative; it would
work fine technically.  Once you pick an encoding, that is; DNS on the
wire deals in octet strings, not character strings.  The distinction
between characters and character encodings is fundamentally what's
behind many issues.  It's why, for example, we have an ssh standard
that is, strictly, unimplementable on most Unix variants.)

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML                mouse () rodents-montreal org
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.