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Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

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Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#51

Post by kick »

manifestsilence wrote: post #43
netsharc wrote: post #35

Hmm, I wonder if that's going to be the next battle field for URLs: Facebook will try to register its logo as an emoji, and you'd just need to go to http://[f] to open their site. There already is an emoji for apple (the fruit, not the company). Oh the horrors. I should start an emoji NIC!

These would be less than convenient to type, but perhaps as we go more and more towards a non-typing web where a walled-garden start page and predefined links lead to the most popular sites with a click, these URLs will become fashionable. I think if so, this will herald the impending death of the human-read and typed URL in favor of start page links and search results.

There are more mobile users than there are desktop users, and for them it's just the same to type.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#52

Post by anticensor »

billpg wrote: post #44
tialaramex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of different human writing systems. All of them are weird because they were invented by humans, most of them are very weird indeed because they were invented by humans a long time ago and then gradually mutated. The Latin system is the one you're using here. It's very popular. Most humans in the integrated tribes are somewhat familiar with it‡. It has twenty six "letters" and then twenty six more "c…

I vaguely recall that the double-hyphen used to be disallowed in domain names, reserving them for future definition. "xn--" becoming that future definition. I'm having trouble confirming this as the double-hyphen is now very much allowed, thanks to IDN.

FYI, xn stands for eXtended Names.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#53

Post by nottorp »

alangpierce wrote: post #33
nottorp wrote: post #6

And how do i type that in the address bar?

On Mac, Control+Command+Space brings up the emoji picker. Every OS has something like that these days, I'm pretty sure.

Hmm, so i have to press ctrl+cmd+space then scroll through the picker or type at least "gh" to find that particular emoji. Pretty once or twice I guess.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#54

Post by kylek »

rahuldottech wrote: post #27
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you run pihole or a local dnsmasq/unbound it should be possible to mitigate it by sinkholing any unicode domains, e.g. with dnsmasq (requires a patch https://github.com/spacedingo/dnsmasq-regexp_2.76 ) you can do this: address=/:xn--*:/0.0.0.0 does anyone know if something like this is possible with unbound?

But... What about legit unicode domains? I own a couple that I use for personal projects or file sharing.

I've never seen a legit unicode domain personally, but, is this not compatible with whitelisting specific domains? (in pihole, anyways...)

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#55

Post by ncmncm »

downerending wrote: post #48
tialaramex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of different human writing systems. All of them are weird because they were invented by humans, most of them are very weird indeed because they were invented by humans a long time ago and then gradually mutated. The Latin system is the one you're using here. It's very popular. Most humans in the integrated tribes are somewhat familiar with it‡. It has twenty six "letters" and then twenty six more "c…

Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Think Google.) Viewed in that light, restricting DNS names to ASCII as a way to reduce bugs, security issues, etc., makes a lot of sense.

Search engines happened remarkably late. Nobody understood how easy search engines would be.

People thought you would follow links from directory pages linked from your "home page", hence the house symbol still seen in browsers. Yahoo! is a leftover of an attempt at a directory.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#56

Post by chupasaurus »

archi42 wrote: post #46
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indeed those would get thrown under the bus. it's a trade-off and depends on how paranoid you want to be.

Two ideas to lessen the trade-off: 1. Use a browser extension that throws a warning on all unicode domains (maybe even with unicode highlighting). Drawback: Needs to be done per-device. 2. Let your pihole MitM all https traffic with a certificate you do NOT trust (maybe create one per domain, so you can add it to the trusted list); if the connection is over http, upgrade it to https (if the server doesn't speak https…

Modification of 2nd idea. Run two dnsmasq servers: one which would do resolving and listening on loopback interface, and other listening 53/udp with no-resolv, whitelist of IDNs and filtering rules to pass normal and block other punycode DNs.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#57

Post by jackewiehose »

wongarsu wrote: post #39
jackewiehose wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd probably had to learn something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet I always assumed the non-latin-alphabet people know their way around this because they already used the internet before unicode-domains.

In Japan there's a trend to use phone numbers as domain names, probably for this very reason.

Interesting. I agree that latin isn't sufficient but they could have just extended the list of allowed characters by a few other defined alphabets. No need to include every(?) unicode-point just because it's the technical more elegant solution.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#58

Post by johnchristopher »

downerending wrote: post #48
tialaramex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of different human writing systems. All of them are weird because they were invented by humans, most of them are very weird indeed because they were invented by humans a long time ago and then gradually mutated. The Latin system is the one you're using here. It's very popular. Most humans in the integrated tribes are somewhat familiar with it‡. It has twenty six "letters" and then twenty six more "c…

Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Think Google.) Viewed in that light, restricting DNS names to ASCII as a way to reduce bugs, security issues, etc., makes a lot of sense.

> You were meant to "travel"

You were meant to surf the web ^^.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#59

Post by wongarsu »

jackewiehose wrote: post #57
wongarsu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Japan there's a trend to use phone numbers as domain names, probably for this very reason.

Interesting. I agree that latin isn't sufficient but they could have just extended the list of allowed characters by a few other defined alphabets. No need to include every(?) unicode-point just because it's the technical more elegant solution.

Allowing only a few alphabets doesn't solve much (Cyrillic "а" still looks like latin "a" in most fonts) but opens new cans of worms: how do you update this list, why isn't alphabet x of important minority y included, etc.

Much easier to just allow everything in the technical standards and let domain registries set reasonable standards that make sense for that tld. Sometimes that works well (.de for example has a list of 93 allowed unicode characters [1] which covers everything a German might plausibly use from German or neighboring country's alphabets), but some registries just don't seem to care much (e.g. .com).

1: https://www.denic.de/en/know-how/idn-domains/idn-character-l...

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#60

Post by PeterisP »

wongarsu wrote: post #28
DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punycode is the joke

Limiting dns names to 26 latin characters and the 10 arabic digits is the joke. From the top of my head I can't come up with a single language other than English that doesn't use additional letters (or at least additional modifiers on some letters). Punycode is the most sane solution to an insane situation.

Well, latin works, but it's not that popular outside of Vatican nowadays :)
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