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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"

#71
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.

I'm a keyboard junkie, and I didn't know that. Thanks!

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

#72
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh man, do you remember aol keywords?

And who can forget the original "me too"? :-)

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

#73

It took me a while to get the joke because I didn't recognize that white ghost on a white background. I take this as another example why these non-ascii urls are a bad idea for security.

It's not white, it's the blueish grey #E1E8ED. You need a better monitor :)

Fails all contrast measures abysmally: https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23E1E8ED-on-white

And this is despite that fact that the actual "font color" is #14171A with excellent contrast: https://contrast-ratio.com/#%2314171A-on-white

But these bizarre characters don't respond the text color and thus utterly unpredictable in their legibility.

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

#74

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.

It's another reminder how much internet infrastructure predates the Unicode standard (along with other equally wacky hacks like email's UTF-7). URLs weren't restricted to ASCII versus Unicode for any sort of bug reduction/security issue/whatnot, they were restricted to (a subset of) ASCII simply because Unicode did not exist at the time to even be considered.

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

#75

Not all unicode characters are valid IDN labels. For example, emojis are not valid in IDN labels.

Valid or not several emoji domains have existed since 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain

As with so many things domain name related, what is or is not valid varies by and is determined by registrar. The biggest registrars (.com, .net, .org as three examples) generally have a lot of restrictions on IDNs, whereas many countries can afford to allow just about the full gamut of Unicode if they wish.

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

#76

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.

I won't judge URLs, but we are talking about DNS and hostnames here, which predate URLs and we're ment to give human-readable names to hosts.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ^^.

"Surfing" came later afair it's traced back to some Australian librarian who had a surf board on here mousepad while looking for an analogy for an article she wrote. [Citation needed]

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

#79
Interesting, both Chrome and Firefox seem to show the Punycode encoding after I enter the emoji in the URL for me.

Do browsers always show the Punycode encoding, or do they show the encoded glyphs only in some scenarios? I can't find examples of Punycode in the wild used by normal websites.

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

#80

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.

DNS was already 8-bit clean. IDNA was chosen for a complex set of compatibility, management, and user interface reasons.
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