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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"

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Very much depends on what browser/platform you're on. Many different emoji implementations out there.

Nope, Twitter replaces the unicode character with an SVG image, so it should show the same for everyone.

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

#32

This is using Punycode encoding, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain .

Why is this even a thing?

Unicode and Punycode were originally designed for letting computers handle the wide variety of human writing systems, common ones like Chinese and Arabic, as well as rarer ones. Much more recently, the emoji characters were added to that same Unicode system, so any encoding system these days that's international-friendly also ends up supporting emoji as well.

So Punycode wasn't specifically designed to work with emoji, it just happens to work with emoji because emoji are part of Unicode.

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

#34
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this even a thing?

Imagine if DNS consisted only of Arabic characters. Imagine how grumpy you'd be that you couldn't go to newyork.gov.us for your local government website, and instead had to go to نيويورك instead? Assuming you can't read Arabic, how on earth would you even recognise that address, let alone remember how to type it.

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.

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

#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!

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much depends on what browser/platform you're on. Many different emoji implementations out there.

Nope, Twitter replaces the unicode character with an SVG image, so it should show the same for everyone.

Depends on how you're browsing. The legacy fallback does not replace it, eg when you have js disabled

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

#37
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, Twitter replaces the unicode character with an SVG image, so it should show the same for everyone.

Depends on how you're browsing. The legacy fallback does not replace it, eg when you have js disabled

None of the emoji implementations use a solid white ghost without something else (border or shadow).

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

#38

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.

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

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

#39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if DNS consisted only of Arabic characters. Imagine how grumpy you'd be that you couldn't go to newyork.gov.us for your local government website, and instead had to go to نيويورك instead? Assuming you can't read Arabic, how on earth would you even recognise that address, let alone remember how to type it.

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.

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

#40
post #4

I hate to be a spoilsport, but this is a good reminder that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack is still possible in some domains and with some browsers and CLI tools, although some of the easier tricks to detect have been mitigated.

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?

As far as I know, no, it’s not possible to do in Unbound since it doesn’t support regex or wildcards on part of a domain (except whole parts as in DNS itself e.g. *.foo.example).
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