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I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

tinyprojects.dev

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Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#81
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German speaker, first association when reading the title of this post. "Uuuuh, that does not fly in Germany."

It seems unfortunate if Kazakhstan has been assigned a TLD that makes it hard for them to do business with Germany.

When you are operating out of Kazakhstan, I'm sure Germans get the context. It's different when you're actively choosing the name.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#82
post #65
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure it's because Emojis are Unicode and HN only supports ASCII. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524948

你确定马?

I love that I didn't have to translate this to know what it said

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#83
post #78

Wait, aren't emojis explicitly prohibited from being used in IDNA? Or do the implementers just not bother to read the "IDNA Rules and Derived Property Values" table and simply allow anything that's a correct punycode?

Kazakhstan and DNS. Always always my personal reminder that OWASP applies to all applications, and to always sanitize inputs. DAMHIK!

Don’t ask me how I know.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#85
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel like emoji add anything substantial to a textual conversation Proceeds to add an ascii emoji

What would an emoji provide over that ascii combo?

Nuance

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#86
post #20

This sounds like a subplot of a Neal Stephenson story from back in the day.

An NS version of this story would somehow involve the protagonist needing to travel to Kazakhstan, undertaking a multiple-day journey in a convoy of trucks across some mountains, to secure a meeting with an officious local bureaucrat who turns out to be bribable with in-game currency from a Chinese gacha game he’s obsessed with.

That sounds very much like my experience in Kazakhstan

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#88
post #6

Does anyone know what happened to TinyProjects? I looked forwards to reading his updates and it looks like he stopped a while ago…

This was my last response in May 2023 when I reached out to him, hoping he was OK!

  ***

  Hi Charles!

  All good here. I have been heads down building a new project - hence the lack of posts recently. Thanks for reaching out!

  Ben

  ***

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#89

I bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it. Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well. I tried pasting the email address in a bunch…

Trying this emoji thing out inline. Had not even heard of the auto-symbol translation

As a test, looked for (star).com [might show up with .com, or %E2%98%85.com ?](EDIT: nope) Long form is: https://www.xn--p3h.com/ Source was a question on StackExchange about weird domain names.[1] Seemed to be related to the authors hunt for "prestige" emojis.

Apparently owned by Gregg N. Ostrick of GNO, Inc. bought wayyy back in 2001-04-19. [2] If this is such a new idea, how did Mr. Ostrick buy (star).com back in 2001? Got some hijinks with time traveling retcon sales of emoji names?

Notably, typing the (star) symbol in the browser (Firefox) does seem to work, and gets auto-extended to xn--p3h. Others, like (star)(star)(star) appear to work (xn--p3haa) just have no domain squatter. Others, like crazy bail bonds names, or eBay reviews, such as A(star)++ appear to resolve (https://www.xn--a++-0m5a.com/). However, I'm not sure if those actually work.

Also, confusing stuff. Like Wingdings (star), which turns into unicode https://www.xn--iba.com/) Well beyond G00GLE.com (zerO)(zer0) issues.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1719132/how-do-i-registe...

[2] https://www.whois.com/whois/%E2%98%85.com

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#90
post #75
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that help the organisation (community) manage their single domain? For example: who controls the intercoin.org domain? I'm quite sure it's a combination of trust and hierarchy and as fallback a society with laws and lawyers and law-enforcement. Which, IMO is "good enough" for nearly all situations.

As I have already said, with the current DNS system, that’s how it works. You have to trust that your provider won’t screw you over. It’s held together by duct tape and spit. You know, in every OTHER technology, that’s how it was before we automated things that humans previously did. You may as well have said this about telephone switchboard operators, or tying up the line, until VoIP brought the costs to zero. “Who…

You have still not answered the simple question of who, within this web3 org, controls the (.org, or even the .eth) domain.

This is also a single person. Even on ENS, whom you have to trust. By moving everything onto ENS, you've, practically, not solved the issue of who controls your domain.

Sure. It mightn't be the ICAN. Instead, now, it's Jeffrey who has the private keys on his ledger. Congrats!

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