As of February 1st 2010 registration of domain names with special characters in them, like for example a letter with an accent, called Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) .lu will be possible. Acceptable special caracters are those communly used in Luxembourgish, German and French languages.

There will be a two months sunrise period between February 1^st 2010 and March 31^st 2010. During this sunrise period owners of registered .lu names will be able to register the identical names with special caracters. After this sunrise period beginning April 1^st 2010 IDN registrations will be open for everybody and performed on a “first-come, first-served basis”.

The allowed character for IDN will be those necessary for Luxemburgish, French or German. Besides the currently accepted caracters (a-z, 0-9, – (hyphen)) these are:

• U+00E4 Latin small letter a with diaeresis (ä)
• U+00F6 Latin small letter o with diaeresis (ö)
• U+00FC Latin small letter u with diaeresis (ü)
• U+00E0 Latin small letter a with grave (à)
• U+00E2 Latin small letter a with circumflex (â)
• U+00E6 Latin small letter ae (æ)
• U+00E7 Latin small letter c with cedilla (ç)
• U+00E8 Latin small letter e with grave (è)
• U+00E9 Latin small letter e with acute (é)
• U+00EA Latin small letter e with circumflex (ê)
• U+00EB Latin small letter e with diaeresis (ë)
• U+00EE Latin small letter i with circumflex (î)
• U+00EF Latin small letter i with diaeresis (ï)
• U+00F4 Latin small letter o with circumflex (ô)
• U+00F9 Latin small letter u with grave (ù)
• U+00FB Latin small letter u with circumflex (û)
• U+0153 Latin small ligature oe (œ)

The domain names eligible during the sunrise period are those derived from an existing domain name by replacing one or more characters with the same base character with a diacritic, or by applying the general replacement convention (e.g. ü=ue).

Mapping table:

• a: à, â, ä
• c: ç
• e: é, è, ê, ë
• i: î, ï
• o: ô, ö
• u: ù, û, ü
• ae: æ, ä
• oe: œ, ö
• ue: ü

An IDN must be registered to the same holder (same name, same address) as the similar ASCII domain name. The registrar does not have to be the same for both names. Trade of IDNs registered during the sunrise period will be blocked until the end of the sunrise (March 31^st).

Removal of the obligation of the administrative contact to be established in Luxembourg

As of February 1^st 2010 domain name holders which are established outside Luxembourg are not no longer obliged to give valid power of attorney to an agent established in Luxembourg for the registration and the management of their domain name.

Removal of the reservation of domain names of Luxembourg municipality and village names on behalf of local authorities

As of January 1^st 2011 domain names containing the name of any Luxembourg municipality or village name will become available to any interested party independent of its nationality and residence. Domain names belonging to this category remain reserved for local administration until January 1^st 2011.

Opening of registration of Temporary blocked domain names

Domain names which have been rejected under former registration policies and which have been identified as Temporary blocked domain names, will become available for registration during 2010. Details of the registration process, as well as the date of release will be published in due time.

Luxembourg .lu domain names rank amongst the most secure in the world

The .lu domain is one of the world’s securest top-level domains (TLD). That is the conclusion of an annual survey by US security software company McAfee. Luxembourg ranks on the 2nd position among the 27 EU countries, just behind Ireland. Luxembourg domain is 4th among worldwide country domains tested, where Japan (.jp) is the safest country domain globally, Ireland’s .ie domain came second, followed by Croatia (.hr) and Luxembourg (.lu). McAfee checked out more than 5.750 .lu websites to arrive at the rating. Cameroon (cm) is the least secure domain worldwide. The risk of being infected by a computer virus when surfing is 69,7 percent when visiting a website from Cameroon (.cm). In Luxembourg, by contrast, it is only 0,3 percent. Of all the websites tested worldwide, 5.8 percent are rated as insecure.

“It is reassuring to see .lu in the upper part of the worldwide security level”, said Antoine Barthel, managing director of RESTENA Foundation which operates the .lu registry DNS-LU. “McAfee’s findings confirm that our continuous efforts and investments to make the .lu domain one of the most secure produce outstanding performances”.

You can download McAfee’s document (at McAfee)