Posts Tagged ‘xn--’

Evan Brewer: International Domain Names (IDN) Practical Information

Back in December of 1996, a man by the name of Martin Dürst at the University of Zürich came up with the idea that adding internationalized characters to domain names would be a good idea.  Much debate was had and now almost every Top Level Domain (TLD) available supports internationalized characters. There are a few exceptions if I recall, […]

Chris Weber: Unicode attacks and test cases: IDN and IRI display, normalization and anti-spoofing

Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI’s) are a new take on the old URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), which through RFC 3986 restricted domain names to a subset of ASCII characters – mainly lower and upper case letters, numbers, and some punctuation. IRI’s were forecasted many years ago by Martin Dürst and Michel Suignard, and formalized in RFC […]

IDN Response and summary to the Cairo public forum

This is a Response and Summary to the Cairo public forum that took place on 6 November 2008.

A PDF version of this document is available at: http://www.icann.org/en/participate/cairo-public-forum-response.pdf

Note from the Chairman:

One of the most significant features of ICANN meetings is the Public Forum, where members of the ICANN community are able to present their views on issues of concern to them to the ICANN Board, in public session. The fact that we rotate meetings through each of the geographic sectors of the world enhances the opportunity that people from every region to present their views to the ICANN Board, in the presence of Staff and the whole ICANN community.

As a long-time participant from the floor presenting views, in my case from the ccTLD community, I am well aware of the time, effort and expense that goes into the preparation of such statements. As a board member, I have valued hearing those submissions, from individuals, governments and constituencies. I am determined as Chair to continue this tradition, and to maximise the opportunities for information sharing it represents.

Unicode Graphic Domains

Domains using the full character spectrum aren’t really supported well in browsers, partly due to security issues… so entering something like bücherei.com (the German word for library) will resolve into what is called a punycode address, namely xn--bcherei-n2a.com. This kinda ruins it for serious uses, but still, there’s domains out there using more than just […]

Conor Neu: ICANN Scheme Strictly for IDN’s?

What if this whole situation proposed by ICANN to allow a larger variety of sites is merely a scheme to make it easier for them to move towards IDN.IDN?
The new decision is to “allow any combination of letters and numbers, including non-latin characters.”  While, I am sure ICANN was considering the geo-extensions when discussing the […]

The Foundation for Internet Development: On possibility of registration of multilingual domain names in SU domain

Supervising Council of the Foundation for Internet Development decided to cancel restrictions on registration of domains with xn-- prefix in SU domain starting from April 28, 2008. For the last several years International corporation ICANN implements the system of multilingual domains (IDN) that permits using domain names with symbols of different national alphabets. Considering support […]

.SU Russian IDN

Since April, 28, 2008 according to the decision of The Foundation for Internet Development, SU top level domain Administrator restrictions for registration domain names with prefix xn-- are canceled. It allows .SU Russian IDN registration. Since April, 15, 2008 RU-CENTER takes the pre-orders for .SU Russian IDNs. If you apply for a domain and your application […]

IDN Domain Names Are Coming

If you have never heard of IDN domain names, you likely soon will. This is because the most used and popular internet browser in the world, Internet Explorer (IE7), will soon beging to resolve them by default. This means people from all over the world will finally be able to communicate websites, domain names and […]

Internationalization

InternationalFlags_Small.jpgRecently, we were thinking about purchasing new domain names for Imperva’s web site in languages other than English. This was a trigger for me to do some reading on ICANN’s International Domain Names (IDNs). Although I was already familiar with the general IDN concept, I knew that it is an evolving standard and I wanted to go back and re-examine the potential impacts on our WAF product. I didn’t find anything too interesting, but I did come to understand that there are some major security implications associated with this standard.  More importantly, no one has yet taken real responsibly for dealing with them.

But before I get into that, here’s a crash course in IDNs for those of you who are not familiar with the concept:

1. International domain names are becoming more and more available as more registrars and ISPs are implementing the IDN standard, which allows registering domain names that include non-ASCII characters.