looking up domain names with unassigned code points

[Vint Cerf]

If this is true, this is a very disappointing outcome -the .SU  
operators are certainly damaging our general efforts to make the  
Internet a less confusing place in which to operate.

v

On May 11, 2008, at 11:13 AM, Cary Karp wrote:

> Quoting Vint:
>
>> technical question:
>>
>> if someone generates an arbitrary  string of the form "xn-- <random
>> sequence of lowercase a-z, 0-9 and hyphen>
>> does the algorithm ALWAYS produce a sequence of UNICODE code points?
>> Note I did not say a PVALID set of code points or even ASSIGNED.
>
> I'm not sure if or how it weighs into the consideration of this  
> question
> but on April 28th, the .SU TLD registry began accepting the
> registration of subdomain labels beginning with xn-- without requiring
> them to be valid output of the Punycode algorithm:
>
> "A user or service provider can either design software used for
> decoding and decoding algorithm on his own or use PUNYCODE algorithm
> recommended by ICANN and published in RFC documents."
>
> 	http://www.fid.su/english/?newsid=1207819620
>
> One purpose of allowing non-IDNA-compliant alternatives appears to be
> to permit script mixing:
>
> "In the process of generation of domain names with xn-- prefix using
> encoding algorithms mentioned in RFC documents registrators are not
> allowed to mix symbols of different national alphabets."
>
> /Cary
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