Comments on draft-ietf-idnabis-defs-10

[Elisabeth Blanconil]

Sorry, I only answered John.

John,

this depends on what this WG calls punycode. I tend to consider
punycode as the interfacing function between U-label and A-label.
After two years that function is like a groggy boxer stripped with
patches everywhere including on the eyes, so one does not really know
what it may see.

I really like your idea of giving us an IETF/LC break with new people
and fresh points of view. I am very worried by the fact that what Wil
brought up was obvious to us from the very begining, what explains
some of our misunderstandings with the rest of the WG. What if there
are other jokers like that? The IETF/LC will help spotting them.

For example, I am very suspicious about the U-Label restriction to
lowercases once the intermediary ASCII string has been lowercased. My
maths are not good but I know that an n character string has only one
way to be lowercased and something power n (or the other way around)
ways to be partially uppercased. Since most of the TMs, fun and tricks
play on cases, as does semantic, I do not see that restriction to
stand for a long. (There are at least two ways to get Uppercased
U-label from lowercase ASCII strings, probably people and crooks will
find more). Also, we actually did nothing about phishing.

Elisabeth

2009/9/3 Elisabeth Blanconil <eblanconil at gmail.com>:
> John,
>
> this depends on what this WG calls punycode. I tend to consider
> punycode as the interfacing function between U-label and A-label.
> After two years that function is like a groggy boxer stripped with
> patches everywhere including on the eyes, so one does not really know
> what it may see.
>
> I really like your idea of giving us an IETF/LC break with new people
> and fresh points of view. I am very worried by the fact that what Wil
> brought up was obvious to us from the very begining, what explains
> some of our misunderstandings with the rest of the WG. What if there
> are other jokers like that? The IETF/LC will help spotting them.
>
> For example, I am very suspicious about the U-Label restriction to
> lowercases once the intermediary ASCII string has been lowercased. My
> maths are not good but I know that an n character string has only one
> way to be lowercased and something power n (or the other way around)
> ways to be partially uppercased. Since most of the TMs, fun and tricks
> play on cases, as does semantic, I do not see that restriction to
> stand for a long. (There are at least two ways to get Uppercased
> U-label from lowercase ASCII strings, probably people and crooks will
> find more). Also, we actually did nothing about phishing.
>
> Elisabeth Blanconil
>
> 2009/9/3 John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com>:
>>
>>
>> --On Wednesday, September 02, 2009 18:20 -0700 Paul Hoffman
>> <phoffman at imc.org> wrote:
>>
>>> At 9:08 PM -0400 9/2/09, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>>> under no circumstance would I recommend that this WG
>>>> undertake any  modifications to punycode.
>>>
>>> ...beyond what idna-protocol already explicitly does. :-)
>>
>> Paul,
>>
>> I believe that it doesn't.  It restricts the input to Punycode
>> but, so, albeit differently, do ToASCII and ToUnicode.  Do you
>> see it doing anything else?
>>
>>    john
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Idna-update mailing list
>> Idna-update at alvestrand.no
>> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/idna-update
>>
>