Subject: Re: [iucg] New version of strawman for IDNAv2

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 14:22:50 +0100

John,
I am glad we at last discuss semiotics in a proper way. You asked if we
should enter typography issues. The problem we have from the very beginning
is that internationalization constrains the human intellectual semantics to
the Anglo-saxon pragmatics, added with some Internet usage/standardization
typographical syntactics (BlueBell, is actually using a virtual space).

Would there be a problem in creating another type of characters as
"IGNORED", meaning that they can be typed but will be ignored by the DNS?Also,
could we not use DISALLOWED code points as a temporary pool of TEMPORARY
code points for typographies not supported (yet) by Unicode?

jfc

PS. As far as I understand punycode supports upper/lowercases. Therefore
French and other languages have much less problems in a non-case folding,
with IGNORED and TEMPORARY classes. What I observe is that contextual rules
are trying to replicate the contextual usage practice and may confuse this
practice, actually diminishing security. They also reduce flexibility: I am
not sure that the semantic/security trade-off is positive. I know this would
change the general perspective of IDNA and also open new possibilities for
attacks. This is why I think the best is to use a regular "xn--" IDNA and an
extended "xx--" IDNA, with possible "x.--" variations when needed. The use
of the same punycode algorithm should greatly increase the security.

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From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 14:34:36 +0100

2009/3/2 Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>

> Adam M. Costello wrote:
> > Mark Andrews <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Mail applications regularly display mail domain names.
> >>
> >
> > But do they display domain names received via DNS?  I don't think so, I
> > think they display domain names obtained from the message header.
> Trace headers routinely contain DNS names obtained by reverse-mapping
> the transport IP addresses.

IMHO, all these examples are not meant to be used for typographic but for
maintenance/management purposes where they relate to the DNS entries, not to
the user entries? This would therefore look as a consistent approach?
jfc

>
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> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/idna-update
>

---

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 18:06:05 +0100

traceroute wants to be compatible with domain names (as entered in the DNS),
not with usage names (as entered by the users). So, if traceroots supports
IDNA, would it not be an application as any other one, which will strip off
the IGNORED characters before its lookup?
jfc

2009/3/2 Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>

> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 10:59:33PM +0000,
>  Adam M. Costello <[email-masked]> wrote
>  a message of 26 lines which said:
>
> > How common is it for applications to display domain names obtained
> > from DNS?  I'm not aware that this ever happens except for
> > logging/debugging purposes.
>
> traceroute ? Yes, it is a debugging tool but it is very common.
>