

Unicode URL - ☃.net - jabo
http://☃.net

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rexf
Gruber made one in 2010 (<http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/starstruck>). I
made one to mimic ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ as the url (url: ˉ⧹ˍ❨ツ❩ˍ⧸ˉ.ws -or- <http://xn--
zqaala8697bga007bda767m.ws/> ).

Unfortunately, it doesn't work well on all browsers/DNS servers, so it's not
very practical.

~~~
prezjordan
Pretty sure a gaming "brand" company owns the rights to that emoticon. It was
the subject of much criticism a couple months ago.

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Fuzzwah
The timing of this is interesting to me. I was having a conversation with a
friend who isn't a geek at all who mentioned that he met the most geeky person
he'd ever come across. Someone so geeky they had a domain name which was just
a black box. I'd never heard of unicode URLs before, but quickly realised what
he was on about.

I raced home to find out if ♥.com was taken. I 1st tried checking it by just
typing alt+3 .com in chrome's address bar, only to find out that you can't.
Chrome just won't accept it. So I tried in IE and noticed that while it
"resolved" out to xn--g6h.com but there was no site. Excellent I thought and
quickly tried to register it only to find that I'd been beaten by about 9
years. As I checked for other available single unicode domains I found that
most of them had been snapped up around 2003.

i♥you.com is for sale.

No real point to this story except that I was once again reminded that as
geeky and "internet hip" as I like to think I am, I find I'm continuously 5-10
years behind the real smart people.

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tintin
I think this is very bad, security wise. Take this URL for example:
www.paypaᥣ.com Ofcourse it depends on the font used and the characters chosen,
but you can trick people into opening a site they trust.

(for those who don't get it: the L of paypal is not an L)

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taejo
This is a well-known issue, and Firefox deals with it by showing (in this
example) <http://xn--n3h.net/> in the address bar.

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tutuca
chrome is doing the same here (chrome 18/linux)

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friggeri
Speaking of IDNs, a few months back I had an idea for a geo service and
registered <http://⌖.ws> — figured U+2316 Position Indicator[1] was a good fit
for something related to geolocation.

I never came around to using it, so if a fellow HNer is interested in the
domain, drop me a line (email in my profile).

[1] Larger image: [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/stixgeneral-
reg...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/stixgeneral-
regular/u2316.png)

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igorsyl
Clever but how would mom and pop type this into the address bar? I guess this
is meant solely for clickable links.

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AncientPC
I don't see much value for most of these Unicode domain names except for
novelty.

However, CJK domains are a potential goldmine if you factor in:

1\. Most internet ready devices in Asia have Unicode input (language-wise).
For example, they can easily type 日本.com (Japan).

2\. China's internet users count has surpassed 500M.

A brief lookup revealed that the most common 1-2 character domain names have
already been picked up.

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tomjakubowski
<http://💩.la> is a better example, IMO.

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acoyfellow
Ha! Care to share how you accomplished this?

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maaku
Registered a punycode domain.

~~~
jabo
If you're asking about how I entered the link into HN, I had to copy-paste.

