History

Let's do some history!

This is 1978's "HOST NAMES ON-LINE". Early Internet standards described the - character as "minus" rather than hyphen.

RFC 608

up to 48 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z),

digits (0-9), and the minus sign (-) ... specifically, no blank or space characters allowed;

no distinction between upper and lower case letters;

the first character is a letter;

the last character is NOT a minus sign;

no other restrictions on content or syntax.

So, originally, you could have as many hyphens as you wanted after the first symbol - which had to be a letter. The last symbol had to be a letter or number⁰.

That was later formalised in 1981's "DoD INTERNET HOST TABLE SPECIFICATION"

RFC 810 GRAMMATICAL HOST TABLE SPECIFICATION

<name> ::= <let>[*[<let-or-digit-or-hyphen>]<let-or-digit>]

That's carried in the the slightly more modern RFC 952.

By the time we hit 1987, the word "minus" has gone. Note, there are no restrictions on the number of hyphens - just as long as your domain name doesn't start or end with one¹.

RFC 1035 2.3.1. Preferred name syntax

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.

By 1989, the "DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION" was tweaked again:

RFC 1123 2. GENERAL ISSUES

The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.

And, from then on, things stayed pretty stable until the futuristic year 2010. That was when Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) became available. They use the xn-- string at the start of the name so, the spec now says:

RFC 5891 4.2.3.1. Hyphen Restrictions

The Unicode string MUST NOT contain "--" (two consecutive hyphens) in the third and fourth character positions and MUST NOT start or end with a "-" (hyphen).

What they really mean is that "--" is banned in position 3 & 4 unless the first two characters are "xn"².

So, in theory, you can have up to 59 consecutive hyphens by ensuring that they start in position 4 and end at position 62.

Something like abc---[…]---z.com should be fine.

OR IS IT?!?!?

TLD Restrictions

There's what the RFC's say, and what a Top Level Domain (TLD) will allow. The Registry (the organisation which administers the TLD) may set their own, more restrictive, policies. Some will ban naughty words, or refuse IDN registrations, or prevent impersonation of Public Suffix domain, etc.

For example, South Sudan's .ss policies refuse to allow any hyphens.

Nominet, who run the .uk Registry, don't have any restrictions on the use of hyphens other than refusing to register xn-- domains.

But, in general, you can register multi-hyphened domain names with most Registries.

Anomalies

Of course, the mighty Internet mostly runs on spit and hope³. Naturally there are going to be mistakes, glitches, exceptions, and anomalies.

My delightful friend Q Misell had a rummage through her archives and helped track down some of the domain names which violate the modern rules. It's somewhat difficult to query every domain name, nevertheless, there are hundreds of multi-hyphened domains lurking within DNS.

Some, like ok--computer.com are long dead, but some are still active⁴!

Possibly the most consecutive hyphens belongs to http://a-------------------------------------------------------------a.com/

Sixty-one hyphens! The maximum possible, and it still works! The website looks like it hasn't been updated since it was first registered in 2000.

But what about more modern domains? The spookily named http://zz--icann-monitoring.uk/ was registered in 2024 - long after the rules were updated. But as Nominet doesn't allow xn-- domains, I guess it is fine?

There are some domains like bq--3bhauz7frjrgbka.com which look like they were pseudo-randomly generated. Perhaps as command-and-control servers?

Here's a quick table showing some of the ones Q found:

Note, "Live" just means an HTTP request returned something. There may, of course, be other services running on that domain, or on subdomains.

So What?

Without a full list of every domain name, it's rather hard to draw firm conclusions. But, in the absence of anything better to do, here are some thoughts.

• Most people don't want multiple consecutive hyphens in their domain names. They're unwieldy but mostly not prohibited.
• If the authors of RFC 5891 had access to a full list of domains, might they have chosen a different syntax for Punycode?
• Why is it so hard to look through every single registered domain name anyway? Even Certificate Logs no longer seem to be easily searchable.
• Are there any other weird restrictions which are violated by older domain names?
• When will DNS finally go all-in with Unicode rather than this kludge? (Probably around the same time as IPv6 adoption!)

If you know of any weird multi-hyphenated domains, please stick a comment in the box 😊

This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years.

What's the point of Gigabit broadband?

Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to get more for less.

But I'm still left wondering if this is massive overkill.

What can you actually do with their promised 1,130Mbps?

Online video calling isn't that intensive. All the 4K streaming services recommend 25Mbps - so I guess I could ask 40 friends to come round and stream simultaneously. Downloading Linux ISOs is pretty speedy on a connection half as fast - and is usually limited by the upstream. Same for game updates.

I've wired most of my house with Cat6 Ethernet - but most of my switches and ports are 1G rather than 2.5G, so the max bandwith isn't likely to get to any single device. The best I've got directly is around 940Mbps which is about what I'd expect from a gigabit port.

All my WiFi devices are limited by the reality of radio physics in a noisy environment - so about 450Mbps when close to the router. Some of my rooms are hard to reach, so they have HomePlugs beaming data across our electrical wiring. Again, physics dictates a fairly modest speed there.

I've got a VR headset - but haven't found anything that taxes its download speed. Especially given that it uses WiFi.

My 4K Fire Stick has a wired Ethernet connection. Its built in speed test maxes out around 80Mbps. In fact, most of the online speed tests I tried couldn't saturate the pipe - tapping out at around 700Mbps.

Some AI models and training sets are multiple terrabytes. But are they really likely to be downloaded multiple times per day? If they are, is there a real difference in waiting 7 minutes rather than 3.5?

Everyone jokes about website bloat, but the reality is much more prosaic. Latency to a CDN is a bigger contributor to the perceived slowness than the limits of a home connection.

So what about upload speed. The Internet is an inherently sucky medium; people download far more than they upload. In this case, upload is limited to "only" 110Mbps. Even if both of the people in this house were full-time Twitch streamers, I doubt we'd saturate that.

It's 2026 and I can barely recommend 500Mbps broadband. For most domestic uses, including working from home, it's rare to need more than 100Mbps. Sure, faster is always nicer and cheaper is always preferable, but what am I actually going to do with this speed?

Back in 2012, it was reasoned that the fastest legal use of the Internet was 2.5Mbps. We've blown past that limit thanks to video streaming and calling. But, on the assumption I'm not going to be using my connection to mirror Linux ISOs, what can I do with it?

I guess I can run a personal VPN from home. Handy if I want to stream geolocked content when I'm out of the country. But, again, 1Gbps is overkill for that - especially as I'm likely to be either on a mobile hotspot or hotel WiFi.

I could livestream all my security cameras 24/7 to a secure back-up vault. That isn't going to touch the sides of my upload speed.

Perhaps I could self-host all my stuff? Again, for personal use I'm limited to whatever speed my laptop or phone can get on a public connection. Given the risk of botnets, DDoS, hacking & the like, I'm not sure I'd want much public-facing stuff on my residential IP address.

To be clear, I think it is a great thing that the UK Government is pushing ISPs to deploy gigabit everywhere. It isn't at all useful now, but will probably be crucial in the future.

So if you have any ideas for what I can do to saturate this connection, please drop a comment in the box.

In the meantime, if you join Virgin Media using this link we will both get £50 bill credit.

Is there a way to use CSS to increase the font size of specific characters without having to wrap them in an extra <span> or similar?

Yes! Although it is a bit of a hack.

This relies on 3 CSS features: src: local(), unicode-range,and size-adjust. Let me walk you through it.

@font-face {
    font-family: "emoji";

    src: local('Apple Color Emoji'),
         local('Android Emoji'),
         local('Segoe UI Emoji'),
         local('Noto Color Emoji'),
         local(EmojiSymbols),
         local(Symbola);

    unicode-range: U+231A-231B, U+23E9-23EC, U+23F0, U+23F3, U+25FD-25FE, U+2614-2615, U+2648-2653, U+267F, U+2693, U+26A1, U+26AA-26AB, U+26BD-26BE, U+26C4-26C5, U+26CE, U+26D4, U+26EA, U+26F2-26F3, U+26F5, U+26FA, U+26FD, U+2705, U+270A-270B, U+2728, U+274C, U+274E, U+2753-2755, U+2757, U+2795-2797, U+27B0, U+27BF, U+2B1B-2B1C, U+2B50, U+2B55, U+FE0F, U+1F004, U+1F0CF, U+1F18E, U+1F191-1F19A, U+1F1E6-1F1FF, U+1F201, U+1F21A, U+1F22F, U+1F232-1F236, U+1F238-1F23A, U+1F250-1F251, U+1F300-1F320, U+1F32D-1F335, U+1F337-1F393, U+1F3A0-1F3CA, U+1F3CF-1F3D3, U+1F3E0-1F3F0, U+1F3F4, U+1F3F8-1F43E, U+1F440, U+1F442-1F4FC, U+1F4FF-1F53D, U+1F54B-1F567, U+1F57A, U+1F595-1F596, U+1F5A4, U+1F5FB-1F64F, U+1F680-1F6CC, U+1F6D0-1F6D2, U+1F6D5-1F6D7, U+1F6DC-1F6DF, U+1F6EB-1F6EC, U+1F6F4-1F6FC, U+1F7E0-1F7EB, U+1F7F0, U+1F90C-1F93A, U+1F93C-1F945, U+1F947-1FA7C, U+1FA80-1FAC5, U+1FACE-1FADB, U+1FAE0-1FAE8, U+1FAF0-1FAF8;

    size-adjust: 300%;
}

body {
    font-family: "emoji", sans-serif;
}

Here's how it works.

@font-face this tells the browser that we're defining a new font which will be referenced later.

font-family this is the name we're going to be using as a reference.

src: local('Apple Color Emoji') ... CSS can reference local fonts. We don't know what device this page is being viewed on, so we've included a number of popular fallback fonts which should work with all major browsers. You can also reference a webfont if you want - although Emoji fonts tend to have a large filesize. I've adapted this from Marc Fornós' CSS and added a few more common default emoji fonts.

unicode-range this tells the browser to use this font only for the specific codepoints mentioned. This is where the magic happens.

Emoji codepoints are complicated - especially when it comes to combining characters. You can see a full list of every sequence in Unicode 15.1. There are currently 3,782 different emoji.

There was some talk of using named ranges but that doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. So, instead, I've extracted all the Emoji codepoints and manually grouped them. It's a pretty long sequence, and I'm sure I've made a few mistakes.

size-adjust this is used to increase or decrease the apparent size of a font.

Finally, the body { font-family: "emoji", sans-serif; } tells the browser to use the Emoji font (remember, this will only work on the specified Unicode range) and then fall back to the defaults sans-serif font. Obviously, you can specify whatever fonts you like.

Have a play with it

This is a nifty little hack if you want to make Emoji (or any other text) bigger than its surroundings.

I am indebted to Šime Vidas who demonstrated this trick to me.

Let's first define what we mean by Queer. This usually means outside of binary gender and/or someone who is attracted to the same sex - what's commonly referred to as LGBT+. Feel free to supply your own definition.

As for what we mean by AI - let's go with "mechanical or non-biological autonomous being." That's probably wide enough - but do please suggest better definitions.

So is a gay/lesbian robot one who is attracted to other robots? Or to humans with a similar gender? Let's go with yes to all of the above.

Do robots have gender?

Humans love categorising things - especially inanimate objects. Some languages divide every noun into male a female. Why? Humans gonna human.

The television is female in French - "la télévision" - but masculine in German - "der Fernseher". Stupid humans and their pathetic meaty brains.

Nevertheless, humans can usually look at a human-ish thing and assign it a specific gender.

Maschinenmensch - from Metropolis - is a Gynoid (as distinct from an Android). "She" has a feminine body shape and that's enough for most people to go on.

HAL - from 2001 - is just a disembodied voice. But it definitely has a male voice. Is there any attraction between Hal and Dave? I doubt it - but it's an interesting reading of their toxic relationship.

Robosexual?

Kryten - from Red Dwarf - is coded as male. All the characters refer to him with male pronouns. Under British comedy rules, he is also "camp" - an over-the-top and stereotypically effeminate man.

Kryten is sexually attracted to other household appliances.

But... Kryten's "perfect mate" is a distinctly female Gynoid. (Fun fact - Camille and Kryten are played by real-life wife and husband Judy Pascoe and Robert Llewelyn!)

C-3P0 - another British campbot - is clearly in love with R2-D2 - whether or not that love is reciprocated is hard to say.

Threepio and Artoo may behave like an old married couple - but the astromech has an eye for the ladies.

I say "ladies" - just because a robot is pink, doesn't mean it's a girl. (KT-10 is a girl though.)

Robots attracted to humans

There are several examples of "female" computers falling in love with male humans - and a disturbing number of sex-worker bots - but it is much harder to find queer examples.

The Tick has an AI in a boat. The AI is male and attracted to other men. Who may or may not be boats.

Is the boat programmed to be gay? Are his desires hardwired? Are yours?

Remember "Alien: Resurrection"? Winona Ryder played the robot "Call" who has a "suggestive" relationship with Ripley. As this ship video demonstrates.

Battlestar Galactica has some bi-sexual Cylons

Apparently there's a few gay Autobots and gay Decepticons in Transformers.

TV show "Humans" has one of the robots fall in love with a human

Ambiguity

Is Rachael from Blade Runner a robot, or a lesbian?

Clearly, yes.

Gender reassignment

It's possible for you to swap the gender of your Voice Assistant in real life. Your GPS can have a male voice one day, and you can swap it to female the next.

I couldn't find many examples in fiction which an AI changed gender.

Back to Red Dwarf again. In the series 3 opener "Backwards" it is revealed that Holly (a computer with a male face) fell in love with Hilly (a computer with a female face). And subsequently performed a head sex change. Although she kept the name Holly.

The entire crew of Red Dwarf accept this. They never comment on it, nor disparage her.

Basically, what I'm saying is this: if you can't accept your trans friends, you're literally a worse human than Arnold Judas Rimmer.