http://↑↑↓↓←→←→ba.tk/

Yup, copy and paste that into your browser and it will resolve. Update: The free .tk domain service no longer works.

For now, it just redirects to a Wikipedia article. If you can think of a better use for it, please let me know. I wonder how mail clients do at sending emails to it?

Interestingly, Chrome sometimes throws up a warning that this is a "Fake Site" saying "Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making small, hard-to-see changes to the URL." I suspect that's because of the mixture of English characters and symbols.

I was inspired by the (slightly weird) http://↓.tk website.

And that got me wondering… what other abuses of the Punycode algorithm can I whack into DNS? Well, here's some I whipped up using FreeNom - they offer free domain names on the .ga TLD (and a few others) and are very liberal in accepting Punycode domains.

There's millions of domains all under one roof

For some reason, the children's retailer "Toys 'R' Us" uses a backwards R in their logo. Presumably because they think kids are stupid and don't know how to form letters.

Or, maybe they're big fans of the reversed letter ᴙ? Either way, Punycode supports that!

I present to you:

https://ToysᴙUs.ga/

Yup! Copy and paste that and it'll work. Webkit based browsers should show the ᴙ in the URl bar - others might show Punycode.

NB: This is not the Cyrillic ya - it is, instead, a homoglyph.

Touch a Touch a Touch a Touch Me

I think this is the world's first domain name written in Braille.

https://⠠⠃⠗⠇.ga

That uses Unified English Braille - with a Grade Two contraction.

Interestingly, I couldn't get any browser to display Braille in the URl bar. The other domains on this page work - but this one just gave the Punycode representation xn--9iii1c8a.ga

These domains go up to 11

Without a doubt, the loudest band in rock and/or roll are the legendary "Spın̈al Tap" - note the dotless I and the heavy-metal umlaut over the N.

Again, Punycode supports that!

https://Spın̈alTap.ga/

Interestingly, this was the only domain that Firefox displayed without converting to Punycode.

Some kind of Einstein

This one combines another trick. As I pointed out in my post about buying a single character domain name, we can abuse Unicode normalisation in our domain names. So the Unicode Superscript block gets automatically converted to regular text.

This means we can have a domain of:

https://e꞊mc².ga/

The "equals" is really "modifier letter short equals sign (U+A78A)" which, surprisingly, doesn't undergo normalisation.

What didn't work

It's always good to share the experiments which didn't produce anything useful. Negative results are results too!

• Zalgo Text doesn't work.
• 🂡 and other playing cards don't work.
• I figured trying to use something like xn--hsbccom-oy9d61a would probably get me banned from the Internet pretty quickly!
• This didn't open up a portal to the Dark Dimension from which all madness stems. Oh well.

Up next?

If you manage to generate any weird and wonderful domain names, please leave a comment.

tl;dr you can't register Punycode .ss domains.

This also means Internet users in South Sudan can't register domains using their own writing system.

Background

The Republic of South Sudan became independent and joined the United Nations back in 2011. A decade later, and it's now possible to register .ss domains.

Partly due to the history of the letters SS, and partly because of the way domains are usually organised, you cannot register a .ss domain directly. You can have .com.ss, .edu.ss, .biz.ss, .sch.ss, .gov.ss, .net.ss, and - my new favourite - .me.ss!

This allows for some interesting domain hacks. Perhaps host a recipe page for Eton Mess? Or complain about trash at your_town.me.ss?

I was looking at hot.me.ss - but someone already snapped that up. However, the registrar said they allowed Punycode registration. Which means... EMOJI DOMAINS!

So, for €24, Afriregister.com.ss sold me...

🔥.me.ss

For the Punycode minded among you, that's xn--4v8h.me.ss

The process

This wasn't quite as simple as I hoped. There are several registries which claim to support .me.ss - but halfway through the process, they'd decide that they couldn't register it. Some of the registrars outside of Africa wanted extortionate prices for domains. But Afriregister.com.ss were relatively cheap and hassle-free. They let you pay via PayPal.

Domains have to be approved. There is a long list of banned terms. Some of those restrictions are very specific to the people of South Sudan - so it is worth reading.

The failure

The registration still hadn't completed after 12 hours. So the next day I chatted to the registrar.

Damnit!

Looking more closely at nic.ss's registration policies, they say

4.1 All .SS Domain Names MUST have a minimum of THREE (3) characters. 4.2 All .SS Domain Names should not have more than 63 characters. 4.3 All .SS Domain Names should have a syntax pattern of [a-z 0-9].

It didn't explicitly allow or deny hyphens - so I thought I'd risk it.

Oh well, that would have been fun if it worked.

As I said, it's important to publish about things which don't work. It stops other people from wasting their time on futile pursuits.

So, I've now got credit with the registrar. What .me.ss domain should I get?

Nestling among the "Letterlike Symbols" are two curious entries. Both of these are single characters:

• Telephone symbol - ℡
• Numero Sign - №

What's interesting is both .tel and .no are Top-Level-Domains (TLD) on the Domain Name System (DNS).

So my contact site - https://edent.tel/ - can be written as - https://edent.℡/

And the Norwegian domain name registry NORID can be accessed at https://www.norid.№/

Copy and paste those links - they work in any browser!

Is this limited to TLDs?

No! This works ANYWHERE in a domain name. Copy and paste these examples:

• Script https://ℰ𝒳𝒜ℳ𝓟ℒℰ.𝒞𝓞ℳ/
• Math Bold https://𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞.𝐜𝐨𝐦/
• Fraktur https://𝖊𝖝𝖆𝖒𝖕𝖑𝖊.𝖈𝖔𝖒/
• Math bold italic https://𝒆𝒙𝒂𝒎𝒑𝒍𝒆.𝒄𝒐𝒎/
• Math bold script https://𝓮𝔁𝓪𝓶𝓹𝓵𝓮.𝓬𝓸𝓶/
• Double struck https://𝕖𝕩𝕒𝕞𝕡𝕝𝕖.𝕔𝕠𝕞/
• Monospace https://𝚎𝚡𝚊𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚎.𝚌𝚘𝚖/
• Super script https://ᵉˣᵃᵐᵖˡᵉ.ᶜᵒᵐ/
• Sub script https://ₑₓₐₘₚₗₑ.cₒₘ/ NB not all characters supported
• Math sans bold https://𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲.𝗰𝗼𝗺/
• Math sans bold italic https://𝙚𝙭𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙡𝙚.𝙘𝙤𝙢/
• Math sans italic https://𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘦.𝘤𝘰𝘮/
• Math Squared https://🄴🅇🄰🄼🄿🄻🄴.🄲🄾🄼/ NB the dot must not be squared
• Circled https://ⓔⓧⓐⓜⓟⓛⓔ.ⓒⓞⓜ/ NB the dot must not be circled

There are a whole bunch more miscellaneous characters you can use:

Christoph Päper 🇪🇺

@Cr1ss0v

Replying to @lambdalynx@lambdalynx @edent Wait, so one can use any of
㍳ ㏃ ㏇(!) ㏈ ffffifflfifl ㎇㎓㎬㏉ ㏋㍱㎐ ㎄㎅㎑㏍㏎㎸㎾ ㎃㎆㎒㎫㎹㎷㎿㎽ ㎁㎋№㎵㎻ ㍵ ㎀㎩㎊㏗㏙㏚㎴㎺ ₨ ℠ßst㏜ ℡㎔™ ㏝
ÅℬℂℭℰℱℐℑKℒℳℕℙℚℛℜℝℤℨ and more to leet-code URLs?
@urlstandard

---

How does this work?

Magic! Which is to say, I think it is the browser doing the conversion. DNS Servers don't successfully reply to queries about .℡ domains.

The browser sees the .℡ and then follows the IDNA2008 process listed in RFC5895 to normalise it:

map characters to the "Simple_Lowercase_Mapping" property (the fourteenth column) in <http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt>, if any.

The ℡ entry is:

2121;TELEPHONE SIGN;So;0;ON;<compat> 0054 0045 004C;;;;N;T E L SYMBOL;;;;

U+0054 is T, U+0045 is E, U+004C is L.

You can test this in Python using:

python -c 'import sys;print sys.argv[1].decode("utf-8").encode("idna")' "℡"

Does this work?

Yes! I asked people on Twitter whether they could access my website using a .℡ - and it appeared to work on every modern browser and operating system.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Hey gang! I have a little experiment for you 🙂

Does this URL resolve in your browser?
https://edent.℡/
(That's https:// edent. ℡ /)

If it does or doesn't, could you let me know which browser and operating system?

THANKS!

---

It even works on command line tools like wget and curl.

Mike

@6byNine

Replying to @edent@edent Things used to retrieve web pages rather than web browsers
curl 7.59, Linux - Yes
wget 1.19, Linux - Yes

---

It does fail in some circumstances:

Ricardo Sueiras (@094459@hachyderm.io)

@094459

Replying to @edent@edent Yes, Chrome/Safari/Firefox running on Mac. The TEL however changed from superscript to normal text. If I copied/pasted into Word and then into the browser, the superscript is preserved and it no longer resolves (takes you to the google page with this page being the first hit)

---

What are the limitations?

Two main ones:

• Sites like Twitter and Facebook don't recognise it as a valid URl and refuse to auto link it.
• Some command line tools like dig and host don't understand it

dig edent.℡

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> edent.℡
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 55282

Is this useful?

Obviously yes. This may be the most important discovery of the decade. You get cool looking URls and get to save a couple of characters on specific domains, at the minor expense of working inconsistently.

It could also be used for evading URl filters.

Every modern browser supports these "fancy" domain names - but most websites won't automatically link to them. So sharing on Facebook doesn't work.

Where can it be used?

Here are the single characters which can be normalised down to a valid TLD. They're mostly country codes, but there are a few interesting exceptions:

• ㏕ - US Military
• ℡ - .tel registry
• № - Norway
• ㍳ - Australia
• ㍷ - Dominica
• ㎀ - Panama
• ㎁ - Namibia
• ㎃ - Morocco
• ㎊ - French Polynesia
• ㎋ - Norfolk Island
• ㎏ - Kyrgyzstan
• ㎖ - Mali
• ㎙ - Federated States of Micronesia
• fi - Finland
• ㎜ - Myanmar
• ㎝ - Cameroon
• ㎞ & ㏎ - Comoros
• ㎰ - Palestine
• ㎳ - Montserrat
• ㎷ & ㎹ - Republic of Maldives.
• ㎺ - Palau
• ㎽ & ㎿ - Malawi
• ㏄ - Cocos (Keeling) Islands
• ㏅ - Democratic Republic of Congo
• ㏉ - Guyana
• ㏗ - Philippines
• ㏘ - Saint Pierre and Miquelon
• ㏚ - Puerto Rico
• ㏛ - Suriname
• ㏜ - El Salvador
• ℠ - San Marino
• ™ - Turkmenistan
• st & ſt - São Tomé and Príncipe
• ㎇ - Great Britain (Obsolete)
• ß - South Sudan (Not available)
• ㏌ - India and Indiana (subdomain of .us)
• Ⅵ & ⅵ - Virgin Islands and Virginia (subdomain of .us)
• fl - Florida (subdomain of .us)
• ㎚ - New Mexico (subdomain of .us)
• ㎵ - Nevada (subdomain of .us)
• ㍵ - As part of .ovh

If you can find any more, please stick a comment in the box below.

You can always reach this blog post at:

https://🅂𝖍𝐤ₛᵖ𝒓.ⓜ𝕠𝒃𝓲/🆆🆃🅵/