2018 Unicode "domain hack" article resurfaces on Hacker News
An old writeup on building clever domain names from unusual Unicode characters was resubmitted to HN and mirrored by aggregator bots.
What to know
- The story is a resubmission of a 2018 article on building "domain hacks" with unusual Unicode/punycode characters, not a new development.
- Engagement across platforms was minimal: the HN post reached only a score of 7 with 2 comments, and bot mirrors on Mastodon recorded no comments.
- The spread shown here is largely automated (RSS and aggregator bot accounts) rather than organic discussion.
n_plus_1_acc Hacker News submitterhkrn@mstdn.social Mastodon aggregator accounth4ckernews@mastodon.social Mastodon aggregator account
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Mastodon bot h4ckernews@mastodon.social reposts the item
A second Mastodon bot account, h4ckernews, posted the same HN submission with the #HackerNews tag, linking directly to the HN comments thread.
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Which of course Bruce Schneier predicted in 2000:https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2000/0715.html..."Unicode is just too complex to eve be secure"As to me I'm running my own DNS resolver (I use unbound) and everything goes through port 53 UDP (and AIUI technically 53 TCP should be allowed, but nothing will happen if you just block it)…
2 more of the top 3 · 9 posts in this stretch
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Not sure why so many things use the compatibility form of normalisation.Some older RFCs even recommended using it for passwords, which needlessly reduces entropy (yes we need to normalise passwords because of combining characters, but we don’t need to collapse symbols that a user can choose from, like ſ and s).In my opinion, the compatibility form…
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Note that, in addition to normalizing domain components, the process also maps U+3002 IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP (。) to U+002E FULL STOP (.) for use as a separator, a nice touch for domain names encoded in blackboard bold.Also, the author's one-liner, updated for Python 3: python3 -c 'import sys;print(sys.argv[1].encode("idna").decode("ascii"))' "℡"
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Mastodon bot hkrn@mstdn.social cross-posts the HN link
A Mastodon aggregator account mirrored the HN submission, including the punycode article URL and the HN comments link, with a timestamp of 2026.11.01 05:44:20.
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HN Frontpage RSS bot mirrors the submission
An automated Hacker News Frontpage RSS account posted the same article link and HN comments thread, recording a lower score of 0 and no comments.
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Looks like HN broke the URL after submitting. Let's try again: https://ₛᵖ.ⓜ/ Here is the backup link:
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background
n_plus_1_acc resubmits 2018 Unicode domain-hack article to HN — The user n_plus_1_acc posted the 2018 article about creating domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters to Hacker News, where it reached a score of 7 with 2 comments.
What people are saying 5 voices from 1 site · best of 10 · verbatim
- Nov 2
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> Is this useful?No, it is not, IMHO. When you create an "alias" you are adding "yet-another-confusion-opportunity" and "yet-another-failure-opportunity".For no actual reason.I for one would aim at lowering the complexity, not at making stuff more fancy.
- Nov 1
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My favorite unicode character is zero width space. One of its funniest properties is that it's not a whitespace.Also, some programming languages treat it as a valid identifier.
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On Firefox, hover-over of the link doesn't show the URL in the bottom left of the browser.
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That shows up as ₛᵖ.ⓜ, so a bunch of characters are missing.HN seems to encode it as punycode when it shouldn’t; it skipped normalization.
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Tangentially related - 20+ years ago I managed to register a π domain under one of the primary TLDs.As in, the registration form was accepted and the fee was charged.Then, few days after they emailed to say that "due to technical difficulties" the registration can be registered and they have no choice but to unregister it.I was so close, damn…