http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29058.html http://fr.news.yahoo.com/030201/35/30bn2.html Verisign has been pushing for its own implementation of Internationalised Domain Names (domain names containing non-ASCII characters) for approx a year through a plug-in to Internet Explorer, that converts the domain name to its ASCII encoding before lookup. This system works thus only for webpages, and if the user is using Microsoft Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows. In an "effort" to have this working on more browsers, Verisign configured the DNS root servers to reply by a fixed IP address for any lookup of a non-existing domain that looks internationalised: 198.41.1.35, also known as www.idnnow.com. See for yourself, with that little perl script: dig `perl -e 'print chr(160).".com";'` @A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET A Scary, isn't it? - It breaks anything but websites. Mail for non-existent domains will be retried for days instead of bouncing immediately, and the error message the user will finally get will be incredibly confusing, making him believe the domain exists, but its mail servers are down. Apply to any other use of the IP network: ssh, instant messenging, printing, backup, time synchronisation, ... Oh my, oh my, looks like Network Solutions / Verisign should be dismantled under charges of profound stupidity.
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