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Comment by jonas-w | Hacker News Reader

You can also access x.com when using the Unicode Character https://xn--971h.com (𝕏.com)

Are you sure? When I type https://xn--971h.com in it doesn't work, but clicking the link in your comment does because HN has made the href x.com. The browser converts 𝕏.com to x.com before going there too. Moreover, X and 𝕏 are treated as equivalent characters in this context, so whois 𝕏.com looks up x.com, and 𝕏.com's punycode encoding is x.com: https://www.whatsmydns.net/idn-punycode-converter?q=%F0%9D%9...

whois xn--971h.com returns the same thing as an unregistered domain.

HN automatically converts these urls to punycode, maybe this is a bug and it automatically converts everything to punycode even though it doesn't make sense?

I think so. Then I'm not right about the punycode encoding of 𝕏.com - it's that it isn't even needed. I've emailed dang about it.

It's unrelated to HN. Copy pasting 𝕏.com into the address bar still leads to x.com

I already mentioned that, and it's not what they mean. Hover your mouse over a https://xn--971h.com link in a comment on HN and notice that it's pointing to https://x.com. This does seem to be an HN thing; see here: https://jsfiddle.net/rtfhejdy/

Looks like it's also not possible to register xn--971h.com (I tried both Namecheap and Cloudflare).

Yeah, it's explicitly disallowed by ICANN to register a domain with this unicode character (along with numerous other characters):

https://www.verisign.com/assets/icannrestricted/idn-icann-re...

Also https://xn--u1a.com is for sale (where х is a Cyrillic letter, see [0]).

Would be funny to buy it and make a redirect to threads.net.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kha_(Cyrillic)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36844079

Also https://xn--vm8a.com which is on sale for $91M

i thought all non-latin punycode domains were forbidden for purchase on .com?

edit - i looked up the whois, just because it's parked at godaddy doesn't mean it's for sale

Name: XN--U1A.COM

Internationalized Domain Name: х.com

Registry Domain ID: 106236037_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN

Domain Status:

clientDeleteProhibited

clientRenewProhibited

clientTransferProhibited

clientUpdateProhibited

$ curl -i 'https://xn--971h.com'

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: xn--971h.com

    $ curl 𝕏.com
    <html>
    <head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
    <body>
    <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
    <hr><center>cloudflare</center>
    </body>
    </html>

What's that all about then? I'd expect curl to deal with either/or

curl should especially live with a punycode version.

Unless the punycode from the OP is incorrect? From basic online tools, it looks like it simply converts to x.com

I get:

  $ curl http://𝕏.com -v
  *   Trying 34.102.136.180:80...
  * Connected to 𝕏.com (34.102.136.180) port 80 (#0)
  > GET / HTTP/1.1
  > Host: x.com
  > User-Agent: curl/8.1.2
  > Accept: */*
  >
  < HTTP/1.1 200 OK

No https, though. (OpenSSL SSL_connect: Connection reset by peer in connection to x.com:443)

I wonder what Elon paid for x.com?

I'm not sure. There was a short period when you could register one letter dotcoms before about 1994. He's owned it since forever that I know of. His first company was called X, which became PayPal.

I spent a long time in the mid-90s trying to persuade INTERNIC to let me register b.com.

Shame. That would have made a great Chinese porn site. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%e5%b1%84

I'm pretty certain you can register one-letter IDN .coms. I registered a bunch the day the IDN system went live, and I had no idea what characters I was registering or what they meant and I later let them all lapse.

See about a dozen comments in this thread, PayPal owned it post-acquisition until 2017 when Musk bought it back.

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