RE: [jig] Single character labels question framing

["Terry L Davis, P.E." <tdavis2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Avri

I was just back from a weekend with our daughter and grand-daughter in
Anaheim and I over-slept not joining till about 4:40AM instead of 4AM.  So I
missed most the discussions.

Q1- I think I agree with you here.

Q2- Again I think I agree.

Q3- This seems to require some serious discussions, I think.

All that said, my initial primary concern is simply "how do we get the tools
to validate the puny-code stored in DNS"?  We have a stored value that is
not humanly intelligible in either latin or the orginal script.  I spend a
good part of any day worrying "cyber security" in one form or another, so
having "certified" tools that provide that translation from stored puny-code
to humanly readable script to me is a key need.  We will need it for most of
our security tools; anti-virus, firewalls, etc.

I think "white lists" and such will be part of our discussions as we go
forward.

Take care
Terry

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-jig@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-jig@xxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Avri
Doria
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 5:17 AM
To: jig
Subject: [jig] Single character labels question framing


Hi,

I hope it is ok, for an observer to the group to ask framing questions this
early in the process.  If the questions are premature (or stupid), please
ignore it.


While I understand that there are financial and policy issues to be
discussed in terms of IDN single character (like which are ccTLDs and which
are gTLDs and is there some sort of premium on single character idn labels)
, I think we need to be careful in our conversion to distinguish which sorts
of labels we are talking about at any moment. 


A single character a-label is fundamentally different from a single
character u-label (though occasionally they look alike).
I also think that the IDN WG indicates that there should not be a blanket
prohibition of single character u-labels, though there are considerations to
be considered.

So in some sense I think this discussion may boil down to the following
questions:

Question 1: do single character a-labels remain prohibited? 

Is that even an issue for this group?  I think probably not

Question 2: which, if any, single character u-labels should be prohibited
and why?

E.g. extended ASCII u-labels or Cyrillic u-labels that resemble LDH-labels
are problematic from the point of view of confusion and should probably be
prohibited.  But otherwise what reason could there be for limiting single
character idn u-labels?

Question 3: for those u-labels not prohibited what policy conditions
pertain?

This might be the bulk of the discussion.

Another differentiation people could make, and seem to make in discussions,
is which u-labels are 'words'.  Somehow, it seems that stating that if a
single u-label represents a real-world word it is somehow more acceptable
then just a single character u-label that does not represent a real-world
word. I am not sure I understand why this would be the case, though the
financial considerations may be different there is no reason that any TLD
needs to represent a word - as the set of existing TLDs shows there are very
few words among them.

Finally, reading the IDN WG report with these issues in mind is somewhat
confusing to me in that they do not seem to have made such distinctions.  I
would be curious to know whether this sort of analysis was considered.

Again if this note is out of place or badly timed, please ignore and excuse.


a.