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I was editing a text in vim and I typed gx on a play-button emoji to open it as an url and to see what happen. Vim translated the UTF-8 emoji into a punycode one and wrapped it into an url format for my browser: xn--g1h.com. The request had been redirected to another site: anti666.com, that it's quite spooky. The site is uncertificated, of course.

I tryed to wrap other emojis' punycode into the same url format (www.<punicode emoji>.com) with two different browsers (firefox and chromium) and I didn't notice any difference in results between them.

Sometimes I got 404 errors, sometimes it took me to other uncertificated sites. To take another example, xn--c1yn36f.com redirects me to 1redirb.com/.../.... I didn't tried further because I thought it could be risky.

I think these are redirections and not aliases or whatever because of my research with whois.com but it's just my own speculation.

My question is: How this redirections are possible and why this happens? Are these domains actually existing or there is another explanation? I expect my browser throws me an error, not redirects me to another unsafe site.

Thanks.

user16753893
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  • emojis are not supported under `.com`, and not in any gTLDs, per ICANN rules, so remains only old things registered long ago. Besides that, an IDN is like any other domain, so it can redirect at the HTTP level like any other, there is nothing specific here. whois on the command line will show you clearly which domains exist or not (`xn--g1h.com` and `xn--c1yn36f.com` are fully registered indeed). But your question is not about programming, hence it is offtopic here. – Patrick Mevzek Aug 25 '21 at 22:10
  • `xn--g1h.com` is `▶.com` (wouldn't be allowed to be registered under today's rules) and `xn--c1yn36f.com` is not emoji based as "just" being `點看.com` – Patrick Mevzek Aug 25 '21 at 22:11
  • Thank you for your answers. I apologize for being off topic here, what can I do? – user16753893 Aug 26 '21 at 07:00

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