On 3 Mar 2004 at 18:34, Adam Peake wrote:
> SWITCH will start a similar service soon (if they haven't already?)
> for German Swiss.
As far as I know, they also had problems and shut down their whois server
for some time. Things seem to have slowed down now and woked fine. They
"only" had something like 14.000 "umlaut" registrations on the first day,
while denic up to now processed 130.000 (of 600.000 requests).

It is true that there is a plugin for IE that is supposed to work. There is
a company named "verisign" (ever heard of that company?) that provides a
plugin, too: http://www.idnnow.com. Haven't checked it. As for Netscape,
Version 7.1 is necessary.

Actually, the code translation is relatively simple, if necessary you can
even do it by a table and a few rules. "Müller.de", for example, translates
into xn--mller-kva.de (a squatter, of course). Müller is the most popular
German surname. Bücher.de is xn--bcher-kva.de. Thus, "-kva" means "ü as
second letter".

By the way, the registration of "müller.de" went to an anonymous who used
his provider as a proxy. On the site itself they say that they registered
it for the a lawyer named "Müller" and promise to change the whois entry.
Simple trick, otherwise, a real "Müller" could probably claim the name
according to German court decisions (in the .de namespace, these things are
handled in court). Also, there is a pretty well known milk and youghurt
company named "müller", who could want to claim that name.

        --iliya