In seriousness, I was linked this in the context of nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers so I suspect the reason for this charade was to make sure that no one was influencing the choice for nefarious reasons. But I'm not sure how anyone could possibly benefit from the idna prefix being xb-- instead of xn-- or whatever

sirius xm out there getting free advertisement on every idn

we coulda had some good emoticons as the idna prefix

@codl geohashing the code to get some of that bitcodepoint

@codl only if they play the sand bird theme

@flussence I've changed my mind I don't want to play pachinko anymore

@codl :)-- prefix

@codl putting a colon in a domain name would fuck so much shit up

@ben @codl wonder if there's a premade list of malicious domain name examples anywhere

preferably in json format, for reasons

@flussence @codl google safe browsing?

@ben @codl no that's only a bloom filter

@codl and it's bullshit in this context anyway since there's so few possibilities

you can get any of them with a normal NUMS like pi by just extending it arbitrarily, and with this stock rube goldberg by waiting

@unascribed they announced ahead of time what day's numbers would be used

@codl I guess these do have day granularity

@codl Honestly, I imagine they just asked the person who came up with the whole punycode algorithm to come up with a way to select the prefix and they were like "oh, I know a simple and straightforward way!"

@Dee @codl I thinkbit was more of a "there's no way to meaningfully compare these options, let's choose one at random"
"ok, how do you do that?"
"the same way we choose members of the nomcom - with RFC 2777"