Hi George!

I'll agree it's a weird edge case :-)

I think the reason my spider-sense is tingling is because years of cleaning up after intrusions has taught me that sysadmins and human beings are very bad at non-canonical address formats, especially where they combine them with either blacklisting, or else case-statements-with-default-conditions.

If one creates scope for saying "the address is <foo>.onion but you can actually use <foo'>.onion or <foo''>.onion which are equivalent" - then someone will somehow leverage that either a) for hackery, or b) for social engineering.

Compare:

* http://017700000001 

* http://2130706433 

* http://0177.0.0.1  <- this one tends to surprise people

* http://127.0.0.1 

…and the sort of fun shenanigans that can be done with those "equivalent forms"

People who've been trained not to type [X] into their browser, might be convinced to type [X']

It's a lot easier for people to cope with there being one-and-only-one viable form for any given hostname or address-representation.

    -a

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