This bug reminds me of what my dad taught me when I got my driver's license. He taught me that knowing how to drive carefully wasn't enough to prevent accidents. I had to drive for myself and for everyone else. I clearly remember "you don't know what kind of drunk will be blowing a red light".
In this bug, Paul was driving carefully - he relied on the parser to do a good job. But relying on the parser is like crossing in GREEN light without checking. 99.9% of the time you should be OK. Until that one time with the drunk blowing the RED light.
My dad was right. Had Paul not relied entirely in the parser and done accurate memory allocation (checked for that drunk blowing the RED light) - everything would have been fine.
I wonder how many people even know that dashes are legal in DNS names. (I mean, of course, the ASCII character that serves as hyphen, en-dash, and minus sign.)
I think there are lots of domain names that would benefit from a well-placed dash -- the most amusing example I've seen being Pen Island's.
Expert Sex Change. (Familiar to almost everyone here, I think.) Power Genitalia. (An Italian battery company.) Whore Presents. (A service for finding out about people's publicity agents, etc.)
In this bug, Paul was driving carefully - he relied on the parser to do a good job. But relying on the parser is like crossing in GREEN light without checking. 99.9% of the time you should be OK. Until that one time with the drunk blowing the RED light.
My dad was right. Had Paul not relied entirely in the parser and done accurate memory allocation (checked for that drunk blowing the RED light) - everything would have been fine.