Rest of the Day: GoDaddy Builds an Easy Way to Register Emoji Domain Names
GoDaddy has built a new way to find domain names that are just emojis. This is the result of a recent hackathon and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it works. Time to register [pizza] [robot] [rocket] dot com. About this and much more in today’s news.
- Behind the scenes, emojis are just a line of regular ASCII code, just like any text. When you enter your desired emoji domain name into a site called ❤❤❤.ws, it translates the emoji and searches for the name in their text form. This means it only looks like a smiley when viewed in the correct context; otherwise, it looks like a sequence of random letters (in this case, “xn—qeiaa.ws”). But when you type [heart] [heart] [heart] .ws on your phone keypad, it certainly works. Currently .WS is the only top-level domain that accepts emoji. Developer John Roig created the site for the GoDaddy TechComm 2016 hackathon.
- Lyft will be given a discount on election day travel. If you need to go to the polling stations, you can get a 45% discount; apparently you can’t just cheat and use it elsewhere, since your driver knows the destination. The discount is valid in 20 major cities. [The Verge]
- Windows updates are getting smarter and smaller. With a new ” single update platform ” running behind the scenes, Windows will now only download the portions of updates you really need, reducing their size by about 35 percent. [The Next Web]
- The pioneers of the Internet are demanding a payment of $ 750,000 for “the man who invented email.” [Gizmodo]