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DENIC's whois service on port 43 is fully compliant with RFC3912. In order to provide support for our internationalized database (for instance, with contact data or IDNs), characters not belonging to the ASCII character set are delivered in UTF-8 encoding by default. The main reason for choosing UTF-8 is its backwards compatibility to ASCII. Further, it is the preferred encoding for IETF protocols according to RFC2277. Support for Unicode, UTF-8 and its other transformation formats is widespread in all modern software and operating systems.

It is true that the whois protocol does not principally support internationalization. DENIC implemented some proprietary supplements of this protocol. They enable the existing whois clients to define the character set which is to be used for queries and replies (besides US-ASCII you may use the ISO-8859-1 encoding - also known as Latin 1 - or UTF-8, which is very popular especially in Europe). However, you are not obliged to use these extensions.

Before a newly registered ENUM-domain becomes accessible round the world it has to be included in the .9.4.e164.arpa zone. This is usually done the next time the name servers are reloaded following completion of the registration. The same applies to modifications to name server entries for ENUM-domains already registered. The following are the approximate times for the name server reloads:

Daily:
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 1:00 and 2:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 1:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 4:00 and 5:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 4:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 7:00 and 8:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 7:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 10:00 and 11:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 10:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 13:00 and 14:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 13:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 16:00 and 17:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 16:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 19:00 and 20:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 19:00 CET.
 
 Reloading the .9.4.e164.arpa zone: between 22:00 and 23:00 CET
 This zone contains all the domain jobs that DENIC confirmed before 22:00 CET.

The following name servers are authoritative for the .9.4.e164.arpa zone zone:

Folgende Nameserver sind für die .9.4.e164.arpa-Zone zuständig (autoritativ):

DENIC eG
Theodor-Stern-Kai 1
60596 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

e-mail: info[at]denic[dot]de

Phone
National: (069) 27 235 0
International: +49 69 27 235 0

Fax
National: (069) 27 235 235
International: +49 69 27 235 235

Our hotline is available
from Monday to Thursday, 8:00 to 18:00 CE(S)T
and Friday 8:00 to 16:00 CE(S)T:

Phone
National: (069) 27 235 270
International: +49 69 27 235 270

Fax
National: (069) 27 235 238
International: +49 69 27 235 238

e-mail: info[at]denic[dot]de

The information page you see is a special web page set up by DENIC. The domain holder currently has no Internet presence under this URL.

If you yourself are the holder of the domain concerned, please get in touch with the customer service of DENIC eG:

DENIC eG
Theodor-Stern-Kai 1
60596 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

Our service staff is available
from Monday to Thursday, 8:00 to 18:00 CE(S)T and
Friday 8:00 to 16:00 CE(S)T:

Phone
National: (069) 27 235 270
International: +49 69 27 235 270

Fax
National: (069) 27 235 238
International: +49 69 27 235 238

e-mail: direct[at]denic[dot]de

Yes. That can happen. What matters here is how much time you want to allow for the transfer. For all provider changes, we recommend you to allow a certain period of time during which your domain will be accessible through both providers. That will permit you to set up your new Internet presence without needing to rush. You can ask your old provider to establish a link that will simply pass on any incoming message to your new homepage, then to complete the formal Provider Change and, finally, to close down your old homepage.

The more thoroughly you plan it, the less likely there are to be problems. DENIC's recommendation is to plan for a transitional period of 1 week.

Besides the ASCII characters (the 26 Latin letters, the ten numerals and the hyphen) you may use some other characters for IDNs under .de. These include the German umlauts ä, ö and ü as well as the letter eszett ("ß") and letters with accents and other diacritics. We have compiled a list with the new additional characters valid for IDNs under .de in a table for you.

You might wonder why these particular 93 characters have been chosen and not others. There are several reasons:

• DENIC supports all characters included in the Unicode Latin-1 Supplement and Latin Extended-A blocks which are marked as "PROTOCOL VALID" in the RFC 5892 (The Unicode Code Points and Internationalized Domain Names for Applications).
• DENIC is an open registry free from any form of discrimination. In Germany, there is no meaningful way of drawing a line between the various character sets, since the written German language now includes characters that originated in the languages of the northern, southern and eastern parts of Europe. The sensible and appropriate solution for us therefore seemed to be to adopt two blocks that cover the necessary European character set for those languages that are based on the Latin alphabet, including some additional characters.
• The most frequently used new characters of these character sets can be entered via standard German keyboards without requiring any additional equipment or outlay.

Not only domains that consist exclusively of ASCII characters can be (ab)used to attract users to forged websites. This is also true for Internationalized Domains (IDNs). At first glance the domains of such websites look like known original domains. But they were registered by third parties exclusively to imitate the original. The goal of such attempted fraud - also called "phishing" - is to spy confidential information such as passwords.

The risk to become a phishing victim is not more severe for IDNs than it is for domains whose names include only ASCII characters. A typical method to fool the user is to replace the original "o" by "0", "1" by "l" or a lower-case "l" by an upper-case "i".

The developers of the IDN standard were well aware of the existence of identical glyphs (character displays) in different scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc.) when they created the specification, and the IDN RFCs 3490 and 3491 expressly make reference to them. To facilitate the unique identification of characters and to impede their replacement, DENIC allows exclusively Latin characters to be used. Thus, no sets of characters with identical appearance will be accepted for .de domains, but at best similar ones.

You can take quite a few measures to protect against phishing attempts. Below you will find a list - not claiming to be exhaustive - of the most important ones.

• Always use encrypted connections to pass on sensitive information. Reveal it only to identified, trustworthy partners.
• Be suspicious if e-mails, blogs etc. request you to "urgently" visit pages you do business with (e-banking etc.).
• Rather follow established bookmarks instead of links in e-mails. Avoid using HTML-coded mails.
• Take warning messages about insecure, unknown or altered certificates serious.
• Consult the Federal Agency for Security in Information Technology (BSI) at regular intervals so that you are always up-to-date.

As regards .de domains, IDNs present a useful enrichment and by incorporating language-specific characters they foster .de's function as a country code Top Level Domain. The advantages clearly outnumber potential security risks, which would persist even if without IDNs.