Announcing I-DUNNO 1.0 and web-i-dunno

It’s hard to believe it’s already a year since the release of RFC 8771 (The Internationalized Deliberately Unreadable Network NOtation), which for me at least made me think about IP addresses in a whole new way.

So, it seems fitting for the anniversary to be able to release proper support for this standard in the Rust universe, with Rust I-DUNNO version 1.0 released. You can find it on Rust’s crates.io at crates.io/crates/i-dunno and the API documentation is at docs.rs/i-dunno.

Also, because for a standard like this to receive the wide adoption it deserves, it’s important that young people have a chance to interact with it, playing with encodings to get a real feel for what it’s like to use in practice, I’m proud to announce the I-DUNNO Creator. On that page you can enter an IP address (IPv4 or IPv6) and see it transformed immediately into a candidate I-DUNNO, with live information about the Confusion Level of the I-DUNNO, as specified in the standard. You can find the source code for the I-DUNNO Creator in the web-i-dunno repo.

The I-DUNNO Creator is built on the Rust package, making use of Rust’s highly-developed WASM support to compile the code into a form that works naturally in a web browser.

I hope that by offering both systems programmers and the young people of today and their new-fangled web sites the opportunity to create I-DUNNOs, I can contribute a little to spreading the word about deliberately unreadable notations to new audiences.

Note: the current implementation is limited to generate only I-DUNNOs with no padding bits. As specified in the standard, I-DUNNOs may end with arbitrary padding, and adding this functionality to rust-i-dunno is left as an exercise for the reader: merge requests welcome!