For me the link on HN is to https://dns.google/ but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be to https://010.010.010.010/ (which redirects, for me). Did the admins change it?
I've changed the URL above back to https://010.010.010.010/ now. Thanks!
See also: https://01.01.01.01/
(btw: .google and .goog are valid TLDs)
This leaves no room for the ambiguity of the text rendering something like 010.010.010.010 in the certificate itself.
Likewise the dnsName SAN type is defined in an alphabet for X.509 that literally can't represent fancy Unicode, so you can't mistakenly write certificates with dnsName SANs that give the Unicode name instead of the unambiguous punycode name stored in DNS.
These two choices mean your browser can mechanically with 100% reliability check certificates in the Web PKI match the IP address or DNS name from the URL you believed you were visiting, whereas historically the abuse of "Common Name" features to write a human representation had nasty edge cases for both IP addresses and some DNS names.
Whether your URL parser considers that octal IPv4 addresses are a reasonable thing is up to each individual parser. On the whole I'd suggest user-facing software should not permit this because it's pointlessly confusing.
Rust took a patch that says if you try to convert (for example) 010.010.010.010 to an IPv4 address that's an error, which again I think is reasonable for the same reason.
In the patch feedback several people want it to mean 10.10.10.10 and others think it should mean 8.8.8.8 and eventually it seems to become clear to both groups that this is itself a terrible sign for their positions, since if you expected one but got the other now your software has unexpected behaviour, whereas if you got an error you can fix your program to do whatever it was you intended. So hence the error behaviour won.
[Edited to add: It has been pointed out to me that maybe the poster meant .google. Yes, that's a TLD owned by Google. They applied for, and received a number of "new gTLDs" from ICANN, some like .dev are open for you to register 2LDs in, others like .google are only for their own use. Running TLDs likely costs Google somewhere in the region of a million dollars per year to maintain, but that's a drop in the ocean for a large tech company.]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_top-level_domain
I think what I meant was mostly
> will all or most DNS servers other than Google's resolve .google addresses
I didn't realize Google had bought their own TLD.
I'm not sure how I feel about the sponsored TLDs. I think I like them, mostly. I think I don't love how .google is centered on a single corporation in the same way that I don't like how .gov and .mil have always been so US-centric.
In a way it feels like an intrusion, or somehow misplaced