Knipp Labs
A Garden for Fresh Ideas
Part of the Community
Competition is an important part of the business. However, working together instead of against each other can set free unforeseen synergies.
This is why we at Knipp live the the idea of community. We like to remain open-minded and curious about new ways of successful cooperation. We are also keen to use open source software (OSS). In return, we give back to the community in the form of plug-ins, bug reports and bug fixes.
Basic Groundwork
Creating a common basis is crucial for collective efforts. Especially the domain business constantly provides new and complementary requirements to which all involved parties commit themselves.
We believe in the power of participation, so we see it as a chance to actively get involved in the formation processes of such requirements and standards. We are an active member of several national and international task groups, for example the DENIC eG, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as well as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Potential through Innovation
We are convinced that education and advanced training for our employees is the best investment for the company.
Especially young colleagues have great potential and innovative ideas in minds. In that way, they can significantly enhance the company‘s competences and portfolio in the long run. We seize every opportunity to get into contact with tomorrow's employees. Accompanying and supporting young academics is therefore one of our main concerns. We are always interested in trendsetting cooperations with universities and academic institutions.
»New ideas are like young plants, threatened often by the everyday life in their development. Knipp Labs is a kind of garden in which our employees can flourish creative ideas without disruption.«
From our Software Labs
In addition to third party software, we also provide our own projects as open source software for the community. In the following, let us present some examples in more detail.
The Knipp RRI Toolkit implements an interface to DENIC's Realtime Registry Interface (RRI) for the Java programming language.
It rcomprises DENIC requests and responses, contact data, domain data and messages as Java objects. In that way, it provides an easy access to the registry functionality. On the communication level, two representation forms are implemented: key-value pairs and XML. The TCP communication is SSL/TLS secured.
The toolkit is thread-safe so that it is possible to access the registry with multiple threads simultaneously without additional safety measures. The prerequisites for using the toolkit are minimal: only Java in version 6 or later is required without any additional libraries.
The current release of the toolkit carries version number 1.7. Its main change is added support for RRI 3.0 (while removing support for older versions of the specification). It is available for download in the adjoining useful links section, together with an archive of some of the previous versions.
Licensing
The package is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, 2.1. This allows for the usage in other OSS projects as well as in commercial projects. The exact details can be obtained from the license.
Domain registrars are often faced with the task, to connect with as many as possible Registries. EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) has established itself as a standard.
But having a standard is not enough. This protocol has to be coded and then to be made available as an application programming interface (API). Some registries offer their own toolkits, which lowers the efforts of programming somewhat. Nevertheless, this difficult task has to be implemented for each registry individually.
Remedy creates here the Knipp EPP Unikit, which facilities the connection to all registries in an universal way. The only requirement is the usage of the programming language Java by the registrar.
Licensing
The package is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, 2.1. This allows for the usage in other OSS projects as well as in commercial projects. The exact details can be obtained from the license.
Expected to be available in the third quarter of 2022.
This software is intended for registries that send regular announcements and messages to their customers (i.e. registrars).
As proposed on the 31st ICANN meeting in Delhi, this package contains all important information and data. You will find documentation, examples, and the Java source code. For a quick start the source has already been compiled and a Windows and Linux run script have been included to directly test the examples.
Licensing
The package is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, 2.1. This allows for the usage in other OSS projects as well as in commercial projects. The exact details can be obtained from the license.
Do-Gooders
In addition to providing ready-made software products, we also try to contribute our share "on a small scale" to make the Internet and the world a little bit better.
Universal Acceptance (UA) is the simple idea that all domain names and all e-mail addresses should work in all software applications. Achieving that, however, is not self-evident and requires awareness.
The technical infrastructure of the Internet including the Domain Name System has mostly been built with the focus on Latin character sets and Western scripts. Later on, many different scripts and character strings were brought to the Internet ecosystem, e.g. with the introduction of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Today there are more than 60 IDN country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and more than 90 IDN gTLDs representing global communities online in native scripts, such as .сайт (.site) and بازار. (.bazaar).
However, people using domain names and e-mail addresses in their native languages still face many barriers as websites and applications do not recognize these as valid addresses. In order to be truly multilingual, devices and systems must accept, validate, store, process and display all domain names and e-mail addresses correctly and consistently.
Knipp's goal is to raise awareness about UA and to include it in the daily work – within the company and in cooperation with our customers and partners. In the meantime we have gained a certain level of expertise in this and can advise and train others or provide support with tools and practical solutions.
As for example on April 21, 2023 as part of the "Universal Acceptance Technical Training Day" in Cologne. The full-day program consisted of an introductory morning session with contributions from ICANN, the eco association and Knipp, and a hands-on technical training in the afternoon, lead by Dr. Michael Bauland of Knipp. You can download the presentation slides (German only) using the adjoining links which give a rough overview of the topics discussed. Feel free to contact us if you have questions or simply want to know more.
Knipp is proud to be able to make its contribution to raise awareness about Universal Acceptance, about why it matters, and how it can be achieved. We will continue our efforts to allow everyone to access the Internet using the domain name and e-mail address that best aligns with their interests, business, culture, language, and script.
