Australian Platypus Conservancy | Hacker News Reader

Australian Platypus Conservancy

platypus.asn.au

30 pointsbrudgers12 comments

I've seen Platypus several times at Tidbinbilla outside of Canberra and near the Australian ground-station for Nasa's deep-space network. If you're in the area, you can do both!

http://www.tidbinbilla.act.gov.au/

http://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/

Something you don't see everyday (apart from a platypus) - a .asn.au domain name.

A fun edge case is that .au domains are not registrable by any entity, except for the ones that exist just because.

http://csiro.au/

I used to think there was meant to be a distinction between .org.au and .asn.au, but looking at AuDA, I don't really see it.

My favourite is, of course, .id.au.

Under the original policies, .org.au was effectively "miscellaneous", it was expressly for domains that don't fit under other categories. .asn.au was for formally registered associations (e.g. not-for-profits). Similarly, .net.au was just for network operators.

When auDA was created in the late 90's, the policies were harmonized and .com.au and .net.au got the same policies, .org.au and .asn.au got the same policies, etc. It has further evolved since based on policy panels I think they conduct every 5 years.

iirc there was one guy for a long time who handed out the au domains. I think he was at USNW or USyd?

Wikipedia says it was Robert Elz at U of Melbourne. Which squares with that department spinning out Melbourne IT, who had a quasi-monopoly on .au registrations for a while.

> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">

They also conserve the webpages as well.

I know this site must be Frontpage at first sight.

I doubt any thing I have built in the last 5 years will stand the test of time as well as the FrontPage code that I have spent the last 10+ years scoffing at.

And Chrome couldn't detect the encoding - I had to set it manually to Windows-1252.

Such fast loading times, so many descriptive direct links, I think I have to try that editor!

The internet equivalent of an egg-laying mammal?

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