Coca-Cola Owns All 61 URLs from Ahh.com to Ahh-With-60-More-‘H’s.com | Hacker News Reader

Coca-Cola Owns All 61 URLs from Ahh.com to Ahh-With-60-More-‘H’s.com

motherboard.vice.com

90 pointsv4n4d1s40 comments

Reminds me of an old gag I want to say I read that the old hacker quarterly 2600 did back in the day.

There was some kind of negativity towards a company, I can't recall which, and they registered companysucks.com. Obviously replace company with the actual name I can't remember.

They received a legal letter requesting they hand over that domain for copyright reasons and so on. They did with no argument. Then they registered companyreallysucks.com. Again with the letter with them handing the domain over with no argument.

Then they registered companyreallyreallysucks.com with the expected outcome.

I'm not sure how far that kept going until they tired of the joke or the company gave up.

Or, at least, that's the way I remember it. I could be wrong as it was quite a few years ago.

Reading the article, I thought Coke was doing something similar to Pepsi here.

Back in the late '80s there was a Pepsi commercial where 'scientists received messages from deep space' and it turns out to be painters(?) sitting on the radiotelescope and opening up a Pepsi and going "Ahhhhh": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9jT6uKknoY

I usually have some idea why someone's post is down-voted. This one is baffling. Maybe someone bumped the down button?

I think that was either PayPal (paypalsucks.com) or GoDaddy (with nodaddy.com).

Thats great, my company owned ahhhhhhhhhhhh.com got approached to sell, no idea it was coke, found out later, but glad they did something cool with it.

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/

At one time, in the late 90s and early 2000s, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., owned many thousands of variants of the words 'walmart' and various bad or negative words. A lot of that was in reaction to the visibility of (I believe) walmartsucks.com

One way or another, talk about an exercise in futility.

Kinda like Home Depot, which also owns: homodepot.com

That is actually pretty hilarious....I wonder if they grabbed it because of potential issues with the name or mainly because of mistypes.

We grabbed quite a few names due to people misspelling the domain so we could direct them to the proper site, never really cared about the <name>sucks.com stuff.

Looks like they also snagged homedespot.com.

But that is what I call it!

Also, from what I understand, most big retail businesses and service providers own [their-name]sucks.com now thanks to that.

They also like to go after legally protected parody and win by bullying:

http://consumerist.com/2015/05/19/walmart-is-now-the-rightfu...

Didn't know about that...but I recall they've gone after a few others.

I like to think of this as screaming rather than a satisfied sigh.

Ahhhhhhhhh!!

That would be more like Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!

I don't want to test them all, but I am sure there is one that doesn't work (404). It should be around the middle.

I know because my spider told me.

Yeah, it's http://ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.com

What surprises me is that www.ah.com is owned by some health center in Wisconsin. Now I want to know how they got it, and how much did Coca-Cola offer them for it, if anything.

Aurora has been around for a while and are a multi-billion dollar revenue healthcare company so I can't imagine they would be willing to give up their domain for cheap. Aurora has really blown up in WI and is the big player there for most medical facilities.

Native advertising?

Looks like it, but maybe we'll get an interesting discussion out of it :)

I work at Motherboard, it's not advertising though reading it again it probably could have used a more skeptical tone at points. It's part of our Masters of Their Domain series, where we explore the history behind weird URLs. If you have any suggestions for domains, please let us know.

http://motherboard.vice.com/tag/masters+of+their+domain

Does nissan.com meet the criteria for the sort of thing you're writing about?

That is a thorn in Nissan Motor's side. I wish the Uzi guy had just sold it for lots of money and cars. Maybe even a car named after Uzi, like the Nissan Uzi.

On a similar note, steam.com.

yes, thank you! Will look at this too

I'm pretty sure shell.de was owned by a private person named Shell in the 90s or early 00s as well, but now it's the Petroleum Shell.

It does! Will look into this. Thank you

Yeah, I noticed this at the time when I was looking for users resolving recently-registered domains (to try to find hacked systems). One of my users resolved & then went to ahhhhhhhhh.com, which had only been registered a few weeks beforehand.

Had my attention for a few minutes, but was ultimately not interesting (at least not from a security point of view).

The actual sites are pretty cool. I love the retro bottles.

No SSL/TLS, I'm disappointed.

They should get a single certificate with a Subject Alt Name including every single domain!

I don't remember Let's Encrypt's exact size limitations but I think it should be possible for them to get that cert, obviously without any additional charge per SAN. :-)

s/URLs/domains/

come on people

Why stop at 60?

There's a maximum of 63 characters for the so called "label"-part of a domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#Label

Edit: Example: http://63-characters-is-the-longest-possible-domain-name-for...

Ah!

And it appears ??? that not quite all of them just redirect, either.

I didn't spend enough time to see if it's just loading random sites or if each site is specific to a domain (that'd be cool) but I encountered a whole bunch. Not bad as far as marketing goes. Note: one of the sites I loaded played sound by default. A bunch got stuck on the loading screen, but I also do a fair amount of uBlock/uMatrix filtering, didn't bother to check what I was blocking.

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