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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

Besides the usual disregard decency let's HSTS preload a TLD people have been using for local development for decades...

This is terrible gatekeeping and I hope Google perishes soon. Wow. I can't get over how fucking dumb this is.

This is the mark of a corporation filled with people that thinks putting a price tag on supposedly scarce good early will deter bad actors. Clearly everyone who thought this up has way too much money in their account.

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Yes, this, though I really am disappointed in ICANN here. ICANN should not have sold a TLD known to be in heavy use already. Their desire for cash from this process seems to have overwhelmed their good sense in managing the domain system.

Yeah, well. That's got nothing to do with .dev. All the new TLDs are fucking dumb. Just a cash grab for the ICANN. Might as well get rid of TLDs altogether.

Honestly I don’t think it’s a cash grab for icann. There are plenty of registries that are making plenty of money, as well as domain owners selling the domains in the aftermarket.

The reason the new tlds were needed is the lack of options for buying a new domain. I know plenty of smaller biz and startups who couldn’t get the dot com they wanted and ended up choosing a really good keyword rich new tld.

To me potato.app is as sketchy and shitty as getpotato.com. They simply say "I wanted to buy potato.com but I couldn't"

Is steampowered.com sketchy? Even incredibly large companies often can't get the domains they want because they were bought twenty years ago by some Joe Schmo.

steampowered.com is super sketchy. It's just that most people use the Steam client and it's been around enough time for it to sink in.

Like if an app tried to register apppowered.com it would definitely hurt its image. Obviously massive players are above the rules somewhat.

> Honestly I don’t think it’s a cash grab for icann.

Wasn't it $10k upfront to have your application for a new gTLD considered? This times ~1200 ... works out quiet good.

The application fee for a new tld is $185,000 not $10,000.

Oh, thanks, I must've had something else in mind. So it's a ~$220m deal for ICANN.

Their desire for cash is the only reason this process exists in the first place. The “old” tlds were perfectly fine as they were.

If you've been using .dev for local development, that means you've either been setting it in your hosts or using your own DNS server until now, which you can continue to do with a .dev TLD.

Chrome requires an SSL certificate for all .dev hostnames.

if you have the technical savvy to be using .dev before the Google deployment, you have the technical savvy to install an additional root cert for use with Chrome.

What about internal use in organizations?

Sorry but this is pure malice by Google. I can invert this argument by saying if you're buying a .dev domain you have the technical savvy to get on an HSTS preload list, except you haven't broken anyone's workflow.

EDIT: And I mean... have you USED openssl's x509 toolchain? That's a few steps up from editing the hostsfile.

Editing the hosts file isn't a solution for internal use in organizations.

If it's just you, editing your hosts file, switch to .local or whatever. There was always a chance when using a "local" domain (which isn't actually some sort of standard) that such a TLD could be created in the future. If it's for an organization, create the root cert, and have that be one of the steps users need to take in order to access the dev site. Or just switch to .local or .test or .whatever.

I've been using .dev as a local test environment for years too, but I'd prefer to have more TLD options available and just switch to .local or .test because I'm not averse to change.

.local is reserved for multicast DNS/zeroconf, by the standard. You literally can’t use it on macos because it will always try to look it up in with mDNS first, and only fall back on /etc/hosts once that fails.

If you use .local for fake DNS for a dev setup, you’ll probably notice lookups are slow; that’s why.

(This is why I’ve always used .dev actually, although this may make me switch to .fuckgoogle or something instead)

> (This is why I’ve always used .dev actually, although this may make me switch to .fuckgoogle or something instead)

Why not .fuckapple? Really, .local is defined for local address, if Apple is using it in a fucked up way this is an Apple problem.

.dev was never destined for local address, it was just because it wasn't registered in ICANN yet.

Apple is adhering to the standard in RFC 6762. .local is intentionally meant for multicast DNS, Apple is doing things correctly.

Nope, yeah Apple should try to resolve mDNS queries, however it shouldn't ignore local DNS requests or make them a lower priority.

Maybe you've never been in an environment where having to change internal domains is near impossible.

I work at the intersection of 3 corporations within our group. We provide a sort of "internal Heroku" using Kubernetes for anyone in the group that needs it. We recently ran into the 63 character limit on domain name labels (we have to use a wildcard cert because nothing else is approved by legal). You wouldn't believe the time developers would've had to spend on fixing the domain schema across hundreds of services if we hadn't found a way out of that dilemma. We're talking thousands of internal names, some of them given our to external partners (we use a partially publicly resolvable name, but we could've exposed our DNS as well) and some used in systems long forgotten.

That is such specious logic it’s kind of sickening.

I use TLDs like .dev exactly because it’s convenient. Not because I’m “savvy”, and even if that were true, it doesn’t follow that it would be just as convenient to set up a local CA.

Using `echo ip >/etc/resolver/dev` to have a custom dns server for everything in the .dev domain is trivial. It’s one command. Getting a custom CA for all of that is not.

What's sickening is devs pretending their broken workflow is important (or should matter) to anyone else, and then getting fussy when it turns out that no, their non-standardized workflow is, in fact, not a standard.

Using .dev for local development is a bug, not a feature. The only reason it was used is because it wasn't yet a TLD . Not because it had some sort of special status as a "Local TLD".

One man's "convenient" is another man's "savvy." If you've got the technical ability (you are 'savvy') to use this TLD, you've got the technical ability ('savvy') to use your own CA.

And I didn't say it would be convenient. The world doesn't revolve around your convenience. I said you've got the ability to use a CA.

Is there a good reason not to use HTTPs now if it’s a public facing site?

Most developers complaining on this page are referring to Google breaking local development workflows.

5 years ago no one would ever have considered .dev for anything public-facing.

Leave it to google to break up something like this.

As of Chrome 63, you also need HTTPS on your local development if you're using .dev.

Except that both Firefox and Chrome ship with the ENTIRETY of .dev on HSTS preload lists, so it'll be impossible to use those domains without clients either installing a CA or owning the domain and getting a cert.

Wow we migrated our local development 5 or 6 years ago off of .dev, just buy a real domain and set its dns to localhost.

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