.42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain | Hacker News Reader

.42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

wiki.42registry.org

87 pointstonyskn43 comments

Before anyone wonders: No, this isn't an official TLD. The domains you register there won't resolve for anyone unless they futz with their nameserver settings.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Looks like a bunch of hackers got really bored and perhaps had a beer too many...

>Looks like a bunch of hackers got really bored and perhaps had a beer too many...

Many, many excellent projects are birthed this way.

I can only hope that one day, when I get drunk, my first instinct will be to start my own TLD. Right now, that generally isn't the foremost thing on my mind four pints in...

So what is an 'official' TLD? One that is controlled by an American government agency?

Why can't we have our own TLDs - just like we have our own browsers and servers.

Technically ICANN isn't a US gov't agency but they do have a MOU with the DOC.

Just a thought: maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Seems like a quick and dirty way to put up a site that people couldn't get to unless they're already know what they're looking for (which would imply that you want them to find it). Probably not the intent, but I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of it essentially being an Internet stash house.

So if my IP is XXX.XXX.XXX.42 I can expect misconfigured clients to be trying to connect to me constantly? What could possible go wrong!

Well, only if someone tries to go to http://XXX.XXX.XXX.42, which seems rare.

I can't think of a way to tell whether XXX.XXX.XXX.42 is an IP or a website from that string alone.

You could require that no subdomain has four "parts" (i.e., A.B.C.42), but that's harsh.

You could require that somewhere in the URL for a four-part numeric-TLD URL there be a character.

You could also require that at least one of the parts of A.B.C.D be X<0 or 255<X.

The last two suggestions are more lighthanded, but harder to implement. They'd all rule out URLs like 1.2.3.4, though.

Quick, register your favorite sequence! (http://oeis.org/)

reading the rules from an rfc mentioned on the wiki, if XXX.XXX.XXX.42 is a valid IP address, the client should try to use that first, if not it should only then try to use DNS to resolve.

That certainly works, but it seems like a large part of this market would want numeric-only URLs, and so you couldn't have e.g., 1.2.3.4, or 1.1.2.3, etc.

> but it seems like a large part of this market would want numeric-only URLs

Except for maybe douglasadams.42 ;)

Reference: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1123#page-13

But note that the RFC assumes there will never be a numeric TLD. Furthermore, it suggests checking the string syntactically to determine if it's in dotted decimal form, remaining somewhat ambiguous about what to do if the hostname looks like IPv4, but the connection fails (it seems unwise to do a DNS lookup for every IPv4 address that's offline). Since IPv4 is relatively easy to validate, it would have made a lot more sense for a numeric TLD to select a number outside the range of 0-255, such as 4200. Then it's obvious that 1.2.3.4200 is a hostname (or harmless typo), and not an IP address.

A lot of parsers do support numbers outside 0-255, though, and treat them as "packed" addresses. For instance, 127.0.1, 32512.1 and 2130706433 are all sometimes treated as alternate representations of 127.0.0.1.

There's also RFC-1738 (URL syntax), which says:

    host
        The fully qualified domain name of a network host, or its IP
        address as a set of four decimal digit groups separated by
        ".". Fully qualified domain names take the form as described
        in Section 3.5 of RFC 1034 [13] and Section 2.1 of RFC 1123
        [5]: a sequence of domain labels separated by ".", each domain
        label starting and ending with an alphanumerical character and
        possibly also containing "-" characters. The rightmost domain
        label will never start with a digit, though, which
        syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP
        addresses.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

I can only imagine how many regexes this will break.

Now they have three problems...

Probably not too many that .museum didn't break already. How many people use a regex that actually captures all possible URLS?

Perhaps the 42registry should try to get openDNS to support .42, that would certainly open up a MUCH larger amount of people that its available to, its also reasonably easy to change to using openDNS servers.

openDNS has little to do with actual NIC stuff. See openNIC for actual alternative root stuff.

Remember nic.d [0]? Its domain was 'nic.d,' a secret site was at '__._', and someone "registered" '☠.d' and '(>^_(7.)7'.

0: http://viewsourcecode.org/why/redhanded/cult/whoNicDOffWithT...

Ugh. Can we phase out IPv4 first?

The really interesting thing here is the alternate DNS root that hosts the gimmick TLD. But it's not the first (remember AlterNIC?).

Getting involved with this will teach you about DNS, and that's probably the best reason to do it --- but there are risks. (Frex, you're implicitly trusting whoever's running it to direct you back to the mainstream root servers for ".com", and not to an alternate ".com" on which selected sites are directed through password-harvesting proxies.)

They do not seem to be hosting an alternate root themselves. They rely on http://wiki.global-anycast.net/index.php/Main_Page

Oh, well if the person you're worried might redirect you to a hostile site says they won't, I guess you're safe.

> WHY we do it

> Because a numeric TLD is something new. As far as we know, it has never been tested out in the open. > Because it means being independent from ICANN, and we believe this to be an important aspect of the experiment. > Because we CAN. And "we" also means YOU. Technically, the experiment works. It is not officially endorsed by the powers that be, but it

Point 1 is pretty equivalent to #3 "because we can", I don't think we're running out of alphabetical TLDs so I don't get the purpose of the experiment (If it ain't broke...).

Point 2 I don't understand, why do you need a numerical TLD to be independent from ICANN? Why no go for ".foo"?

As I read it, because ICANN have apparently disallowed numeric TLDs so they don't expect they'll be allocating .42 anytime soon. Whereas ICANN might decide that .foo sounds nice and hand that out to someone, and then you wouldn't be able to figure out which registry to resolve the address against. It's not foolproof of course.

I remember in the late 90s (when I was just out of the single digits) Dutch computer hobby magazines would regularly feature articles about the "alternet" or the "dark net", where they'd explain how you could visit so many more sites beyond the "normal" internet that were secret, "illegal" and exciting.

I'll never forget the screenshot they printed of a website with a photo of a sea and "Welcome to the atlantic ocean" on it: http://atlantic.ocean.

You can also use OpenNIC and get .geek, .free, .bbs, .parody, .oss, .indy, .fur, .ing, .micro, .dyn and .gopher domains.

http://www.opennicproject.org/

Now you can find all of the software that used a regex on [.0-9]+ to decide if you gave them an IP or a name.

I would never have done that… on any software that is still in service, to my knowledge.

Edit: The right way is not to try to determine which it is, pass it to inet_pton() on the assumption that it is a numeric address. If that fails, then pass it in to getaddrinfo() to let DNS or whatever the host uses for names have a crack at it. gethostbyname is obsolete now.

so who owns 42.42.42.42 ? (which is the obvious candidate for the root DNS server)

the correct question is 'whois 42.42.42.42'. answer: sk telecom (sktelecom.com). sk = south korea.

There are some other networks around: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_network_42

split-DNS is not the answer.

That depends very much on the question. If I just want THE ANSWER as my tld, and care about nothing else, then it IS the answer.

Why 42. Most of the early would be hackers and geeks and a prime number would seem way better.

hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy? dur.

O fish, I totally missed that(I am not geek enough I guess). They should include that in the FAQ.

It's in the faq.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide comes to mind. 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. I guess many hackers will get the reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhikers_Gu...

42 is probably the most famous "geek-number", from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)

Why 42?

“The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do'. I typed it out. End of story.”

Adams described his choice as 'a completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could without any fear introduce to your parents'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhikers_Gu...

Of course, he would say that.

Agreed, and as above, 42 is in the valid range for the 'D' part of an A.B.C.D ipv4 address. If the number were larger than 255, there would be no issue.

How about 420? ... Okay, okay. 421 is prime.

I bet 420 would quickly pass .coop and .aero...

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