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News.gmane.org is now news.gmane.io

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

88 pointsmariuz42 comments

The previous article this one links to explains why: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/01/06/whatever-happened-to....

That's funny! And here I was expecting this to be related to the sale of .org.

That would be a funny reason to switch to .io because people have been complaining about .io as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587379

As I see it, Gmane is a stateless website/nntp server, plus a data archive of public data (copyright law notwithstanding, since Lars never worried about it like Yahoo Groups/Oath apparently worries about now). I don't think Lars was protective of his server software IP, right? And he didn't sell Gmane for money, right?

Is there any reason there weren't 2 or 3 variations of it, run separately, as backups?

When Lars agreed to hand it over, why not put out a call to the public to clone it? Isn't the point of NNTP in the first place: a decentralized news archive?

Anyone remember the discussion years ago when a lot of people on the web (including the early github community and alike) stood up against the "misuse" of TLDs like .io and .tv?

Personally, I still see it as a misuse. Those TLDs stand for countries and it doesn't feel right to me to use them for generic TLDs.

Or, in the case of .io, a colony/possession/militarybase that has been depopulated of its people. (No, it is not the only place that has been depopulated in the name of colonialism.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians

Are there any negative consequences to this "misuse"?

CCTLDs are useful for searching.

I fairly often add "site:dk" to my Google searches. I know I'm excluding Danish sites using generic TLDs, or using Danish domain hacks¹, but it's usually good enough to get past the irrelevant results I didn't want.

Search engines can also use the CCTLD as part of the signalling -- a .dk site is almost certainly related to Denmark.

That doesn't work for .to, .nu, .cc and so on. (.IO is unusual, the only genuinely linked site I can see is the government's, at https://biot.gov.io/ ) Google has a list of CCTLDs it considers "generic"², I don't know if they have workarounds for sites actually linked to these places.

¹ "A/S" is a type of company registration, so American Samoa ".as" is used, "nu" means "now" so there's some use of Niue ".nu".

² https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#generic-...

Why not just lang:ja

It works for Japan I guess, but it's often more important (well, to me at least) to discriminate by country than by language.

I use it when I want a recipe using local (Danish/European) measures and ingredients, or restaurants in this city, or a relevant government or official website.

Many of these have an English version in Denmark, which I understand much more easily.

Not-Denmark-but-English results are most of what I'm trying to exclude -- recipes full of sugar with measurements in Fahren-cups, restaurants in the three Copenhagens in North America, etc.

Does this work? Seems to work in some searches and in some others it treats "lang" as a search term instead.

Yeah, ccTLDs are often poorly run and domain names can be seized for arbitrary political reasons. In contrast, gTLDs are regulated by ICANN and are required to uphold technical and policy standards.

This statement sounds rather ironic in a discussion that involves a .org domain. Although I'm sure country-TLDs can in principle do things that are much worse.

They absolutely can. Just one example of how ICAAN regulation helps: ICAAN requires that the .org registry let domain owners lock in their current price for 10 years if a price increase is announced, and prohibits different renewal prices for different domains. ccTLDs can just increase prices with no notice, or price gouge popular domains.

And .io is certainly worse than .org will ever be - there have been numerous security outages of the .io name servers and one very bad security incident: https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...

You can lose your domain based on politics of operating country.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/letter-ly-abrupt-ly-loses-...

To randomly philosophize (probably as many have done), segregating TLDs to political units seemed like an arbitrary choice anyway, there are companies not in the US with ".com", or ".net", and why should foreigners have multiple dots like ".co.uk" and be denied ".com". Or in Germany everyone just uses $DOMAIN.de, so you can't tell if it's a government or commercial institution.

The only segregation that made a lot of sense was ".gov" and ".mil", so users could tell they were the real deal.

US got the cool TLDs as reward for leading development of the Internet.

gtld != cctld

One if generic, the other is country specific.

.com and .net are both gtld, thus good for the whole world.

.co.uk, .us and .io anre cctld, thus country specific.

Segregating TLD makes sense, they are meant to understood what's behind the website.

Sorry for being a technical pedant but .uk is a ccltd, there are alternatives to .co.uk like .nhs.uk .gov.uk etc

my point is about consistency of enforcement, not about the possibilities, instead of letting each ccltd make their own, they should come with the agreement of following the global tld standards is my point.

To me the only problem I have with the way they handled cctld, is the inconsistency which has let to a lot of confusion.

I think that cctld should be a sub off of the gltd. just take the gltds and append the country extension to them. (so the UK for example would be .com.uk, .org.uk, etc..)

I don't know if it would be wiser (and necessary) to effectively leave the US with the gtld, or to try to transition all of them to a .us sub.

As it sites now, greed and stupidity have now pushed the number of gobal tlds to over a 1000, I would see that 99% of those should be removed, or them all fall back under the rules for the global tld issuance.

Those "countries" (vague term) have sovereignty over their TLD, to hand out names as they see fit.

In one sense words mean what their users intend them to mean.

If people start using TLDs in a sense that differs from the original intent, are these people necessarily wrong?

I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other. Although, perhaps, I'd be willing to say: who am I to tell others they're wrong?

.io is probably the worst choice you could go with if what you're looking for is long term stability.

This tld is problematic and really, should not be used.

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

It may be questionable on value grounds, but I suspect it will be stable:

"ICB gets to run .io “more or less indefinitely, unless we make a technical mistake,” Kane told me. (ICB has so far run a stable .io namespace. It should be noted that Kane is a respected veteran of the infrastructure scene, and has been entrusted by ICANN with one of the 7 so-called “keys to the internet”.)"

With the current state of ICANN, it seems like migrating from .org is a good idea.

If migrating to .io is a change for the better, I do not know. Why not something more traditional like .com or .net?

Edit: Disregard completely.

The guy evidently lost the domain through some mild incompetence, and never managed to restore it. Boy, does that have to suck.

That's not the reason if you actually were to read.

Specifically this linked article https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/01/06/whatever-happened-to...

The site guidelines ask that we avoid doing this:

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't try and get people to educate and improve themselves and instead let them babble mindlessly?

That's a fine intention, but please achieve it by respectfully providing better information (for example, like thcz's sibling comment did). Don't do it by being rude and aggressive, which breaks the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and contributes to damaging the container for everybody.

Maybe name the company that's not responding and not updating the DNS record?

Why? It probably would come back to bite OP if it results in people reading their blog spamming or otherwise retaliating against the company.

The 'Y' is mentioned in this blog post: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/09/06/gmane-alive/

By making it possible to find, but not explicit it avoids low hanging outrage, which doesn't help anyone.

If anyone contacts this company they need to assume good faith and be understanding - it's possible there are good reasons (the individuals health?) for the non-resposiveness. It's not like they've repurposed the domain for financial gain.

I'm guessing C is cloudflare - in which case the situation is a bit ironic as the domain uses cloudflare DNS.

How can we support this effort?

It seems he accepts offers to register missing mailing lists.

I meant "fund".

Something like patreon at least to keep it going.

Hate to see a great resource with a "single point of success".

Seems he's not interested in cash donations: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2020/01/15/news-gmane-org-is-no...

Is this just the nntp bridge or is the web archive returning as well?

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