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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

The io domain is actually for a British Indian Ocean Territory. I know a startup I worked at had issues being allowed to use an io tld previously, are there any concerns with the tld given the provacative nature of teledildonics?

Edit: Correction of British Territory to British Indian Ocean Territory

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.io domain is for British Indian Ocean Territory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

> The only inhabitants are US and British military personnel and associated contractors

So wait, all .io domains map to a US/UK military base in the Indian Ocean?

How does that affect privacy...?

Given that they didn’t give a f*ck about the natives (they kicked off all the native population in the 60s and 70s), probably the same amount of care.

It doesn't "map" anywhere. It's just a domain name. DNS happens like it happens for any other domain.

In day-to-day usage, it doesn't, at all. Who owns a domain doesn't have anything to do with where the traffic flows.

If I owned buttplug.io (which I don't, unfortunately), and someone sent traffic to me (by visiting the website), DNS would look up and return the IP address of my server, and that's where the traffic would go.

In theory, since the owner of the TLD controls the root DNS servers, I guess they could hijack the DNS to send the traffic to their server instead. We would know if that happened though.

Actually tlds may have restrictions and can enforce them. This isn't very common, and most of the past issues with IO has been their very slow time processing registration requests as opposed to content takedowns, but some tlds require ssl and others do restrict adult content. Some restrict things to a given topic (which they get to be the judge of) and others require legal hoops to register such as proving you're a non-profit.

With the explosion of tlds and those tlds being privately owned, there's a good chance we'll see more of these problems in the future though right now it just seems like the owning orgs are just looking for easy money.

Yup, it's a risk on multiple levels, that I of course found out about after building the project and marketing it. I've got some backup domains, but I'm gonna lose a lot of link juice if/when this goes.

another fun one is that .af is for Afghanistan and websites must comply with Islamic law, sometimes Shariah depending on who happens to say they are the government at the time.

fortunately, most domain hacks for .af are colloquialisms that don't translate outside of native English easily

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