Fuck.com (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Fuck.com (1997)

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I was trying to register this too in 1994. I guess it was a race between several of us to register stupid domains. I was also bending their ears to get them to let me register the remaining single-character dotcoms. It is heartwarming to see the Internic form on that page - you used to type up the text file and email it to them and wait. You could have pretty much any domain you wanted in 1994. Except fuck.com. Also, they were FREE. I lost all mine once they introduced the $200/year registration fee, after, I believe, Unilever sent them 19,000 registration requests for each of their trademarks.

Despite domains being free, most of the web sites I would visit were simply hosted on IPs. I had a big notebook next to my PC with all the IPs written down. That was my DNS in 1994.

Amazing how quickly it transitioned to a more mainstream web. We had internet at home in 1995-96 and I registered my first domain in 1997 - by that time domains and DNS worked pretty much like today.

> by that time domains and DNS worked pretty much like today.

And by then it was too late. It was already broken beyond repair.

In a way, one of the more prescient things I have done in my life was to register the .org for my surname in 1999. I wasn't the first, but my timing was good. I do use it, so it's not just sitting idle.

I registered "steve.org.uk" in April 1999. steve.com and steve.org were registered in 1995, and 1997 respectively. So I guess I was very slow!

Happily after moving from the UK to Finland I did manage to grab steve.fi, which had expired within the first year of my relocation.

> I had a big notebook next to my PC with all the IPs written down.

Likewise! It was like having a secret code, or treasure map, and this data was much coveted among local young hackers.

There weren't many web sites, so I'll be honest, it was mostly IPs for ftp sites with upload directories that had accidentally been left open and were now filled with warez.

I'm a bit too young to remember the advent of the Internet but old enough to remember when the FXP scene burst onto BBS's with enough warez to fill every hard drive I could get my hands on.

hard drive? you mean diskettes, ZIP drives, and SYQUEST cartridges

the tape drives... 250+ MB years before iomega came along

Iomega Zip drives— still impressed with the choice of making the drives blue. The showstopper though, was my dad’s wood modem—I don’t remember if it was plastic or real, but it was purchased from a national retailer—not homemade and way cooler than the slate of white 56k US Robotics modems that followed!

why write them out longhand, you were just using ftp at a shell? I remember gui clients in that era that would store them. cuteftp on windows at some point mid 90s, and before that something else, maybe ws_ftp.

I’m not op but I have a very funny, related story.

In the nineties, my parents occasionally logged into my computer and stared at it for 15-20 minutes before going upstairs and turning on the television. Saving numbers in the computer box meant that I was breaking into the CIA and selling secrets to the Russians (while fornicating). Writing the same things down in a notebook was okay.

As soon as those client came along, I mostly switched. I don't remember any GUI clients in 1994.

One issue was that the GUI clients failed at most of the warez folders because they contained so many special characters - lot of things like ^H^H^H^H^Hwarez etc.

My experience predates the existence of cuteftp.

I was using gopher and telnet before Windows 3.1; I remember when HTTP arrived and ruined everything.

I want to return

It's like having the phone numbers of different BBS to dial into back in the day. Except, the internet was always connected - which totally blew my mind!

I registered my UUCP node prior to 1994, so there :P...

an ol' buddy of mine has always claimed to have owned apple.com back in those days but he said they just took it from him one day. He would have been pretty young then, like 10 (and, yeah, that sounds right for him). Maybe he lost it because they started charging! haha.

A former colleague (who I don't know personally, but I worked with people who did) owned sex.com for a while. Even if the stories I've heard about what it was like to own that domain were exaggerated, it was pretty insane the lengths that people would go to in order to get a domain. Basically another gold rush, but with marginally less violence against those who squatted a claim.

sex.com was registered really early on. I remember registering 5ex.com in the mid90s as a runner-up prize.

Funny enough, dotcoms weren't as prized in the early 90s as they are now. All the c00l kids on the Internet had dotnets, so my first domain registration was eschaton.net.

Nowadays website using IP without https are blocked behind a red wall by main stream browsers

Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a plain IP used with HTTPS.

Here's one example that came to mind: https://1.1.1.1/

OF COURSE

Haha, thanks!

http://www.links.net/webpub/domains.html says:

> It used to be free, now you have to pay $50 a year for the priviledge ofyour own address. Some people aren't standing for it, Refuse to Pay!.

The "Refuse to Pay!" link 404s, but is present in the Wayback Machine, and is an amusing read:

https://web.archive.org/web/19970606222403/www.alaska.net/~n...

Imagine if registration had stayed free, there'd be no domain squatters, and that cool idea you had that only works if the domain is available would be possible!

If registration were free one guy would write a script to register every possible domain and no one would be able to get one without buying it off of him.

Easy to handle, just use the rules of that time — single domain for single IP. Not applicable to v6 and dyndnses, but something like this can solve it.

That seems like it would only further incentivize a problem we have today - wastefully holding a bunch of IPV4 addresses that you have no need for.

IMO the .com domain name fees are… acceptable. It’s similar to how we deal with scarce resources in almost every other domain. The only real improvement I can think of would be some sort of LVT-like-system where high-value domains (dictionary words, short domains) would cost more than low-value ones (robertospizzaottawa.com) to discourage camping.

If to speak about free domains, this problem can be an advantage.

That was not a hard and fast “rule” in 1994 in that you could host multiple domains on a single IP for email purposes. You could also point an arbitrary number of domains/host records to an http server with a single IP, you just couldn’t serve differentiated content per domain/host record.

Ok, then we would have to buy an IP address instead of a DNS address. How is that better?

Blackrock and Bloomberg would be squatting on the entire web, and we'd be back to using BBS / newsgroups to get away from them.

I mean we currently have Google and Facebook clawing the entire web, and plenty of us are using BBSes and newsgroups to get away from them.

Can't say you're wrong. As with any giant corporation, their guilt is presumed, it's just a consideration of degrees.

The site reads from another era. There are some things like "Fravia+" that sometimes feel from an era that never existed. One person from Greece contacted me on Facebook, of all places, because I had something on Fravia+. I grew fond of that person and almost met them in Athens when I went to Greece (to meet another person I knew on the internet after a week of meetings in Paris where I said: "screw it, let's just do it"), because we shared one bit of an almost lost memory of the internet. It truly is special.

I lost quixote.com (which I'd had since domain registrations were free) to a missed renewal while I was in grad school. To add insult to injury, the ultimate owner of the domain name had a parking lot filled with trucks with quixote.com painted on the side that I had to drive past every day on my way to the university.

At least they did something with it. One of my domain names has been on sale for 10.000$ by a squatter for a few years after a billing issue.

That would bother me too since they're only buying it to resell. Over a decade ago I emailed a domainer/squatter to ask about a domain that matches my sister's married surname. It was the ccTLD version, not even the .com. At the time, they told me they didn't accept offers of less than $2k, so I offered them $100 as an insult and forgot about it.

8 years later I get a random email asking me if I'm still interested in the domain. Lol. I check it every once in a while. Last year they wanted $8k. This year they want $10k. Holding it for 20 years (literally) has only costed them about $200 I think, so there's not much downside if you're rich and can afford to buy in bulk with the possibility of making 50x profit at times.

It's too bad there aren't any great solutions to eliminate domain squatting like that.

There is. Adding a massive amount of TLDs. I’ve wanted my family name ccTLD, but it’s been occupied by a gospel choir. Fortunately there are hundreds to choose from now.

A project called Handshake[0] may be of interest to you. Namebase[1] is a popular on-ramp but you could also obtain your own TLDs via a desktop wallet[2]. There’s even a lightweight resolver[3] to access Handshake domains.

The project is slowly gaining traction, what with Namecheap and Porkbun getting in on it too.

- [0]: https://handshake.org

- [1]: https://namebase.io

- [2]: https://bobwallet.io

- [3]: https://impervious.com/fingertip

I looked at buying one of these a while ago. The AML/KYC hoops you need to jump through to buy HNS are a deal killer for me. I'd literally pay 20x what they want if I could use a normal credit card.

I've been KYC'd on Namebase since its inception so I'm all set.

I do agree that the KYC requirements are trash. A while ago I figured out I could buy without KYC via MEXC and then send the HNS to ViaWallet.

This is the “just build more housing” argument with similar issues. The number of desirable names is finite and squatting is very scalable. One way of reducing squatting may be, hm ... making it less scalable.

I'm surprised the price of domains is not explicitly set to a flat amount, or at least capped.

Were you in Los Angeles? If so, I used to drive past the same lot!

Yep. driving down La Cienega from Pico/Robertson on my way to CalState Long Beach

The UK equivalent was registered in 1996 for the "well known and respected Fulchester Underwater Canoeing Klubb", allegedly to get around UK name registration rules.

Which was owned by Viz

On a related note, FUFME is still online: http://www.easylife.org/fufme/

I thought when I invented the Universal Serial Dick (USD) I was unique.

I get the distinct feeling that website might be very useful prior art in any forthcoming teledildonics patent cases. Also, the "box cover" art is amazing. From their FAQ:

> Can I use FuckU-FuckMe for anal or oral sex? > >Certainly! But be sure to set the preferences to oral/anal for best results. Ensure first that these acts are legal in your state. We cannot be held responsible for the legal consequences of extracoital use.

Is that really true -- are there places in america where either sex toys or anal/oral sex either are not legal, or were not legal in ~1997?

Sodomy - which I believe legally was essentially 'non vaginal sex' was illegal in Texas until 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas

And toys were contraband in Texas until 2008. You'd have to register as a sex offender if caught selling them.

Alabama, still illegal it seems: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3aipiz/til_a...

I don't know if it's still on the books, but it's definitely not enforced as there are successful sex toy shops in Alabama. They even advertise on the radio.

Fun fact: There are countries in the world that are not the US!

We're talking about a product that was marketed to a US audience, and their legal disclaimer that specifically referenced US states.

Pretty sure this is a parody on CU-SeeMe, not an actual product.

Like Iowa?

I haven't seen compelling evidence yet.

Yeah, sex toys were illegal to sell in my county in GA until pretty recently.

https://creativeloafing.com/content-172005-good-vibrations--...

The Y2K compliance statement was a great touch.

> Justin, my friend - is this domain really necessary? or are you just pushing the envelope?

LOL, that's an interaction style you won't see today from the faceless domain registration dickheads.

(Not exactly, Sir; I'm more like fucking the envelope ...)

One past bit:

Fuck.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14000570 - March 2017 (2 comments)

When I got online in 1996-1997 there was some website that played with font sizing and graphics to make the biggest Fuck on the internet. Like it would take a couple minutes to scroll on an old 640x480 monitor. Good times lol.

His email address is justin@cyberorgasmic, without a TLD. Could someone please explain how this worked back then?

iirc the hosts file was the primary DNS at the time, and would sync every 24 hours from a master hosts file online. Thus not needing TLDs to resolve hostnames.

While this would work, Internic would need to share the same HOSTS file. I don't remember a global shared HOSTS like that.

When Windows 95 came out I created an online shared cdplayer.ini where everyone added their own track info and we intended to create a file that had info for every CD in the world (this was before CDDB was invented). Sadly the project self-destructed because W95 had a hard 64Kb limit on .ini files.

This is exactly how CDDB got started, except it was a database file for xmcd.

No, there was a global hosts file prior to DNS — see RFCs 811[1] and 953[2].

[1] — https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc811 [2] - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc953

TIL the Internet once ran on a shared text file. "This data base is an extension of the old ARPANET Hosts.txt file, and is being maintained by the NIC to provide continuity during the transition and expansion to the internet environment."

If you think that's crazy, check out how email worked on ARPANet: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email#ARPANET_mail

> fuck is a powerful word, we intend to use it as a web domain for a powerful press

Fuck.com now goes to some probably-scam sexy singles chat site. Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself a villain etc etc.

There was some dirty business going on here. Several dozen people wanted to register domains that were arbitrarily deemed to be inappropriate. When the policy changed, they weren't offered to the first person who made the request, but to users that were hand-picked by the powers-that-be.

Still weird to me to see bud.com actually be something commercial, rather than a bunch of random links ala Memepool.

I see that diarrhea.com is still owned by P&G.

They probably sell antidiarrheals and just had to own it.

Around 1999, I had crot.ch and offered a small webmail service (and used the address for LinuxWorld registration) on the 'my' subdomain. I gave it up after a while when it became increasingly tedious to walk into my bank and request a wire transfer to the Swiss NIC to pay renewals.

"2. Complete Domain Name:fuck.com

3a. Organization name:Yer Mama Net Productions"

Ahh the good early days of technology.

Well it resolves to something now. I guess they relaxed their policy.

While this other policy got worse...?

> If christian.org had been secured by out and out blasphemers, why couldn't I get a simple swear word?

http://www.christian.org/

> This domain has been suspended due to non-completion of an ICANN-mandated contact verification.

This is solvable by just clicking on the link they send to the contact of record.

Curiouser and curiouser!

Maybe they don’t have God’s address?

lol, when you discover c__t.com links to a wikipedia page.

His legacy lives on I guess

I don't think you need to censor yourself here...

Coming from New Zealand, "cunt" is about as bad as "jerk" or "moron".

I saw John McWhorter discuss that "cunt" is one of two unspeakable words to Americans. -- I think McWhorter's discusison is pretty interesting: https://archive.md/ImjgJ

I get that swearing is less severe than the US and that "cunt" isn't any worse than other swear words in NZ (it's the same in Scotland). But is it really on the same level as "jerk"? Like could a kid in school say someone was being a "cunt" without being reprimanded by their teacher?

Ah, you're right. I mainly meant to emphasise how it was a less severe word than in the US.

As a young Brit visiting his American girlfriend I once said out loud in an Olive Garden, "Don't worry about that old cunt." My girlfriend practically died on the spot. [I was talking jovially about a friend of mine who would not in the slightest mind being called a cunt]

To save people a click, http://cunt.com redirects to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Corbyn .

I'm always surprised that Bernie Sanders didn't get the same treatment in the US that Corbyn did in the UK. I think deep down we're just meaner and more miserable than the Americans are.

fascistcunt.com

May we all reminisce on typing in random words and then appending .com or .net to see where it would take you (and if the school's internet filter would block it, in which case you'd note to look it up at the public library later)?

I successfully registered х%йпи%даджигурда.рф when Cyrillic .рф zone opened. Unfortunately, it was shut down a couple of months later by the registrar, but it was live for at least those couple of months :)

I love the simplicity of this website, good old days!

this reminds of a recent story I heard about on my favorite podcast (last podcast on the left - true crime, ufo, conspiracy, something for everyone) about an Aussie with the legit last name of assman, he was denied for a license plate with basically the exact same response as the one you see in these comms.

I remember there was a cartoon robot named “Fucko”

The hottest place to...

I was afraid. Opened in a private window. P.S - I know they still track me.

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