Eu.org, free domain names since 1996
nic.eu.org
nic.eu.org
EU.org is not endorsed to any European Union initiative.
These things are quite unstable. I've seen URL shorteners (even one from goo.gl) and URL "redirectioners" and a lot of things like that disappear. Like Geocities in the wind.
Sadly only archive.org is a source of memories.
Edit: but I agree with your main point, .eu.org isn’t a real TLD as they make out in the title.
EU.org predates the European Union.
Is a free subdomain free?
You make it orders of magnitude easier to do weird tracking if you use an overly specific subdomain rather than placing things "after the slash".
To give a case study:
I had an old housemate freak out when I questioned their integrity and they said "that was after the slash" -- I used to pay for the internet and collect $ for it, I didn't log anything and asked folks to not share the WPA(2?) password.
He also told me he took a special route to campus because some of the undergrads didn't close their blinds, then took umbragen I decribed him to others with the wrong adjective.
(At least when I look out my window with a pair of binoculars, it's to look for tacticool weirdos, not titties worse than what you can find for free with a simple Bing search[1])
//[1] and please forgive the wall of text, bootstrapping new social networks post COVID has been harder than expected, since the folks who were very predatory about gatekeeping the definition of espionage freak out if you point out GDPR is a European law, and I've been a permanent resident of Pennsylvania all my life.
I think you could do worse for a free subdomain provider.
We should probably remember that no-one "owns" a domain, at least not in the traditional sense of ownership.
To be clear, i'm not saying it's a good thing. I don't think we should be able to publish anything (read: pedonazi propaganda) and have it uncensorable, but i certainly believe DNS is not the layer where you want to apply regulation/censorship, as it's not hosting any content and disrupting a domain name can result in many other domains (from other, potentially legit users) becoming unavailable. That's why we have legal responsibility for hosts and you contact the host to get content taken down.
I'd be curious what a DNS coop would look like. I was excited about the .org coop being setup due to the sellout scandal, unfortunately the nefarious deal was canceled so the coop was buried alive. It would be great to cut the middlepersons for commercial names, as well as mutualize domains to share free delegations from such as afraid.org, eu.org, or netlib.re is doing.
Impersonation is a simple concept.
No, rent is not tax.
Moreover, as was previously mentioned, domain name fees were previously introduced as administrative fees, not rent. It's a very modern invention that domains should be a profitable field.
No, not really, it's just definitionally false.
> A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or national),[2] and tax compliance refers to policy actions and individual behaviour aimed at ensuring that taxpayers are paying the right amount of tax at the right time and securing the correct tax allowances and tax reliefs.[3] The first known taxation took place in Ancient Egypt around 3000–2800 BC.[4] A failure to pay in a timely manner (non-compliance), along with evasion of or resistance to taxation, is punishable by law. Taxes consist of direct or indirect taxes and may be paid in money or as its labour equivalent.
> At least most registries cannot by law/contract take your domain away from you as long as you keep paying your dues
Any contract can be written that way and none of them are tax.
Aren't there situations where it ends up being hard for a landlord to take their appartment away from the tenant?
It may have become that, but was it always that way, though?
I grew up being pretty clear on the distinction between purchasing a book in a bookshop and borrowing a book from the school or public library.
Does that mean that you don’t own the book?
Ownership is not so clear cut.
You still get value from reading the book. You get no value from a pogo-free pogo stick
Very good point that proves "ownership" means different things: private property under capitalism is different from a common/public property such as a book from a library. For most of history, land was not "owned" by anyone. See also "enclosure of the commons" for some reading on the topic.
Use-based "ownership" (personal belongings) is not "private property" (a religious belief that prevents people from using a resource that could benefit them such as empty dwellings), and is not "collective property" (shared resource managed by a community), and is not "public domain" (shared abundant resources such as air or water in some regions). All of these approaches can be considered forms of ownership/property, but they vary wildly in principles and applications.
There is no practical difference between personal property and private property. If i have lathe in my workshop that i use just for hobby purposes, then it is personal property. If i started business, put that lathe in that business and use it for work, then it is private property / capital. But in both cases it is the same lathe that someone has to produce, someone has to pay for it, someone has to maintain it and can be bought and sold on open market.
In most countries, leased property is often referred to as "owned", yet you have to keep paying over and over to renew that lease.
If you fail to pay your lease then they will reclaim that particular item.
At least in the states they absolutely do. It starts off as a tax lien which is then sold to whoever wants to buy it, so that the private sector handles actually reclaiming the land and re-listing it on the stock market.
https://www.bristol.gov.uk/council-tax/what-happens-if-you-d...
In the UK the process is different, which just shows that they don't have to take your house to reclaim outstanding taxes.
The point is that the government has options, if the property recovery value doesn't cover the missing taxes then I'm sure they will recover through other avenues. If you lease a car and don't pay, they can really only reclaim the car.
The government can take whatever they want in repayment as they are the government.
Also this depends on the state, some US states are set up where the bank owns the title until the borrower pays it off, and others have the borrower on the title from the start but with a lien on the car by the lender in case the borrower doesn't pay. https://realestatelicensewizard.com/title-theory-vs-lien-the...
A vehicle's registration papers show the keeper's name and details but the document states in large letters "This document is not proof of ownership".
[0] https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-registration/new-and-used-vehicle...
Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership.
Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.
one gives you ownership at the start, the second one merely "rents" you the thing
Thought experiment: If they were to damage their vehicle (but assuming it's still legal to drive), who gets to decide whether it should - or indeed must - be repaired? Your parents, or someone else?
(Full disclosure: I recently added some scratches to my wife's car after a concrete pillar jumped out in front of me in an underground car park. I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.)
This is all true for a leased car as well. The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term, you may get charged by the leasing company for any damages that are currently on the car.
Almost, except that:
> The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term [...]
Yes, correct, and exactly what I was alluding to: the significant difference between owning and leasing!
EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something (we've only ever owned vehicles outright, never leased). Q: If you are leasing a car and you have a (let's say fairly serious) crash, are you allowed to have it repaired in the manner of your choice, even at a third-party repair shop, and not even be obliged to inform the leasing company about the accident and/or the repairs?
In that regard, ownership is more like "sizing the window in a large enough shape so that all stakeholders are convinced that it will never be required to put special attention on it again, despite ineluctable changes".
Maybe privileges, responsibilities and liability are less delusional terms for that matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leasehold_estate [2] https://mullinstreacy.ie/freehold-vs-leasehold/ [3] https://www.ft.com/content/b8068d5f-b4b9-4be6-a67e-1866fee68...
"But these buildings have an even lesser-known sibling in the world of condominiums, known as leasehold condos. In this scenario, condo owners get an actual deed and therefore own their property, even though the building is technically under lease to a larger ownership entity, to which it pays rent."
https://www.brickunderground.com/buy/what-is-a-leasehold-con...
Note that private property rights still exist on top of that but this is why the state can decide that e.g. an energy company's interest in your land is more beneficial to the people than yours. You'll still get reimbursed although legally speaking I'm not sure the state would have to do that in order to seize it. The difference is that they couldn't do this for land owned by the Catholic church for example.
As a caveat note that not all land used by the Catholic church in Germany is owned by the Catholic church, this really only applies to historical claims and contracts the state decided to uphold.
About six years ago there was a publication summing up the current state of affairs[1]. I believe we can safely say your comment doesn't reflect it at all.
[0]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html
[1]: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/414774/826f537e22a405...
Maybe that's a technicality (at first glance it feels like an almost outlandish claim), but in the spirit of enquiry I'll put it like this: can you share a source for that?
FWIW I skimmed [0] and failed to come up with anything that comes close...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteignung#Wiedervereinigtes_D... (third paragraph):
Since 2009 there have been 1647 procedures initiated in the Bundesrepublik for expropriation of landownership for road construction projects. As of August 2020, 448 of these procedures have been completed. Paragraph 19 of the Federal Funeral Street Act allows expropriations, "insofar as they are necessary for the execution of a determined or approved construction project" and are in accordance with Article 14 of the Basic Law for the benefit of the general public.
So the total outlay would be around $540. The biggest issue with that is the possibility the registrar ceases existing over that time period.
In the sense of renting != owning
They registered it, NOT created/invented it. It's like saying the Patent-office created your patent, but yeah you can loose the url, like you can loose your patent when you forgot to pay the patent-office.
Renting is just not the right word, because renting means that you never owned it, but someone else.
That "some" might not be the property you failed to pay the tax on (eg it could be your car whereas you failed to pay property taxes on your house). There are usually protections on the property you inhabit, but otherwise they should look to seize whatever is smallest but big enough to cover the amount due.
With domains, you lose the domain that you failed to pay fees on, and no other property will be seized to pay it off.
The difference is in requiring a court system and in what way you are liable (any of your holdings can cover it).
Imo there is a good argument for property tax if you view land as a somewhat public good. After all some wealthy family can and in some cases in the old world literally does own vast stretches of land for centuries. That's basically hereditary aristocracy, probably not the best political system we could come up with. So imposing a tax/rent on land ownership seems reasonable to me.
Anyway, I may be digressing because the point wasn't even if it's good or bad, just that it isn't ownership in the way people generally understand the term. With DNS I find it personally questionable why it's in private hands if we as a society have decided to impose a tax/rent. It used to be public afaik, it's a bit like privatizing the water supply. I think most people would be against it if they know how the internet works. They simply never noticed it even happened.
If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.
It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server.
Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).
Like an appartment. Can lease it, or purchase it.
If the money were to be used to secure the network somehow, it would make sense.
If the money just goes to the creators... it was all just a money grab.
However most of the potential token supply (like 50%) was premined/airdropped to ssh keys of Github users with >15 followers.
That's not necessarily fine if the fee is in custom tokens. By burning they are just reducing supply, locking in the amount paid and increasing the value of their huge holding. It's pretty terrible.
Ofc in this case the Devs and the "sponsers" have 10% of it, so yea.
the registration fee does prevent someone from squatting the entire Library of Babel though
What is your suggestion for those of us who can't spare an angel investment of "just" ten dollar a year until we die or sell the domain?
It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.
This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
Imagine somebody suddenly "owns" my house because they pickpocketed my house keys, without any recurse. Then I really don't own the house, do I.
There would have to be consensus that the particular blockchain is the source of truth for who owns which domain.
> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.
Yes, and this is something that wouldn't be necessary with blockchain-based domain names. It would not need to know about anything that originates from the outside.
> This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
I'm far from a blockchain fanatic and using blockchain for land ownership is obviously laughable to me.
True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself.
Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen
E: Honest question, comes off as snark a little - would they be able to just take it somehow or would they need to use jailtime and or broken kneecaps to get it off you? Either way the blockchain's concept of ownership seems like it would be broken easily by law and companies with lots of money
Or more likely, in partnership with other big tech with similar concerns, they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain. This would be fairly easy to justify on grounds of security and crime.
Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place, because the current system mostly works and provides a legal process for disputes which they are content with.
This is a given, it's strictly hypothetical.
> they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain
Luckily we already have something similar to fall back on already, that's a time saver!
Why is that a problem? Do you even understand how physical property IRL is owned at a legal or philosophical level?
Edit: as I wrote in another comment, I got confused with indentation and assumed that the comment I was replying to was saying that it doesn't make sense to have a recurring fee for domains. I'm sorry. I do agree that a blockchain isn't a good alternative.
Like always, free domains often come with weird or shady requirements, I wouldn't rely on them too much. That said, they're great if you're not willing to spend money on a domain yet and just want to experiment.
Also, they tended to be flagged when hooked up to services (mail hosts for example).
Yeah don't rely on free stuff like google workspace legacy ;)
But it's also a really good dns server.
However ofc getting a subdomain under a gTLD comes with all the benefits and promises ICANN provides. Which this won't.
The main distinction here is really just that keeping eu.org costs 20 bucks a year or whatever, and creating a subdomain costs them ~nothing, so it's not really remarkable that these are free, whereas, for example, a free .org would be remarkable.
How are browsers handling it differently?
If they weren't on the public suffix list, cookies would be shared.
This also affect a myriad of other contexts that the browser applies against the public suffix list.
There exist people who disapprove of this behavior.
A few years ago I tried all two-letter ([a-z]) TLDs and found some others that were able to handle HTTP requests, but they were either just redirecting to another domain name (the ones I noted down back then don't seem to work anymore) or returning 500 errors (http://uz/).
These examples should at least demonstrate that there shouldn't technically be some special case for resolving TLDs. They work in normal web browsers, and presumably a lack of A records for other TLDs would just be some sort of convention.
curl http://ai
Apache's Hello world:
curl http://pn
ping tk
ping uz
ping cm
All others had this error:
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: %tld%
One way to define a distinction is to look at liability and legal standing. Do users under eu.org have any rights, and if there is abuse, how much legal liability do eu.org have? To take an example, HN users can be kicked out of here at the whims of ycombinator. TLD's usually don't do that and generally require a court decisions before a persons domain can be taken away (assuming fees have been paid).
For example would you consider .co.uk domains as subdomains
This is why we can't have nice things.
And what about URL-shortener services, such as the one you work with? Should they be banned all together? They seem to be popular with spam and scammers...
We ban as we see spam. Most free shorteners end up getting banned as there is no need to double shorten a url other than for double obfuscation which is usually shady.
Imagine how easy Twitter would get rid of spam accounts if they only charged a few sats per tweet.
All I can do is imagine, since I interviewed to be an anti abuse UX researcher at Twitter and they decided to not hire anyone for the role, so I assume they do not see a need for such work since I was extremely professional and did a LOT of research prior.
I recall especially well because it was the same ±1 as the 2016 Turkish Coup[1][2][3], though I've lost some master passwords since then.
[1] Ich habe dir gesagt, was ich tun würde, dann habe ich es getan, hör auf, mich dafür zu bestrafen, wenn du das immer noch liest. [2] !geen [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
It'd be spam free alright, because there would be nobody left to spam to.
Hackerfreund, nie vergessen: Drei können ein Geheimnis bewahren, wenn zwei davon John McAfee und Dan Kaminsky sind.
(Ich schalte jetzt wieder auf Englisch um, ich muss mich auf maschinelle Übersetzungen für synchrone Gespräche verlassen)
Do people still think Satoshi was a singular guy? I had a convo at a picnic about how it was probably a team and some very smart people acted like they hadn't thought of that, people who definitely had heard of Shamir's Secret Sharing and read Wired or whatever, so should have been able to connect the dots that maybe "Satoshi" was a set of people ,and one of them died or lost access to a key.
Here is the wayback archive of Wikipedia from that summer:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130208051024/https://en.wikipe...
And a current link to the article:
In my country most people (even Govt officials) speculate on the US dollars against our currency, there's lots of fraud with cash, or social engineering old people to steal their money from their home banking. We should get rid of all of those as well, right?
2. Bitcoin != "cryprocurrencies" - which is why I didn't include Elon Musk under 1.
I also miss videogames but can't be arsed to play any since I lost interest. It's kinda weird how that works.
Building a new internet that starts from where the old internet ended and makes internet work again like old internet is what we need. You need reputation control and propagation etc.
We could certainly use more cooperative registries/registrars, if only to make domain names more accessible to poorer folks. I was so excited about ccor.org and i'm sad there's been no development since PIR/ICANN folks dropped their corrupt deal.
Isn't that the same with co.uk or com.au?
Americans may find that inconvenient, more radical tongues call it a sign of US imperialism that .com is often associated with the home for US companies.
Right, technically and probably legally there was a list of domains that you cannot register because they act as a "top-level" like co.uk. Not sure how official and how correct the list is.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to try and make some point about US imperialism in a discussion about a TLD with an extra dot when plenty of countries have a TLD that is customarily used without an extra dot: .de, .ch, .nl, .es, .ie, etc. It's simply a matter of convention (and sometimes local legislation) that .co.uk, .com.uk, .co.in, and others became the norm for commercial entities in these countries while .com similarly became a norm for US companies by convention. There's nothing stopping a non-US company from using a .com domain, as I'm sure you're aware.
Likewise .com typically implies US, as affirmed by the .com.mx, etc variants
If ICANN wasn't super biased towards favoring the US, do you really think .gov would have been approved in the first place?
I'll gladly concede this point. I do agree that ICANN favors the US for .gov (and .mil). It would definitely be preferable if these weren't approved at all or at least weren't restricted to US entities.
> Likewise .com typically implies US, as affirmed by the .com.mx, etc variants
I responded to this in my previous comment. As far as I know there wasn't a decision to systematically favor US companies, so I'm not sure what this has to do with US imperialism. There are many websites in the UK and other countries that use .com, even if it's still far more common for US entities, and there's nothing stopping more from doing so.
It's actually not that popular with most people I know because it sort of muddies the water with most Australians being very comfortable with .com.au and having a basic understanding of its restrictions.
The 'public suffix list' is one: https://publicsuffix.org/learn/
So it's not a normative document, but an empirical document maintained by volunteers. The introduction tells what is the difference between a domain (registered by one entity) and a subdomain (any number can be created by the same entity): If a website sets cookies for something above their domain, e.g. co.uk or org.eu the cookie would be valid on other entities' websites. Browsers use this list to prevent that. eu.org and it's non-registerable subdomains are correctly listed.
As a whole this looks a bit fragile, depending on volunteer work. Or you could say positively good old internet style: No single government or company controlling it.
The likes of uk.com and others owned by Centralnic have been around a while.
I've never been sure what to call these since they aren't (as in top) TLDs.
Does anyone know why bulgaria thought this was a good idea?
> bg
> (a-z).bg
> (0-9).bg
I can't find the mentioned "rules"-document...
Edit: shorter representation of original list
Italy registered subdomains for all its regions and provinces, including spelling variations.
All of the following domains are for the same region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trentino-Alto_Adige/S%C3%BCdti...
trentin-sud-tirol.it
trentin-süd-tirol.it
trentin-sudtirol.it
trentin-südtirol.it
trentin-sued-tirol.it
trentin-suedtirol.it
trentino-a-adige.it
trentino-aadige.it
trentino-alto-adige.it
trentino-altoadige.it
trentino-s-tirol.it
trentino-stirol.it
trentino-sud-tirol.it
trentino-süd-tirol.it
trentino-sudtirol.it
trentino-südtirol.it
trentino-sued-tirol.it
trentino-suedtirol.it
trentino.it
trentinoa-adige.it
trentinoaadige.it
trentinoalto-adige.it
trentinoaltoadige.it
trentinos-tirol.it
trentinostirol.it
trentinosud-tirol.it
trentinosüd-tirol.it
trentinosudtirol.it
trentinosüdtirol.it
trentinosued-tirol.it
trentinosuedtirol.it
trentinsud-tirol.it
trentinsüd-tirol.it
trentinsudtirol.it
trentinsüdtirol.it
trentinsued-tirol.it
trentinsuedtirol.it
After the 2nd world war Italy just invaded south tyrol/now trentino because they mixed up the capitulation date. They still speak tyrolian there, but belong officially to Italy.
You won't see co.uk ever expire because it's owned and manages by the same company that manages the TLD, but it's perfectly possible for eu.org to mess up their renewal and disappear from the internet. There's no direct connection between .org and the company managing these subdomains.
Calling American TLDs like com/net/org imperialism is too extreme. The internet was developed by Americans for American use and other countries were added to the domain system later. When com/net/org because available, the entire system was completely centralised on the USA so it's not that strange that other countries had to make do with just a national TLD. That's not some kind of attempt of the USA to enforce their rules on the world, that's just historical development. These days, all kinds of TLDs are available, including ones in non-Latin scripts. I don't ever see any .भारत domains on the web (and I wouldn't even know how to type it if I saw it) but it's an available TLD for anyone to use. There are even geographical TLDs like .frl (Fryslân) and .wien (Vienna) that go way overboard with the TLD concept imo.
I have no strong feelings about this part of US dominance, it's just a fact of life. There are worse things. Like US agencies doing mass surveillance on foreigners worldwide. Or using extra-terratorial sanctions, assuming they are world-government.
You hold the domain at the whim of whoever controls the top level. Likely, they'll be less reliable than an official registry.
I am assuming they delegate in this manner, as opposed to some free web hosts who would host the nameservers and essentially just let you set A records.
Would you say that example.nsw.gov.au is a domain or a subdomain?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140802223207/http://rpi.nl.eu....
The scams i am getting use low quality domain names hidden behind the domain they are faking.