.io Domains Considered Harmful | Hacker News Reader

.io Domains Considered Harmful

j3s.sh

91 pointsj3s85 comments

> .io domains are associated with: > - cryptocurrency > - startup culture

So, like .com domains?

> - military occupation > - native population displacement

What utter nonsense. The British Indian Ocean Territory is associated with those things. ".io" domains are in turn associated with the British Indian Ocean Territory. But association is not transitive. If it were, it would be just as correct to say that ".com" domains are associated with slavery and torture.

This whole post is pseudo-moralist manufactured outrage.

> 2021: a very sexually frustrated ethos capital buys donuts and afilias

This line should tell you everything you need to know.

> But association is not transitive

People are always trying to do this, though. But if you carry it far enough, we're all associated with everyone else and therefore with whoever the literal worst person in the world is right now.

they key difference between .com and .io is that .com stands for "commercial" and .io stands for "indian ocean" - a territory which was occupied

the association is stronger because the occupation of indian ocean territory translated directly into occupation of the .io domain.

> This line should tell you everything you need to know.

that i'm funny & don't take myself that seriously, yep :3

It would've been good if the article brought up the real consequences of buying an .io domain, outside of pure optics for those who are in the know. Supporting ethos, I guess?

Nobody associates ".io" with "(British) Indian Ocean (Territory)". People associate it with "Input/Output", which is why it's so popular with tech websites.

Did you know that .com used to be run by the United States DoD, an organization that regularly commits atrocities that make what happened on Diego Garcia look tame by comparison? And that literally the entire Internet is a byproduct of US military research? And that simply paying taxes in the UK funds the same institutions that are responsible for the forced relocation of the Chagossians?

Just wait until the author finds out about child labor used to mine rare earth metals.

> So, like .com domains?

What does this mean?

.io only exists as a logical entity BECAUSE the British and US militaries forcibly evicted the indigenous residents of the indian ocean islands.

The "British Indian Ocean Territory" is an absolutely artificial political construct as a direct result of foreign occupation and take over of peoples' traditional territories without their consent. It's not even something that happened very long ago, solid documentary records exist of everything that happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_expulsion_of_the_Chagos...

From a strictly utilitarian military/strategic point of view Diego Garcia does occupy a very unique location in the world as an air base. But they sure could have built out its facilities in the post-WW2 era without just trampling all over the locals.

If a similar thing was an absolute necessity to build now in the modern era the locals would probably get massive economic subsidies, job training, electricity, air conditioning, modular prefab housing, etc and remain on their islands..

Very well said.

> So, like .com domains?

It might just be me, but I actually do have a slight negative feeling toward .com domains. For me, the ranking is:

1) .edu

2) .org

3) .net; the regional TLD of the country the website is actually associated with (.fr, .de, …)

4) Domain hacks (.me for a personal site, …); Cutesy, unprofessional, generic TLDs like .space

5) .com; .gov; Tech startup-type stuff (.io, .app)

6) Weird TLDs with an advertising / commercial purpose (.flights, .financial, .ai, …)

7) Spammy TLDs like .ml, .xyz, .biz

>1) .edu

I still use my Ivy League alumni email address, and would never have made another (a .com) my primary address if I'd had access to the .edu address the whole time since graduation. Why would I not want to immediately communicate my affiliation to one and all without having to explicitly state it?

I run a prolific .io domain... well, I used to, until we bought the .com! I think all domains could be considered "bad" for the exact same reasons listed in this article (".com" stands for commercial, all domains are rented even if you "own" it, and have you seen how bad ICANN is??).

But more importantly, I by-default approach all articles that are titled "____ considered harmful" with trepidation. I think it's a cheap trope to avoid just saying "I don't like this". People have different opinions and it's such a distancing way to state your opinions without having to own them.

(All that being said, this was a delightful post and I genuinely enjoyed the format!)

You know I think by publishing their opinion on their website they very well may be owning it. I'm not sure they're trying to avoid owning this opinion. The "considered harmful" thing is an old tech meme that I think they're playing for laughs more than avoiding imaginary liability.

Wait until you hear all the bad things associated with .com domains!

ha! i do wonder what the most wholesome domain names are.

I imagine .edu has to be up there.

I imagine you've never been screwed by a university.

.edu is associated with the greatest source of debilitating debt the world may have ever seen, all to prop up a jobs program for the administrative class in higher education and to pile more billions of dollars into their endowments.

.cz is certainly up there, at least under current nic.cz: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZ.NIC

They strongly push for DNSSEC, supports a bunch of OS projects, etc.

neat!! this is great to know :3

Non-profit Irish charities using org.ie?

I’ve seen some of the Russian sites using .it domain. -it is a suffix for many verbs in a (single,present) form, so basically the site name answers the question “what does this site do?”, like vesel.it - provides fun.

Nauru domains (.nu) were popular in Sweden for a similar reason, it means "now".

Did you support putting Tokelau on the map with a free .tk domain?

The trivia folks have a lot of .fud to memorize nowadays

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domai...

.bs has nothing to do with the bahamas either (a pun well before the ftx shenanigans)

.su is unmatched

I think .TK can give every other TLD a run for its money since domain registration is free and it is a haven for scams of every sort.

Right, so I get that this is a joke, but it's a content-free one. What are the bad things you think are associated with .com domains, exactly? Nothing comes to mind like what the linked article discusses about .io. As far as I know, .com is an entirely boring generic namespace, that doesn't have the same kinds of security/colonialism issues that the link says that .io has.

> this claim would EXTINGUISH the british indian ocean territory, _and_ the > iso-3166 two-letter country code, _and_ potentially the .io domain

Is there any precedence for this?

> .io domains are associated with:

This seems so tribalistic.

IIRC the Australians tried to be '.oz' but now that's gone.

.oz wasn't actually Internet DNS. Australia developed its own domestic inter-university network (ACSnet), running a locally-developed protocol (MHSnet) which was conceptually similar to UUCP, but incompatible with it. [0] In some ways, ACSnet could be compared to BITNET, CSNET, Coloured Book-era JANET, etc.

In 1989, AARNet was launched as a replacement for ACSnet, connecting Australia's universities using TCP/IP, and to the global Internet. ACSnet was grandfathered into AARNet, by moving *.oz to *.oz.au. And the oz.au domain still exists, although it has long been closed to new registrants – the main oz.au site I know of which still exists is ftp://munnari.oz.au – an anonymous FTP server (I believe run by the University of Melbourne), most of the contents of which hasn't been touched in years, you might say it is preserved for posterity. Also one individual who somehow has an .oz.au for his personal website http://danny.oz.au/ (I think his background in university IT likely explains how he got it)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHSnet see also https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/ACSnet/

I think the Computer Science department of the University of Melbourne still uses some *.cs.mu.oz.au, though cs.mu.oz.au. itself stopped having any A records some time in the past decade or so. But its name server mulga.cs.mu.oz.au. is certainly still alive.

Found this website, even updated last month: http://gridbus.cs.mu.oz.au/

Although it seems their main address is actually http://www.cloudbus.org/

> Is there any precedence for this?

i'm not sure - but there's definitely risk, and a lot of potential for it to happen here:

- https://domainincite.com/23957-un-ruling-may-put-io-domains-...

- https://www.nominet.uk/the-shifting-world-of-country-codes/

- https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/27/io_domains_uk_un/?pag...

Given that nobody associates the TLD with the Indian Ocean I'd think they could hand it over to a new entity to manage

tbh, i hope so!

> is there any precedent?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...

The following list of ccTLDs have been deleted after the associated country was withdrawn from ISO-3166-1: .cs (Czechoslovakia), .zr (Zaire), .tp (East Timor).

It has happened before and could happen again. There are also some, like .su (soviet union), being actively phased out which will probably be deleted in only a matter of time.

If io is withdrawn from ISO-3166-1, we may see the ccTLD be deleted as soon as 2150 I think.

Click bait title. They are considered harmful by the author primarily due to the authors own moral code and opinions.

Not wanting private capital firms to hijack .org (look into the history of Ethos Capital and Fadi Chehade) is a valid political and economic position.

Without the massive community backlash towards it a couple of years ago I have no doubt they would have been successful.

Yes, it's easy to organize mobs on the internet and mobilize them for ones own personal ideologies, economic positions and gain.

I'm really tired of seeing the obligatory comment of this form on nearly every article posted.

I mean...no shit? I won't entirely go out on a limb here but I really can't recall any article titled "X considered harmful" that wasn't an opinion being stated.

It's a goofy blog post and title in which the author is attempting to woke mob io TLD so I pointed it out.

I think there is a space to say that the author has moral issues with sites associated with a TLD… but there’s not technical harm occurring, like malicious software, viruses and etc.

How dare that guy have a clear opinion that he's willing to back up with reasons!

Way better than Dijkstra being pithy about everything.

I found it difficult to understand the reasoning on that page to object to a TLD.

I found the article to be irrelevant and only clicked the link because I thought I was going to find a technical reason as to why the .io domain would be considered harmful. Instead I found an author's opinion as to why the .io domain would be considered harmful to the author and other's who would share the author's concerns which are not technical in nature.

Title is click-bait, article has no impact on my decision making process when purchasing TLDs.

Meta, on presentation:

You’ve capped the width at 750px, but use up to 83 columns of monospace. This leaves it assuming that each column is no more than 9px wide, but this may in fact not be true. I, for example, have boosted the size from the stupid historical customary value of 13px to the more sensible 16px, which, combined with my chosen monospace face Triplicate, takes 9.6px per column, and so I get some undesirable wrapping. Here’s what should be done instead (assuming 83 columns, though I suspect you actually want to rewrap the sole line where that occurs and go down to 80, and incidentally the other line that’s 80 could be subjectively prettier with manually-chosen line breaks aligning with punctuation rather than line length, starting a new line for each of the two “_and_”s):

  #main, #header, aside {
      font-family: monospace;
      max-width: 83ch;
  }

In related news, I think this is the first time in at least a decade that I’ve come across an actually interestingly useful use of monospace in a web page and felt no particular inclination to substitute in serif and breathe a sigh of relief at how much more readable it becomes, which is what I would normally do. If you’re going to go monospace, do something interesting with it like this!

wow, thanks a lot for this! i'll look into it later - i didn't know that you could specify character width with the max-width param. neat!

Relevant reading: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_.... The ch unit is the width of the 0 glyph, which for monospace fonts means the width of all regular-sized glyphs. The story of what it actually calculates gets a bit messier if you use a font-family stack with more than one item, but that’s no problem for what you’ve done. There are genuine uses for all three of em, ex and ch (though ex is the rarest by far).

And hey, another fun tip: you can add U+FE0E after emoji to prefer monochrome textual rather than graphical representations (and U+FE0F says “go graphical”, useful for the comparatively few emoji that default to a textual representation). It’s not perfect, and it may end up feeling less pleasant than the greyscale-filtered graphical representation, but hey, it’s a fun feature.

Normally I'm a fan of creativity and not of tone policing, but I look at this and I literally have no energy to try to figure out wtf this person is arguing.

TLDR: .io owned by bad people. .io bad.

I still remember when our app went offline and we scrambled to diagnose the issue. Turns out it was the whole .io TLD that was down! Never again did I buy a .io for a product.

Yeah, too many people pick TLDs solely out of vanity. But there's a huge spectrum of registries in this space. Who is in charge of your DNS records? It could be Verisign, under Delaware law, or it could be some guy updating a zone file in notepad, under a dictator's rule. You probably should check that out before you build a business on it.

Never use a domain you use for a product website in your product. `boringproductcodename.com` would be always available despite PR dept shenanigans, product and/or company renamings, buyouts and whatever. Also would cost $15/y for at least a decade.

This message brought to you by .sh domains lol

Owned by...you guessed it! The Internet Computer Bureau Ltd!

A readable summary of the authors' issues with the .io TLD:

1. The TLD is a ccTLD for the BIOT [1], the creation of which was questionable under international law to say the least. It also serves solely as a military base, so the author perceives it as linked to both colonialism and militarism.

2. There isn't a clear link between the UK (the owner of the BIOT colony) and the former or current operators of the .io TLD. Normally there is a license agreement between the government and the company that administers its ccTLD, but apparently the UK government could not find any records of ever having granted the company permission to take control of this ccTLD. It's worth noting that the UK government does make use of an .io domain for the island's colonial administration [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory [2] https://biot.gov.io

.sh domains represent another British overseas territory and are also administered by the Internet Computer Bureau

Honestly I really enjoyed this blog post and found the author's tone fun and lively.

thank you! :3

.io domains = bad is something that has come up over and over again in my tech circles. i thought it'd be nice to have a sort of poetic & fun overview about why people feel the way they do. i had fun writing it too!

I was expecting this to be about the technical reason not to use .io, or really any ccTLD, as opposed to .com or newer gTLDs.

Historically, ccTLDs have been more poorly run and have less strict technical requirements for how they are run. That make sense because, well, it's not like ICANN can take away ".ne" from Niger even though the registration website they have listed on icann wiki (http://www.intnet.ne/) is running linux 2.6.32 and doesn't allow registration anymore.

On the other hand, if, for example, ".coffee" is being poorly run by its owner, ICANN can give it to a new owner and require them to run it better.

... That said, this was a joy to read! Since I see you around, author, your writing style is excellent, and I'm happy I read what I did, even if I am nit-picking about the above point being missed.

aww, thank you! sorry it wasn't quite what you were after, but i'm glad i gave you a little joy.

Anyone know what the state of censorship is for TLDs? I know some enforce rules on what kinds of sites can be hosted, but have there been any cases of tld owners going beyond that?

Seems like .net is pretty resistant to censorship and deplatforming but I can see domain names becoming the next battlefront as we continue moving down the levels.

This is a critical question for those who maintain domains for personal email setups.

Yeah having your email deplatformed would be a disaster.

There was a story here recently about a guy who had his phone and email through google and when the google script wrongfully flagged his account, he was locked out of everything including his bank account due to 2FA. Google refused to roll back the decision even after admitting it was mistaken.

some tech industry things use .ly (libya) but it puts you at risk of having your domain cancelled because it violates some Libyan morality law. Ultimately the nameservers for it are controlled by the Liyban government. There is also the problem since 2011 of who is actually in control of the Libyan government, and its stability as a going concern.

.com, .net, .org are the least bad options

>but I can see domain names becoming the next battlefront as we continue moving down the levels.

they already are. check out the daily stormer's wikipedia article.

the next battlefront is tier 1 ISP-level censorship

The ISPs are already at it. Kiwi Farms has had issues with ISPs in the middle of routes deliberately disrupting traffic.

It’s a pretty disturbing state of affairs where legal websites are being disrupted by the most core layers of the internet. This is basically the problem net neutrality aimed to prevent.

Yup.. Somewhere within the US network specifically, someone seems to be literally refusing connections to the site once again.

This is the internet being literally broken.. No hypothetical or slippery slope arguments, but actual direct breaking of the net.

Indeed. NN is now even more important than ever and we can't let any attempts at it to leave out this kind of thing in favor or more specific "extra service" ($$$) type issues like so many would clearly want today.

I really thought by now in history there would be a "letsencrypt for domains" (alternate DNS root) that even corporate adopted to end ICANN expense

I mean they have tried with OpenNIC etc but never had adoption.

It would take android and ios adoption but the huge impossible hurdle of course is legacy backwards compatibility.

anything associated with donuts and ethos capital is in my opinion highly suspicious.

remember ethos capital is hooked up with the people who tried to hijack .org

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=ethos+cap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donuts_(company)

Usually I'd expect attempts to appropriate the "considered harmful" cachet to at least try to be a bit classy.

The only thing harmful was the registration price hike.

That page, I can’t figure out what it is trying to say. I think I know but I’m not sure.

I had trouble reading this because of the crazy indentation scheming. My eye kept getting drawn to something else.

thx for the feedback, i may try to be more subtle about sentence placement in my next post.

I am sorry, I appreciate the history lesson, but this was at best nonsense.

io used to be the cool choice for indie game like slither.io or agar.io

They are in fact called IO games even.

The worst I can say about .io is that it's a fad TLD for software projects from about 10 years ago.

The best I can say about .io is that nvim uses it.

Seeing a lot of people in the comments here who have purchased an io domain.

Tl;dr :

Author thinks .io is “icky”, but more importantly the purpose of this article is to convince the reader that writing in a cutesy early-2000s “monkey cheese random lol” style lends the author credibility.

.io owner detected

.sh considered harmful because St. Helena was administered by the East India Company ◕ω◕

Σ (ﾟДﾟ;）

this made me laugh, thank you :D

About the writing style, it may only be that they are very young.

Checkout my business for AI text generation https://text-generator.io !

Apologies for owning said domain, I worked at a domain name registry... Attesting to the other comments that it's a metaverse/nft/digital property style pyramid scheme like most things and they do tend to be owned by "evil capitalists who do hostile takeovers".

Even the web3 name tokens I'd assume there's someone who minted a whole bunch of tokens for themselves before launching.

You can buy names that are no dollar markup on CloudFlare which still gives money to the registries but at least that skips the bottom layers of the pyramid

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