I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
tinyprojects.dev
tinyprojects.dev
2k addresses registered
If you take that as a live counter of the number of subscribers that's 2k a year, and pretty good!
If you take that lifetime registrations that's not so good.
Also assuming that that copy is accurate.
Very true, also for Austria. When I was in the military and we got our Steyr AUG A1 we had to know the serial number by heart so we could find our gun when mixed up. We also had to report our serial number when asked by instructors. Mine started with "HJ18" which was by random chance but always wondered why these wouldn't be taken out before production because of the obvious nazi code
Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well.
I tried pasting the email address in a bunch of popular services (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) as my email or the domain as my homepage and most of them treat it as invalid, and I found some legitimate breaking bugs in their services in trying it out.
Edit: case in point, just noticed HN also falls in the camp of unsupported emojis in the text body, so another example :). Added the punycode instead
https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-and-stability-ad...
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-emojis-domai...
Even if emoji was invalid, unicode in general is valid in domain names, and should be converted to punycode. Local domains exist too.
It’s not the email client’s job to decide whether a domain is valid, it’s DNS’.
but others are not, so we're reduced to using things like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to communicate
Proceeds to add an ascii emoji <facepalm>
_ _ __ _ _ _
(_)_ _ ___| |_ _ _ ___ ___ / _(_) __ _| | ___| |_
| | | | / __| __| | | | / __|/ _ \ | |_| |/ _` | |/ _ \ __|
| | |_| \__ \ |_ | |_| \__ \ __/ | _| | (_| | | __/ |_
_/ |\__,_|___/\__| \__,_|___/\___| |_| |_|\__, |_|\___|\__|
|__/ |___/
HN allows 99% of Unicode.
Yes? The code points of emojis are excluded by HN.
Try it yourself with characters of different types! Ones that are neither ASCII (including builtin html entities, sure) nor emoji.
Pretty sure I ended up buying a turtle and did absolutely nothing with it. Almost had the hammer and sickle for some quality trolling...
--edit--
This just reminded me of reading about Milka (the euro brand) taking away the domain name of a woman named Milka and, being drunk at the time, immediately buying milka.eu.com (or something very similar) and just setting up a webpage with a picture of a statue of Stalin I'd taken while in Hungary. Not too sure why they didn't go after my obvious trademark infringement?
-- edit II because I'd mixed Stella with Milka, my bad Stella.
As a test, looked for (star).com [might show up with .com, or %E2%98%85.com ?](EDIT: nope) Long form is: https://www.xn--p3h.com/ Source was a question on StackExchange about weird domain names.[1] Seemed to be related to the authors hunt for "prestige" emojis.
Apparently owned by Gregg N. Ostrick of GNO, Inc. bought wayyy back in 2001-04-19. [2] If this is such a new idea, how did Mr. Ostrick buy (star).com back in 2001? Got some hijinks with time traveling retcon sales of emoji names?
Notably, typing the (star) symbol in the browser (Firefox) does seem to work, and gets auto-extended to xn--p3h. Others, like (star)(star)(star) appear to work (xn--p3haa) just have no domain squatter. Others, like crazy bail bonds names, or eBay reviews, such as A(star)++ appear to resolve (https://www.xn--a++-0m5a.com/). However, I'm not sure if those actually work.
Also, confusing stuff. Like Wingdings (star), which turns into unicode << do Not actually go to the what Appear to be visually the same. (https://www.xn--iba.com/) Well beyond G00GLE.com (zerO)(zer0) issues.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1719132/how-do-i-registe...
Within a few days almost all of them sold and made a couple grand in affiliate commissions.
I wrote about it here: https://marc.io/emoji-domains
Email forwarding is also a clever use! Nice to get that recurring revenue.
But yes, it's an amusing (ab)use of punycode, but still fun in spirit.
I feel they missed a truck not calling the service Emailji, which swaps just one syllable.
I turns out their mailbox.ws domain doesn't have SPF or good DKIM records. Might be part of the problem why google chucks it.
Email is a shit show. I feel like getting emails out reliably is akin to black magic now. Without the right incantations your never going to know what happened or why.
google.com TOTAL SPF ALIGNED DKIM ALIGNED
209.85.167.49 3 100% 0%
209.85.218.47 3 100% 100%
209.85.167.43 2 100% 50%
209.85.208.44 2 100% 100%
26 more IPs 28 75% 92.8%You're right though, email is still a shit show, it's particularly annoying that they've made so many over-complicated auth schemes based on centralized and insecure-as-a-rule root tech(DNS), and never phase any out. When it's easier to configure postfix than domain identity, you know something is wrong.
It being a CCTLD, this is a true claim. At a basic level, these tlds belong to the country, and that country sets the rules. Libya reclaiming from ICANN was a jerk move but their claims are absolutely right. (Most cctlds already have this requirement.)
I always smile when bosses want everything to be GDPR compliant. I am not sure why these laws are more important than the laws from the Chilean Navy. Why are we clicking on cookie popups? We think the EU is smarter than the PII laws from Cameroon? Elitism I say. My websites follow strict guidelines set by proper Constitution of Cameroon doctrines. Every fourth visit to my site we dump all contents in html form (obviously).
Purely market size. Europe is a large market. Same reason that just about every product is labelled with 'known to the state of California to cause cancer' - California is a large market.
The other part is how likely a country is to try to enforce their laws, and what ability they will have to do so.
Even if a hypothetical US company had an equal number of customers & revenue in Chile as in the EU, if either the Chilean law being broken is one that Chile never bothers to prosecute, or if the worst thing they could do should they find out about the law breaking is to block the service at a national firewall level but not levy any punishments (say, if the US company has no staff or assets in Chile, and the crime has no possibility for extradition or other international collaboration to punish) then the company would be a lot less likely to comply than they are with GDPR. Because most US companies aren't able/willing to serve EU customers without having servers, employees, and revenue, physically in the EU; therefore the worst case for getting caught breaking GDPR is considerably more worth avoiding than if it would just be the EU blocking access to your servers.
DNS is a federated database, but it is subject to domain seizure etc. at multiple levels. I've seen people complain that their domain operator can just "steal" their domain!
If browsers won't do it, can't someone start a CCTLD (it's only $250K) and then read the blockchain to resolve the DNS records? I realize that this "someone" would be a central point of failure, but alas, that's how the Web currently still works. The best you can do is some sort of "DNS multicast" I think, but it would still be under the control of one company, sadly.
Personally, I'm a bit surprised why the Web hasn't standardized onion links / magnet links / hashes of content / cids / whatever you want to call them. Tor and Beaker Browser have had it for a long time, and Brave too I think. DNS then becomes just a glorified search engine for a small subset of URLs (the ones without a long path / querystring).
No, they can't. ccTLDs are associated with countries. There's no process for creating one that doesn't involve having IANA recognize you as a country.
You're probably thinking of the new gTLD process, which has only been open for applications once, for a brief period in 2012. It's not open to new applications, and the process for applicants was much more involved than a single payment.
> "While the application fee has not been determined, it will be set on a cost-recovery basis. The fee will ensure that the next round of the New gTLD Program is fully funded and does not require funds from ICANN's operating budget. As a point of reference, the application fee for the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program was US$185,000."
From the FAQ page for the next round of gTLD sales, via the link shared above: https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/announcements-and-media/announ...
For example: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-njalla-still-legit.1521...
Now, you can say, "most people don't care, they just have a small-time operation, just find a reputable domain operator who doesn't have a history of screwing people over." But that's exactly the use case for Web3 and blockchains in general. Why do you have to be forced to trust SOMEONE, with something as important as your brand / identity of your entire organization? And, for that matter, why should an entire community have to trust one guy who can change up the site at any time? That's not very secure, and many of you vehemently insist that no alternative should be made available, to anyone, "because scam"! You don't want browsers to even support it!
As your site gets larger and more people rely on it, you don't want to have that major point of failure at any point. I know that some people on HN go so far as to say that banks freezing your money, and ICE seizing your domain name, are very desirable features of the Internet. So, then don't complain about censorship and deplatforming. You can't have it both ways!
This just happened, for instance... ICJ officials are being threatened that their funds will be frozen: https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1781066997666607193
You keep saying "your website" but any successful website will be "our website". There'll be an organization, company, community behind it. And now "the person(s) with the private keys" can rugpull it. Or do whatever they want.
Yes. Maybe A DAO could solve that. But that means everything, including domain names is in there from the get-go. Which isn't how this works on practice.
Blockchain technology is great for valuable assets owned by individuals. But much less so for groups and organizations that own valuable assets. And valuable domains almost exclusively fall under the latter.
Each participant should be able to take only the actions as themselves, and affect a small part of the network. In aggregate they together effectuate the evolution of the network.
That is exactly the point — that we need blockchain software for entire communities rather than individuals!
For example: who controls the intercoin.org domain? I'm quite sure it's a combination of trust and hierarchy and as fallback a society with laws and lawyers and law-enforcement.
Which, IMO is "good enough" for nearly all situations.
You know, in every OTHER technology, that’s how it was before we automated things that humans previously did. You may as well have said this about telephone switchboard operators, or tying up the line, until VoIP brought the costs to zero. “Who connects your calls? I’m quite sure paying $1 a minute was good enough for nearly all situations.” Except, when it all got automated and the providers turned into dumb hubs because open protocols eliminated the middleman. Where are these phone providers today? They provide the infrastructure only, and we route around problems. Same with blockchain.
Paying someone exorbitant amounts to “maintain your domain” because it is famous, and a hosting company to “handle spikes in traffic” etc. All that results in the need to extract rents from the ecosystem in ever-more-toxic ways, using toxic forms of capitalism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
But it gets worse than that. The externalities to our society of the profit protive and private ownership of public forums are immense, including widespread depression, tribalism evho cham and national anger reaching a fever pitch. All predictable. Take a look at exactly how it works:
LAWeekly published an article recently about the steps I and my company have been taking for the several years to fix it:
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
Again, Web3 and blockchain is one possible way to do it but the keys to all the solutions are decentralization and open protocols! They remove the middlemen and oligopolies (like phone companies used to be, or the original AOL/MSN walled gardens) by making an alternative system not owned by anybody and with no single points of failure or control by a few people:
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-worldwide-web-ne...
This is also a single person. Even on ENS, whom you have to trust. By moving everything onto ENS, you've, practically, not solved the issue of who controls your domain.
Sure. It mightn't be the ICAN. Instead, now, it's Jeffrey who has the private keys on his ledger. Congrats!
Each person with a wallet and private keys contains neither more nor less than what they are entitled to control. Smart contracts manage collective decision making.
You should learn about "abstract accounts", i.e. smart contracts on the blockchain being the owners of different things, and acting on behalf of multiple people. This is far more secure, there is no one private key that can leak, but rather the smart contract has business logic, that everyone knows what the rules are. It's like a constitution of a country.
If you wanted to point the DNS to another IP address, for instance, you could have a rule that requires a proposal to be made, and for people to have a chance to vote on it during a voting period, with vote weights being equal or proportional to how much of a token people hold. Votes could be delegated. I wrote about all this on CoinDesk in 2020: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...
In fact, as more things become decentralized, the need to host a website at a particular IP address will go away, too. All of these Web 2.0 things are too centralized and prone to be rugpulled and changed, and the idea that someone must pay all the hosting costs is stupid, when even in 2004 BitTorrent participants also had to "seed" the same files they were "leeching". The reliability is actually necessary to the MEMBERS of the community who use it every day (exactly who you're talking about), rather than the LEADERS.
You can host static web sites on IPFS, for instance, and use smart contracts on the blockchain for business logic. That's what happens with NFTs, for instance, but that's just a first-generation technology, like the games Space Invaders and Pong.
Your domain name is one of the means to get more people to know about you or to deliver your product. Decreasingly relevant, note, as no one types domain names usually (people search).
As more people know about you via various channels (most centralized one way or the other: curated lists, social platforms, search), takeover of your domain name (or any other channel) becomes less of a risk. If you take Coca-Cola’s or Apple’s or Basecamp’s domain, they will barely feel it. Perhaps Basecamp could feel it, as it probably plays a bigger role in delivery, but I am sure they would have a procedure specifically to manage that risk.
99% of the time, if you run an ordinary %product%, should you worry that it will be you vs. the world and all of your channels are taken over? Currently, I’d say not. I could be wrong.
That requires more than just an assertion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You argued that.
I argue the opposite: brand name recognition is what matters.
(And believe me, I am not the only one who makes that point and I certainly am not even remotely smart enough to have come up with it first.)
A domain name is merely one of the many things that may help you reach that recognition. These things evolve; domain names are less meaningful these days—an Instagram username runs circles around one—and all of those things are less critical the more recognition you achieve.
“If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.” If you have your shiny domain name, but no one knows about you, you are as good as dead. If everyone knows about you, and your domain name gets taken over, you can’t really care less.
It's like saying "1800 flowers" can rename itself. Or Jacoby and Myers had a phone number that was all 8's. And then when they split up, they got other numbers like 800-800-8000 but it wasn't the same.
People type in the domain name when they think of chess.com or whatever. You're using examples which are the most ubiquitous companies in the world that spend the most on brand recognition. That's not a great way to support your point!
Consider "basecamp.com" or "hey.com" -- would they do just as well if they had to switch every month to basecamp.nl and basecamp.io ? Probably not. And why should they?
A domain name is one of the means that together can help achieve that awareness and/or deliver your product.
It is like saying an airplane is “a large part of being in New York”. It is useful if you want to fly there, but once you’re there you don’t need it much. You can also drive.
> Consider "basecamp.com" or "hey.com" -- would they do just as well if they had to switch every month to basecamp.nl and basecamp.io ? Probably not.
Again, if you are specifically in the business of subverting the law and expect the world to turn against you and your domain is the main means of delivery then it may be wise for you to do something like this (or simply be a Tor hidden service with the same outcome). For any normal product this does not matter.
Incidentally, public awareness about the pirate bay did not really go down since their domain seizures.
> People type in the domain name
No.
I do and people I know do.
You are way off. What do you think people do exactly?
> Again, if you are specifically in the business of subverting the law and expect the world to turn against you and your domain is the main means of delivery then it may be wise for you to do something like this (or simply be a Tor hidden service with the same outcome). For any normal product this does not matter.
Ah, that old chestnut! Yeah and you don’t really need end-to-end encryption, unless you’re a criminal who doesn’t want the government to find things out. Let them have the certificate so they can solve crimes easier and keep you safe! Same logic.
> Yeah and you don’t really need end-to-end encryption
I didn’t say you don’t need privacy, you are putting words in my mouth.
> Ah, that old chestnut!
The real chestnut are people who think the only way to go is to abolish institutions, grab a piece of land and guard it with shotguns and rocket launchers. A quick thought experiment would show that this is a dead end.
After all, it can be used to hide ANYTHING, including 2 billion dollar transfers, tax evasion, money laundering and of course supporting terrorism. At least the blockchain is public! The sentiment you express comes on one side of the freedom/security spectrum.
If you’re arguing in good faith, then you’ll have to think deeply why oppose blockchain but others shouldnt oppose end to end encryption for the same reasons of “nothing to hide”. Even I come down on the side of “if you are reduced to sneaking around, then your society is already in bad shape” and consider end-to-end encryption to be a bandaid that makes people complacent. But the war on end-to-end encryption is actually far more prevalent than that around the world, and far bigger than your silly war on blockchains and mere cryptographic signatures (which governments don’t oppose nearly as much):
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
Read it! And no, the strawman is that I’m talking about shotguns. I’m talking about open software and protocols eating the world if capitalistic for-profit corporations, just as they disrupted the Big Telcos, and then AOL/MSN etc. So will blockchain be the value layer and IPFS/Autonomi be the storage layer etc. And the Web will be increasingly outdated.
As an aside, I don’t really get how a domain name connects to privacy. When I use encryption (including HTTPS) to communicate, the goal is to stay hidden and unknown. When I set up a domain name for my business, the goal is directly the opposite. Not to say there can be no reasons to advertise while remaining anonymous, just not sure privacy is a great parallel to draw.
I didn't talk about facilitating privacy. You brought this up, in order to switch the subject to something end-to-end encryption can facilitate.
Blockchain isn't about privacy, it's about making sure that no one can control or man-in-the-middle-attack the network. People don't have to trust the middleman anymore.
All of this is irrelevant or orthogonal to brand recognition.
You should never go full emoji. It is supported in far less places than the domain alone is.
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Hi Charles!
All good here. I have been heads down building a new project - hence the lack of posts recently. Thanks for reaching out!
Ben
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