elgooG
com.google
com.google
Now, as to people buying up rights to gTLDs and charging way too much...
I'm thrilled to see a dramatic increase in namespace.
and I think java namespace conventions need to be changed after this :P
and it is silly
Now you have things like .wine, and there's suddenly a question - does this represent the abstract concept? Or some specific wine-making trade group? And which one? And is it clear to users what this imprimatur means? Do we trust ICANN to make this kind of decision, which is much more subjective and opinionated than the ones it traditionally has had to make when deciding who to give a TLD to?
What you had was an illusion of meaning, and the new gTLDs killed it. Good riddance.
I guess I'm confused, isn't .ly a pretty good example of top level domains losing all meaning? bit.ly has nothing to do with Libya, for instance.
But yeah, I think bit.ly and friends really messed up a lot of the logic people expected from the DNS.
And then one day you install a new update of your ICANN package and all of a sudden when you do ls -l / you see /Documents and /Photos and /Music and /Google and /Ads (where the hell did that come from?), and suddenly it isn't so familiar any more. Someone took your nice neat system which was good enough for Kernighan and Ritchie and RMS and Linus and everyone and they... just figured they'd ignore it.
I think the feeling techies get is just that there was a reason for that old approach. I can mount /bin from shared network storage and /usr from a workgroup server and okay I never actually do that on my MacBook Pro but that's why it's like that and it's important to keep it like that in case... I ever find myself running a timeshared college computer network on a PDP11 and I need it to work just the same as my MacBook, okay?
And we have the same feeling about the TLD system. We were trying to keep that top level directory tidy, in case... you know, in case we needed to use it for something important. And we don't think branding is important.
Unfortunately that ship sailed a long time ago. The DNS system is all about branding, and so we don't really get to use it for important things, like security, or partitioning, or delegation. We can futz around the edges with things like using in-addr.arpa for reverse DNS lookups (but what the hell is using a .arpa address if not hipster techie branding, anyway?), but the majority of the DNS hierarchy? Forget about it. Bit.ly is not actually in Libya.
Let it go.
Yes, it's most likely going to be more typing, but this way, you're not risking having everything break at some point when your pseudo-TLD gets picked up by someone (maybe even yourselves) and becomes a real thing on the public internet.
I only see a bunch of reserved TLD and second level domains, of which non seems reserved for such use.
Can you elaborate a bit?
Specifically, that's going to mean that your internal names need to be subdomains of a domain name you control, such as your organization's domain. Something along the lines of "*.internal.companyname.com".
Fixed that for you.
you know there's an actual reason for this?
com > google > www
"www" is a subdomain of "google" which is a subdomain of the top level domain "com"
historically that was a conventional way to separate services (ftp.google.com, www.google.com gopher.google.com)
But actually 'web' reveals to the graph of hyperlinks between http/html pages that let you navigate from page to page, server to server. www denotes the host is primarily a http server serving web pages.
You could argue it's superfluous these days - if you are typing it in an address bar, you hope it is a http server, and if you are typing it in a ssh prompt, you know it's your ssh server. People add it because it's a convention and some users might get confused if you don't... (it's probably a vhost anyway most of the time)
com. only serves the nameserver (NS) addresses for example.com., and if they are within the same domain, their IP addresses. It does not serve the rest of the records for example.com.
You can see this easily with e.g.:
dig -t any google.com. @a.gtld-servers.net.
vs.
dig -t any google.com. @ns1.google.com.
There is no real advantage of having it be 'www' coming from DNS...
There is a somewhat more modern problem which is that having a domain be a CNAME (the DNS equivalent of a by-name redirect) means it can't also have MX records and receive mail; the CNAME also ends up "redirecting" everything, including MX lookups. So if your web host offers yourdomain.someawesomehost.com and you decide to point yourdomain.com to it via CNAME, having you@yourdomain.com doesn't work unless yourdomain.someawesomehost.com is configured to receive mail for yourdomain.com.
google.com.www is in neither ascending or descending order.
www.google/stuff works now that we have generic TLDs and .google is a TLD, but before that it ignores the possibility of google.net and google.org. This may not be a problem for a unique trademark like google but not all domains are trademarks.
Or how about com/ycombinator/news?
Human language is all about optimizing for context. Abbreviations, contractions, etc. For humans, most of the time the current year and/or "com" are the default context, so it makes sense to present the most significant differentiating information first. If you think about it, that's also why "www." got dropped.
With cell phones and unlimited nationwide calling plans, it's more common to find an assortment of area codes in contact lists these days. What you're describing is not actually a default context. It's just your personal area code. The person next to you might very well have a different one.
So I'm not sure what "old enough to remember" means when it's still true today. 95% of the numbers I call now are local businesses, so I only dial seven digits.
I don't know, maybe you're from the future or something.
It's only the default for new numbers. People carry their old numbers with them when they move, unlike the olden days. Bottom line, contact lists have a lot more mixed area codes now.
> 95% of the numbers I call now are local businesses
That might explain the difference of perspective here. Most people call other people on their phones, not just businesses.
If it was done in the same direction as folders, you wouldn't even have to know anything about domains.
I actually suspect if we started with a clean slate, it would make more sense to start with "more generic/less detail" to "less generic/more detail." Urls after the domain already do that (well, organized sites, do), e.g. www.site.com/cleaningsupplies/clorox
Then we could have (expanded for example): company.google organization.charitynavigator uk.company.google xxx.whoa (for those that remember the proposal for a xxx tld)
But there's probably a technical reason for it being the way it is that I'm not aware of or something.
Of course, I realize that this is a tall ask given that you have conflicting brands around the world. Perhaps there should be some linguistically obvious [to the average non-I.T. person] way to differentiate between conflicting brands...
I feel like the most obvious should be that we should never have to negotiate security by typing HTTPS... that should be the default state, falling back to HTTP only if HTTPS was unavailable and a warning should be given to the user. The average user [indeed any user] should never have to "look for HTTPS" or "look for the padlock". The whole browser UI should be more intuitive than that - the user should be able to look at the browser window and infer that communication with that site is not secure.
I'm not sure what the address structure should be... perhaps something like(?)
ISO_COUNTRY_CODE/REGISTERED_COMPANY_NAME/SITE_NAME/PATH/TO/RESOURCE
Examples:
- UK/COMPANY/ARGOS/ABOUT-US [Brand Information Page]
- UK/COMPANY/ARGOS/ONLINE-STORE/HOME/FURNITURE/BEDROOM/KIDS/BEDS/PIRATE-SHIP-BED [Catalog Item]
- UK/COMPANY/ARGOS/STORES/ACOCKS-GREEN [For local information]
- US/COMPANY/AMAZON [Brand Home Page]
- US/COMPANY/AMAZON/STORE/ELECTRONICS/DVD/LORD-OF-THE-RINGS [Catalog Item]
- US/CHARITY/LIVESTRONG [Brand Home Page]
- CA/CHURCH/UNITED/SASKATOON [Localized Home Page]
Perhaps a global brand such as Amazon or Facebook wouldn't even need a country code...or it could be figured out by an algorithm based on the user's context: FACEBOOK could map to UK/COMPANY/FACEBOOK for a person in the UK or US/COMPANY/FACEBOOK for a person in the U.S. The user could override the location by manually typing the address. If the user's IP address belonged to Amazon in the US, then they could type in just the site and resource address and the rest of the address could be construed from their context: Typing in STORE/ELECTRONICS/DVD/LORD-OF-THE-RINGS would automatically be understood as: US/COMPANY/AMAZON/STORE/ELECTRONICS/DVD/LORD-OF-THE-RINGS. For a residential user, their IP would be assigned to the block for their country, so any sites not explicitly specified would infer a site within their own country.
If the country code isn't known, then some algorithm could attempt to figure it out. If it was ambiguous, then the user could be presented with search results by a preconfigured [or their favorite] search engine.
Anyway - as Tim Berners Lee says... it's too late now. Until someone sets about re-imagining the entire infrastructure that is today's internet, we're stuck with what we've got.
Everything old is new again.
- That's how phone numbers work, the most significant part of the number is first (<country-code> <area-code> <local-number>) so the most significant part (TLD) should come first in domain names. Users like systems that look like other systems they are already used to.
- <tld>.<domain> would help thwart phishing attacks as most users read left-to-right, so they see right away when the domain is incorrect. Compare this to "google.com.phishing.com" which tricks users because they stop reading after they see "google.com..."
- When you read or hear "go to com.myawesomedomain" you know a domain name is being mentioned as soon as you hear "com.". It is not always obvious otherwise (you have to use specific language like "browse to").
<House number> <Street>
<City> <State> <ZIP code>
Except for ZIP code, the address elements are ordered in descending specificity.
I would say its easiest if the most variable part is first, not only for autofill but for the way I think about it.
When you talk about "most significant" you mean the "largest" category. To me the actual most significant is the part that identifies the most unique thing you are typing in, and that tends to be the domain.
Top-level domains have rarely been used as the ontological category they were intended to be. They are little more than flavor-text that is annoyingly required for uniqueness purposes. I think they rightfully belong in the position of least significance.
Except that's not true at all.
The reason they became "flavor-text" was because they appeared to be tacked on to the end for no reason other than uniqueness. Previously existing organizational schema worked for decades with proper categorization: Usenet is a wonderful example of just how powerful it is.
Had URLs been defined correctly, "com" would have immediately told the user "a commercial entity", "org" would have immediately meant "an organization", "net" probably wouldn't exist, and these newer TLDs like "google", "audio", "apps" would have made a hell of a lot more sense.
Usenet suffered from some a similar problem to domain names: everything started creeping into the "alt" top-level because it was the popular top-level free-for-all.
And the usefulness of the classification for humans was debatable since every topic could be found in multiple locations and some, like rec.arts.tv and alt.tv, rapidly ended up dwarfing entire top level categories like humanities.
What we have now is obviously much friendlier to the end user, given it has no reliance on remembering or understanding the network topology!
Domain names (DNS) were developed in 1985 to locate things on the Internet, entirely separately, with the opposite hierarchical ordering.
The convention of locating files on a system identified by a domain name wasn't developed until 1992 and standardized in 1994 as a URL.
As a result, we have two hierarchical orderings for two separate things, because they were merged later on.
How do I explain to my grandmother when a banking site is safe? "Yeah, so, it has to start with 'https://', but only at the beginning, and then it has to END with "thebank.com", OR, before the third slash (so not the ones after https://). So find the third /: is there no third /? Then it must end with thebank.com. Is there one? Then before that it must have thebank.com. Yeah it's the part that's blacker! Exactly. It's not super clear but.... Ok forget it. Click the padlock and read the name of the company. And make sure it's from the same country, at least."
[🔒 Bank Entity Inc.] https://yourbank.tld
But then Google wants to purchase the whole .dev TLD for their own private, internal use http://sealedabstract.com/rants/google-our-patron-saint-of-t...
Then there's the relative domain problem. Although it's not used much any more, it's a feature of DNS that if you're on machine "abc.example.com", and you look up domain "xyz", it will try "xyz.example.com". The idea was that you could get at servers within your own organization without typing the fully qualified domain name. If you want the domain to be searched from the root, you're supposed to type "." after the domain, as in "example.com." Nobody knows this unless they're really into DNS. There's an adspam exploit that uses relative lookup to turn certain mistyped domains into ads on the domain "com.com", which pretends to host all subdomains of the form "*.com.com". If you're on "example.com", and you look up "nonexistentdomain.com", which doesn't exist, the domain "nonexistentdomain.com.com" is tried as a relative lookup. You get ads.
Then there's the problem of determining what's a second level domain. For that, you now need a very big list. (The list is here: https://publicsuffix.org/)
Current thinking seems to be to disallow single-word domains. There are already, though, a few two letter country code domains which host valid web sites at the TLD. (Try "http://ca.")
I would change that... to
"putting random shit into the root if you're rich and can afford to buy your own TLD"
There is nothing subversive within the new gTLDs unless you're up to pay for it.
I bought shall.work for 2 usd, although I admit I only bought it to use the mail it©shall,work for testing purposes.
This would leave the rest of the root namespace available for completely different approaches to resolving names. Think decentralized schemes like namecoin, .onion, etc.
I realize it is too late for that, but this is the way we should be thinking about name resolution, imho.
Soon we'll just have no consistency in domain names.
If you really want to prevent any possible domain which contains "obama" and "sucks" from being registered, there is a serious problem with freedom of speech.
In the case of .porn, do you know you can submit your trademarks to the ICANN so they enforce them? ex.
http://who.is/whois/barely.legal
You can read more about protecting your trademarks here:
Even before the existence of gTLDs there were stupid legal cases because companies like Apple felt entitled over a domain like a.pl[1]
If you own <trademark>, you are not entitled to own every <trademark>.<tld> combination unless <trademark>.<tld> is related to your business, taking the example from apple, you (Apple) may be entitled to own apple.computer and apple.inc, but not apple.groceries
The ICANN guarantees (if you register your trademark) that only you (Apple) will be able to register apple.computer, apple.inc, and every other apple.<tld> closely related to your trademark, but if you don't want to register those domains, nobody else will be able to register them. Where is the extortion in that?
Your arguments about extortions and supporting oligarchies are simply ideological fallacies. Selling domains is a business, and people with enough funds will profit from them whenever you like it or not.
Except that they do, all the time, as I said previously. The extortions and the victims come in when this oligarchy of the wealthy registrars apply for and are approved a TLD which is for the obvious purpose of making everyone buy theirname.shithead to prevent a literal theirname.shithead website. This is extortion on a different level, and it's not hard to see it, so it's apparent you're denying the obvious in order to support your (incorrect) assertions.
You can still get a good 2nd level domain for way less than 185k, just look for it.
Also, depending on your country, some domains are free, for ex., in my country .edu.mx is free for schools, and .gob.mx is free for government.
The free .tk domains also exist, because the government of Tokelau Islands found better to use the TLD as tourism advertisement.
At the end of the day, the gTLDs are a good thing, because the value of domains like sex.com won't be $12 million anymore, you can get sex.<anythingelse> for way less.
Implemented with:
transform: scaleX(-1); transform: rotateY(180deg);
transform: rotateY(180deg);
I'm curious which browser stringham is using.
transform: scaleX(-1);Similarly "ICANN" can "create" tld's by editing a text file. As we all know, most users choose(?) to use dns caches run by someone else and the admins of those caches point them at ICANN's roots.
I would guess most users are not even aware they are making that "choice".
In either case, the cost of editing a text file^W^W^W^Wproduction of a tld is next to nothing. (Maintaining a network of globally reachable servers and coercing dns cache admins at ISPs and elsewhere to use these servers is a separate matter.)
Yet ICANN can charge exorbitant sums for "creating a new tld", i.e., editing a text file. With relatively little work this strange "not for profit" organization can put most YC startups to shame: 1. Edit text file 2. Profit.
How is this possible?
Here is my guess: Because most users do not know how to run their own root let alone their own cache.
Here is my opinion: It is not difficult. 14 years ago djb made it very simple.
Of course, it is April Fools Day. Maybe I am joking and there really is something more to it?
Although it's down now, so i guess this is the official Google replacement
Though originally created by All Too Flat "for fun",[1] it found practical use
in the People's Republic of China after the domestic banning of Google, as it
circumvented the government's firewalls.
Mirror implemented with:
body {
transform: scaleX(-1);
}body { transform: rotateY(180deg); }
transform: scaleX(-1);It doesn't matter though, both transforms have the same effect.
$ host google.
google has address 127.0.53.53
google mail is handled by 10 your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.google.
$ host your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.google.
your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.google has address 127.0.53.53
your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.google mail is handled by 10 your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.google.
Though I think I figured out the puzzle:
$ host -t TXT google. 8.8.8.8
google descriptive text "Your DNS configuration needs immediate attention see https://icann.org/namecollision"
Oh yes, and this is happening in gTLDs now, too.
I'm amazed how many places unicode has been jammed in without regard for how utterly unlike ASCII and left-to-right plaintext it is. Check out the vertical text overflowing its boundaries in Youtube comments. Also look at how Youtube's attempts to block keywords from spam are evaded by lookalike characters.
I suspect unicode's keepers won't be satisfied unless it can render any monochrome bitmap via a cryptic formatting language the rest of us still naively treat as plaintext in order to slap a "localizable" label on our software.
EDIT: I understand the mirroring, but not the DNS.
There isn't really a .google TLD, right??
body {
transform: rotateY(180deg);
} transform: scaleX(-1);There is. For I think ~$250K you can get a .burningfrog TLD too.
Time for a Kickstarter!
Try eg. http://nic.google.
body {
transform: rotateY(180deg);
}http://www.thedomains.com/2012/06/13/google-applies-for-101-...
Since 2011, the registration process for gTLDs has been opened up.
More accurately, during a few months in 2011 and 2012, a registration process for gTLDs was opened up.
Edit: Ah, it seems to be used in the "Chrome for iOS" user agent string.
Weird that it can't handle iframes(?). Or what's the reason for the JS on com.google that redirects only the "CriOS" user agent to www.google.com without framing?
So Google.com busts out of cross-domain iframes by default to prevent attacks like this.
But that goes for all browsers — I wonder why is Chrome for iOS is being singled out here?
➜ ~ dig a a.google
; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> a a.google
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 32515
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;a.google. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
a.google. 600 IN A 127.0.53.53
;; Query time: 31 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.254#53(192.168.1.254)
;; WHEN: Wed Apr 1 12:34:27 2015
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 42[edit] tried logging in and it redirected me to google.com. seems as though com.google is just an april fools/CYA move.
As for the UI it's a simple css transfom: scaleX(-1) on the body. It's not a specific 'reverse' UI.