7 ms·

My story is not nearly as cool, but one day I could not visit my bank's website via "<bank-name>.tld" and I thought something was broken. After a few days I cal

by dxuh 4y ago

My story is not nearly as cool, but one day I could not visit my bank's website via "<bank-name>.tld" and I thought something was broken. After a few days I called and they said that it works fine for them and there was no recent problem and they told me to just type "www.<bank-name>.tld" into my browser, which.. worked. The person on the other end of the phone call clearly thought I did not know how to use a computer (arguably I actually don't, because I did not try out prepending "www." myself). I explained to them that it worked without "www." in the past and this likely was a mistake and they should inform someone, if possible. For a while I called them every couple of months and after about 2 years I finally got someone on the phone that did not think I am being an idiot and calling for something silly and a few days later it was fixed :)

petesergeant 4y ago
I bitched and whined about Google Flight service being useless for searching for long business class flights with a change in them, because it would assume you were fine with the shorter leg being in economy -- even if the shorter leg ended up being 7 hours long. I did eventually get one of their PMs on LinkedIn to apparently take it seriously, but I note it's still very broken on their site putting in a Vancouver to Bangkok flight (10hr in J YVR-NRT, 7hr in Y NRT-BKK)
- april_22 4y ago
  Agree that Google Flights isn't perfect, though I do find it better than any other flight search engine. Especially the 'explore' option is so good for finding very cheap flights across Europe.
- saghm 4y ago
  > I did eventually get one of their PMs on LinkedIn to apparently take it seriously, but I note it's still very broken on their site putting in a Vancouver to Bangkok flight (10hr in J YVR-NRT, 7hr in Y NRT-BKK) How long did his LinkedIn say he was still at Google afterwards? I have to imagine that sometimes being reasonable in the face of infallible bureaucracy would either drive you crazy enough to leave or drive your coworkers crazy enough to get someone to make you leave.
cesarb 4y ago
If you're really old-school, you know that it makes sense to require the "www" prefix. Why should the machine pointed to by the bare domain be the web server, instead of for instance the FTP server or the Gopher server? It's not necessarily the same machine which provides all these protocols, and putting the web server there is privileging one protocol over another. Of course, that ship has long sailed; everyone uses HTTP now, even for things where it doesn't make sense, and one should at least have a tiny web server pointed to by the bare domain which redirects to the correct "www"-prefixed address. The fate of bare domains was sealed when browsers started prefixing "www." and suffixing ".com" whenever one typed a bare word in the address bar.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  So what protocol should the bare domain point to in order to not privilege one protocol over the others? Or should it not resolve at all?
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > Or should it not resolve at all? Exactly. To put it simply, in that old-school thinking, the bare domain should have only SOA and NS (these two being required for the domain to work), MX and SRV (these two being protocol-specific), things like TXT for SPF, and the DNSSEC stuff, but not A or AAAA or CNAME (and AFAIK using CNAME in a bare domain can cause problems, since it's not supposed to be used together with anything else, and a bare domain always has at least SOA and NS).
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      This is inaccurate. There's never been a reason to not assign an A record to @. The historic structure of DNS is that names were given to systems within a domain. So you might have pikachu.company.com, squirtle.company.com, etc. It wouldn't make sense to just assign an address to the domain itself because we simply didn't have the technology to drive sophisticated consolidated sites on one system. You might need to get some files off one host, and some off another. We didn't have load balancers, and we often didn't have drive space to hold everything in one place. MX doesn't have this problem of scale, as MX specifies multiple systems per SMTP spec. Sometimes people would create www.pikachu.company.com, and sometimes they wouldn't. The www prefix was sometimes a handy default, but certainly wasn't ubiquitous. The real change here is the rise of single endpoints for a domain. This began by assigning "www" as place to look for web content for the entire domain and almost in unison people began to also add A records to the domain itself. After all, why wouldn't we? CNAME is different, of course, because CNAME aliases all record types - not just A records.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dmd 4y ago
Until a year or so ago 'nasa.gov' didn't work; you had to use 'www.nasa.gov'.
- julianlam 4y ago
  https://blogs.nasa.gov/nasadotgov/2011/05/31/post_1306860816073/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/nasadotgov/2011/05/31/post_1306860816... FWIW I don't understand why forwarding the bare domain to the www subdomain would increase traffic so much so that they'd need to provision extra servers... ... but hey, I'm not working for NASA, so I can't say.
  - dmd 4y ago
    I'm 98% sure whoever wrote this had no idea what they were talking about.
- marketerinland 4y ago
  Premierleague.com only fixed this issue around 2015-2016. I first noticed it in the early 2000s
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
you wanna know a secret? well when indian income tax department announced a new web portal, they made a big deal out of it but guess what, they still haven't gotten the memo how incompetent they are and that they know it and don't care. case in point, www.incometax.gov.in works but incometax.gov.in does not. haven't you learned in domain setup tutorials to set your A records straight? i guess they didn't and its been like 1.5/2 years and its still a problem. go figure
- jopython 4y ago
  Talking about incompetence, Why are most Indian government websites look like they were designed in the 90's?
  - thumbsup-_- 4y ago
    Because they were either designed in 90s or are being approved by people who are stuck in 90s. Like you still can’t use back/forward buttons, paste text on many indian gov websites
    - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
      at least on the banking side, i do suppose that is a good thing. looking at all the scammer payback videos, most of the scammers take your remote tool, make you open the banking website and then they edit the source, reload and here is your money. Indian banks don't let you do that, they make you give an OTP for every transaction, if you reload, you get logged out, you can't paste or open inspect element which actually makes these scams very very difficult on indian netbanking customers.... that makes me wonder,why don't american banks have reload security for one? like if you reload a page it should log you out?
      - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
        > Indian banks don't let you do that, they make you give an OTP for every transaction, if you reload, you get logged out, you can't paste or open inspect element [...] I don't see how these four things are related. Banks in the Netherlands require 2FA (i.e. smartphone or dedicated 2FA device) for every transaction, but this does not prohibit you from pasting an account number or reloading the page. In particular, I don't see how opening the developer tools and reloading the page are related. If you reload a page, changes you made using the developer tools are lost.

by dxuh 4y ago

petesergeant 4y ago

I bitched and whined about Google Flight service being useless for searching for long business class flights with a change in them, because it would assume you were fine with the shorter leg being in economy -- even if the shorter leg ended up being 7 hours long. I did eventually get one of their PMs on LinkedIn to apparently take it seriously, but I note it's still very broken on their site putting in a Vancouver to Bangkok flight (10hr in J YVR-NRT, 7hr in Y NRT-BKK)

april_22 4y ago
Agree that Google Flights isn't perfect, though I do find it better than any other flight search engine. Especially the 'explore' option is so good for finding very cheap flights across Europe.
saghm 4y ago
> I did eventually get one of their PMs on LinkedIn to apparently take it seriously, but I note it's still very broken on their site putting in a Vancouver to Bangkok flight (10hr in J YVR-NRT, 7hr in Y NRT-BKK) How long did his LinkedIn say he was still at Google afterwards? I have to imagine that sometimes being reasonable in the face of infallible bureaucracy would either drive you crazy enough to leave or drive your coworkers crazy enough to get someone to make you leave.

cesarb 4y ago

If you're really old-school, you know that it makes sense to require the "www" prefix. Why should the machine pointed to by the bare domain be the web server, instead of for instance the FTP server or the Gopher server? It's not necessarily the same machine which provides all these protocols, and putting the web server there is privileging one protocol over another. Of course, that ship has long sailed; everyone uses HTTP now, even for things where it doesn't make sense, and one should at least have a tiny web server pointed to by the bare domain which redirects to the correct "www"-prefixed address. The fate of bare domains was sealed when browsers started prefixing "www." and suffixing ".com" whenever one typed a bare word in the address bar.

drexlspivey 4y ago
So what protocol should the bare domain point to in order to not privilege one protocol over the others? Or should it not resolve at all?
- cesarb 4y ago
  > Or should it not resolve at all? Exactly. To put it simply, in that old-school thinking, the bare domain should have only SOA and NS (these two being required for the domain to work), MX and SRV (these two being protocol-specific), things like TXT for SPF, and the DNSSEC stuff, but not A or AAAA or CNAME (and AFAIK using CNAME in a bare domain can cause problems, since it's not supposed to be used together with anything else, and a bare domain always has at least SOA and NS).
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    This is inaccurate. There's never been a reason to not assign an A record to @. The historic structure of DNS is that names were given to systems within a domain. So you might have pikachu.company.com, squirtle.company.com, etc. It wouldn't make sense to just assign an address to the domain itself because we simply didn't have the technology to drive sophisticated consolidated sites on one system. You might need to get some files off one host, and some off another. We didn't have load balancers, and we often didn't have drive space to hold everything in one place. MX doesn't have this problem of scale, as MX specifies multiple systems per SMTP spec. Sometimes people would create www.pikachu.company.com, and sometimes they wouldn't. The www prefix was sometimes a handy default, but certainly wasn't ubiquitous. The real change here is the rise of single endpoints for a domain. This began by assigning "www" as place to look for web content for the entire domain and almost in unison people began to also add A records to the domain itself. After all, why wouldn't we? CNAME is different, of course, because CNAME aliases all record types - not just A records.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dmd 4y ago

Until a year or so ago 'nasa.gov' didn't work; you had to use 'www.nasa.gov'.

julianlam 4y ago
https://blogs.nasa.gov/nasadotgov/2011/05/31/post_1306860816073/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/nasadotgov/2011/05/31/post_1306860816... FWIW I don't understand why forwarding the bare domain to the www subdomain would increase traffic so much so that they'd need to provision extra servers... ... but hey, I'm not working for NASA, so I can't say.
- dmd 4y ago
  I'm 98% sure whoever wrote this had no idea what they were talking about.
marketerinland 4y ago
Premierleague.com only fixed this issue around 2015-2016. I first noticed it in the early 2000s

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

you wanna know a secret? well when indian income tax department announced a new web portal, they made a big deal out of it but guess what, they still haven't gotten the memo how incompetent they are and that they know it and don't care. case in point, www.incometax.gov.in works but incometax.gov.in does not. haven't you learned in domain setup tutorials to set your A records straight? i guess they didn't and its been like 1.5/2 years and its still a problem. go figure

jopython 4y ago
Talking about incompetence, Why are most Indian government websites look like they were designed in the 90's?
- thumbsup-_- 4y ago
  Because they were either designed in 90s or are being approved by people who are stuck in 90s. Like you still can’t use back/forward buttons, paste text on many indian gov websites
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    at least on the banking side, i do suppose that is a good thing. looking at all the scammer payback videos, most of the scammers take your remote tool, make you open the banking website and then they edit the source, reload and here is your money. Indian banks don't let you do that, they make you give an OTP for every transaction, if you reload, you get logged out, you can't paste or open inspect element which actually makes these scams very very difficult on indian netbanking customers.... that makes me wonder,why don't american banks have reload security for one? like if you reload a page it should log you out?
    - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
      > Indian banks don't let you do that, they make you give an OTP for every transaction, if you reload, you get logged out, you can't paste or open inspect element [...] I don't see how these four things are related. Banks in the Netherlands require 2FA (i.e. smartphone or dedicated 2FA device) for every transaction, but this does not prohibit you from pasting an account number or reloading the page. In particular, I don't see how opening the developer tools and reloading the page are related. If you reload a page, changes you made using the developer tools are lost.