3 ms·

If the government is going to put a domain name on license plates, you'd think it would make sure the domain name stays registered as long as the license plates

If the government is going to put a domain name on license plates, you'd think it would make sure the domain name stays registered as long as the license plates remain in use. They're lucky it was snatched up by a casino and not something worse like hardcore pornography or a hate group. To fix this, the state of Maryland should identify everybody who still has this license plate and send them a replacement plate in the current style. They have that information in a database somewhere, associated with names and addresses, so they should be able to run a simple query. If not, that means they probably need to fund a project to upgrade their databases to a modern implementation of SQL.

bombcar 3y ago
Government plates should use .gov or some similar tightly controlled domain (.edu might be acceptable). Florida has "myflorida.com" which is an official government website, but .com is not a limited and controlled TLD; so in theory registration could fail and someone scoop it up. If it were "myflorida.gov" that would be much less likely. ahahahah http://myflorida.gov http://myflorida.gov redirects to dot com (it's dot muffin)!
- vxNsr 3y ago
  They probably registered the .com before .gov was easy to get. FWIW when I click your .gov link I get an SSL warning in safari on iOS.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Ha! I'll update it to http which works, but that's hilarious. I know whitehouse.gov uses lets encrypt; I wonder how many TLDs have domains using them, and which the rarest is.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  They should have done that, but it probably took a contractor minutes to create a TEMPORARY, EXAMPLE domain like "starspangled200.org." The plan would have been to change this later to read md.gov/starspangled200, which will 301 redirect to maryland.gov/starspangled200, which needs to be made to point to a new starspangled200.maryland.gov subdomain because the Windows server running www.maryland.gov requires everything to be under the www.maryland.gov/Pages/<page name>.aspx URL scheme... But project management ran over budget, and the people who needed to be contacted about those changes couldn't be reached, and when the subcontractor's project manager talked to the vendor's project manager who emailed the wrong government IT department, some information was lost. The necessary forms needed to be filed, but to do so the contractor needed a particular vendor ID number and approval for that takes months, how many more projects do you plan to do for the state? And anyways starspangled200.com looks pretty clean, do we really want to do this optional redirect? So they spent some pocket change and registered it for 10 years, and handed off the task of renewing it to some administrator who could spell DNS but knew nothing else about it with a stern warning that things would break if it was not renewed. Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge of this project.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  There's a common belief that .org domains are much more tightly controlled than they are. They may have thought they were doing the right thing.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Government plates should use .gov or some similar tightly controlled domain (.edu might be acceptable). Most government entities are not qualified for .edu. For a while (pretty long ago, I think early 00s, maybe even late 90s) GSA (who managed .gov. at the time) made some noises about narrowing it further (may have even closed noncompliant registration for a while, while keeping grandfathered ones) to federal government sites only, which led to a lots states using .com or .<state>.us domains for nongrandfathered domains, and even adopting them as preferred sites where they had grandfathered domains. The policy direction died fairly quickly, but the impacts were more lasting.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I was thinking of the specialty plates that are issued for educational institutions - those could get away with an .edu California offers a special plate for UCLA but it has no URL.

bombcar 3y ago

Government plates should use .gov or some similar tightly controlled domain (.edu might be acceptable). Florida has "myflorida.com" which is an official government website, but .com is not a limited and controlled TLD; so in theory registration could fail and someone scoop it up. If it were "myflorida.gov" that would be much less likely. ahahahah http://myflorida.gov http://myflorida.gov redirects to dot com (it's dot muffin)!

vxNsr 3y ago
They probably registered the .com before .gov was easy to get. FWIW when I click your .gov link I get an SSL warning in safari on iOS.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Ha! I'll update it to http which works, but that's hilarious. I know whitehouse.gov uses lets encrypt; I wonder how many TLDs have domains using them, and which the rarest is.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
They should have done that, but it probably took a contractor minutes to create a TEMPORARY, EXAMPLE domain like "starspangled200.org." The plan would have been to change this later to read md.gov/starspangled200, which will 301 redirect to maryland.gov/starspangled200, which needs to be made to point to a new starspangled200.maryland.gov subdomain because the Windows server running www.maryland.gov requires everything to be under the www.maryland.gov/Pages/<page name>.aspx URL scheme... But project management ran over budget, and the people who needed to be contacted about those changes couldn't be reached, and when the subcontractor's project manager talked to the vendor's project manager who emailed the wrong government IT department, some information was lost. The necessary forms needed to be filed, but to do so the contractor needed a particular vendor ID number and approval for that takes months, how many more projects do you plan to do for the state? And anyways starspangled200.com looks pretty clean, do we really want to do this optional redirect? So they spent some pocket change and registered it for 10 years, and handed off the task of renewing it to some administrator who could spell DNS but knew nothing else about it with a stern warning that things would break if it was not renewed. Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge of this project.
RandallBrown 3y ago
There's a common belief that .org domains are much more tightly controlled than they are. They may have thought they were doing the right thing.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Government plates should use .gov or some similar tightly controlled domain (.edu might be acceptable). Most government entities are not qualified for .edu. For a while (pretty long ago, I think early 00s, maybe even late 90s) GSA (who managed .gov. at the time) made some noises about narrowing it further (may have even closed noncompliant registration for a while, while keeping grandfathered ones) to federal government sites only, which led to a lots states using .com or .<state>.us domains for nongrandfathered domains, and even adopting them as preferred sites where they had grandfathered domains. The policy direction died fairly quickly, but the impacts were more lasting.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I was thinking of the specialty plates that are issued for educational institutions - those could get away with an .edu California offers a special plate for UCLA but it has no URL.