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Yugoslavia's Digital Twin – When a country's internet domain outlives the nation
- meindnoch 3y ago>Kosovo, for example, is still not a member of the U.N. and, as a result, does not have an official TLD So what about .tw?
- _ache_ 3y agoISO 3166 has a a lot of legacy countries (edit: countries code ! not countries), not the ICANN fault. Like Guadeloupe, that is a French region, not a independent island (and doesn't want to be). I should study why these code exists since there aren't UN members. Seems a lot political for me.
- computerfriend 3y agoTaiwan is not a "legacy" country, but I think the point is that the article's claim, that the ISO 3166 country codes correspond to UN seat holders, is false.
- _ache_ 3y agoI apologize for any bad wording. Didn't intend to say that Guadeloupe was a legacy country or anything, nor Taïwan. The legacy part was about using something other than UN recognition (before using that rule). You're right about the point I wanted to make.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIf “Legacy” is your explanation for non-UN member state country codes, explain PS (which also has a corresponding ccTLD)?
- _ache_ 3y agoRecognize by UN. It's not even legacy. The legacy part was about « The use of UN recognition » to refer to countries (that's a new definition). Not anything like it's a country that should not exists, I apologize for any bad wording. Source: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/non-member-states https://www.un.org/en/about-us/non-member-states
- j16sdiz 3y agoISO 3166 is a list of country/region _for statistics purpose_.
- jakub_g 3y ago".yu domain expires today (30/Sept/2009)" 24 points by blazzerbg on Sept 30, 2009; 23 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852194
- shimonabi 3y agoUntil today I thought that the most widely used second-level domain .co.yu stood for "Commonwealth", like in .co.uk.
- lmm 3y agoIt doesn't stand for that in .co.uk though? It is at least widely understood to stand for "commercial" - .co.uk, .org.uk etc., are meant to be analogous to top-level .com, .org etc.
- resolutebat 3y agoAnd of course .co.ck, for commercial entities in the Cook Islands: https://www.google.co.ck/ https://www.google.co.ck/
- lmm 3y agoTotally sums up my credos
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoI've found the perfect TLD for my new porn venture named 'hard'.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y agoGet your head out of the gutter! The .co.ck TLD is for serious business purposes, like crane rental companies, producers of integrated circuits, cloud storage providers, or maybe a lobby group for the carbon-based pigment industry.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 3y agoWell it seems .en/.wa/.sc don't exist, (or I mean, whatever it might be, it could be .ab, for Wales it would be harder as .cy/.cm/.cr/.cu exist
- nidnogg 3y agoThose two emails in the article hit hard
- pastacacioepepe 3y agoReading them in the morning is a way to give me the feels for the rest of the day.
- alluro2 3y agohttps://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-civilian-during-an-air-raid-on-your-city-or-town/answer/Leonard-Budima?ch=15&oid=15748204&share=09550591&srid=3EDH&target_type=answer https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-civilian-durin...
- Scoundreller 3y agoFor too long I thought .su was for Sudan and maybe they were just unwilling to cancel TLDs as long as you paid. But nope.
- MichaelMoser123 3y agothere was the .dd domain for East Germany/GDR, but that one was withdrawn (unlike .su) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.dd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.dd Other cancelled country TLDs - .zr TLD for Zaire - https://www.iana.org/reports/2001/zr-report-20jun01.html https://www.iana.org/reports/2001/zr-report-20jun01.html - .cs TLD for Czechoslovakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.um https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.um Did i fail to mention anyone? ... Interesting that they don't have a wiki page for deleted ccTLDs.
- NeoTar 3y ago.cs is especially interesting since it was the ISO-code, and so would have been the domain for the union state of Serbia and Montenegro (2003-2006). However it was ultimately not used, before the country divided.
- yorwba 3y agoThe list of deleted ccTLDs is part of the ccTLD template: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:CcTLD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:CcTLD
- resolutebat 3y ago> the X.25 messages would get converted back into internet *twitch*
- _ache_ 3y agoThere is errors about how ICANN set country code TLD. ISO 3166 is just a base proposition, the.uk (United Kingdom) is a bad example because the ISO 3166 code is GB (Great Britain).
- CamouflagedKiwi 3y agoOne could also argue the ISO code is inappropriate though and UK would have been better (because the country that GB refers to is the United Kingdom, not just Great Britain).
- lathiat 3y ago"The Difference between the UK, Great Britain & England Explained" by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 A good watch to understand the above
- Symbiote 3y agoISO codes generally avoid using words like "United", "kingdom" or "Republic" in case that changes for the country.
- NeoTar 3y agoIn recent years the British government seems to be distancing itself from the term Great Britain (perhaps as a consequence of more awareness/sympathy of Northern Irish issues?), and using United Kingdom / UK more. As an example - the [International vehicle registration code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registration_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra...) recently changed from GB to UK.
- keiferski 3y agoI’ve spent a lot of time in the Balkans, and one interesting real world equivalent to this domain is that a lot of older ex-Yugoslavians, especially ones that went abroad in the 90s, still identify themselves primarily as Yugoslavians and not as Serbians, Croats, etc. Maybe a bit of it is nostalgia, but I think a similar thing might happen if America broke up into separate countries. You’d still have a sizable amount of people that identify more as Americans than as Californians/New Yorkers/etc.
- SergeAx 3y agoAll ex-Yugoslav republics are speaking the same Serbo-Croatian language, despite calling it Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian etc. Even today, after 20 years of separation, their languages are closer to each other than some South and North Italian dialects. Genetically they are mostly the same population too. Only Albanians in Kosovo and Metohia are exception in both cases. So, technically Bosniaks, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenians are South Slavs, or literally Yugo-Slavs.
- xtracto 3y ago> but I think a similar thing might happen if America broke up into separate countries. You’d still have a sizable amount of people that identify more as Americans than as Californians/New Yorkers/etc. And yet, invariably when you meet an American in some other country, and ask him where is he from, he will answer "I'm from California/New York/Alabama/Ohio". Back when I lived in Europe and had a lot of contact with international people, I used to pull the leg when that happened. If an American introduced himself like that, I will introduce myself in a similar way: "I am from Campeche" ... let HIM try to guess what that meant haha.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThere are enough people who still identify as Yugoslavs in some way that articles can be written about this as a thing. However, as one who speaks BCMS and Albanian and travels the region for months each year talking with random people about these things, my own experience is that is merely a subculture, not anything representative. A lot of people going abroad in the 1990s, or as gastarbeiter before that, were coming from Bosnia, the Sanjak, or Kosovo and they understandably are loath to identify with a state they saw as dominated by the Serbs, who committed atrocities against them. For Albanian speakers, Yugoslavia was a Slav-dominated project in general. As for Croatia, significant opposition to Yugoslavia began already by the early 1970s and it only got worse after the 1991 war.
- rcbdev 3y agoInterestingly, Kosovo is in multiple organizations that fall under "UN Specialized Agencies" (IMF, World Bank, etc.) and as such should have received a ccTLD over 10-15 years ago as per the UN's rules. Instead, they have to keep the temporarily assigned .xk which the UN confirmed can never be a permanent ccTLD. What is going to happen to all .xk sites once the UN finally gets around to publishing the bulletin on Kosovo's country code?
- j16sdiz 3y agowait... Did UN have rules over ccTLD? I thought ICANN is not under UN.
- dukeofharen 3y agoIf I'm not mistaken, ICANN uses the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes as country TLD's, so in a sense the UN indirectly specifies the rules for ICANN. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2
- gbxyz 3y agoThe UN publishes a list of recognised member states. ISO maintains a list of codes. IANA uses that list to determine whether a country code TLD is valid. But that's the extent of the UN's involvement in the governance of the root zone.
- locallost 3y agoNot sure what this article is about. A country with the name of Yugoslavia continued to exist all throughout the 90s. The article argues it was some kind of an imperialistic claim, but ... whatever? It still existed and it was called like this. They took part in the FIFA world cup 1998 under the name? I find it strange that the article pretends this doesn't matter and matter of factly deals with the "curious" case of a country not existing, but its domain existing. If they wanted to deal with this case, they had the .su domain of the Soviet Union, which still exists.
- keiferski 3y agoIt’s not “whatever.” In the 90s, Yugoslavia ceased to be the unified south Slavic state and only included Serbia and Montenegro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbia_and_Montenegro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbia_and_Montenegro
- locallost 3y agoIt's whatever related to the domain name. The name Yugoslavia still existed, and if it was acceptable for them to take part in the World Cup it was acceptable enough for ICANN to keep the .yu domain.
- Hendrikto 3y agoI really don‘t think FIFA should be the arbiter of who is or is not a country…
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I find it strange that the article pretends this doesn't matter and matter of factly deals with the "curious" case of a country not existing, but its domain existing. While the article is wrong about the amount of time, it is correct that .yu outlived Yugoslavia by several years; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was replaced in 2003 with the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which itself was dissolved in 2006; the .yu domain was eliminated in 2010. > If they wanted to deal with this case, they had the .su domain of the Soviet Union, which still exists. The situation with the .su domain is discussed at length in the article and its continued existence and use is contrasted with the treatment of .yu.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vsviridov 3y ago.su is still around, but the Soviet Union is not a thing for 33 years...
- ozyschmozy 3y agoThis is discussed in detail in the article
- akaitea 3y agoThere's an archive of the biggest BBS of the time that they failed to mention https://www.oldsezam.net/ https://www.oldsezam.net/
- msolujic 3y agoIt is a very sad thing to remove TLD for any country, no matter if it does not exist anymore. As the author underlined, tons of valuable and interesting historical resources are lost for good. ICANN should change this rule, IMHO.
- mcfedr 3y ago[flagged]
- Pako 3y agoWe could remove this comment and not lose much of value.
- MichaelMoser123 3y agoYour suggestion is equivalent to getting rid of 'that internet'. Actually such a development would make sense - first there are the regional wars, then comes fragmentation and the end of that global communication network.
- jakub_g 3y ago> After years of bureaucratic delays, the domain was finally shut down in 2010. Over 4,000 websites, some of the earliest examples of internet culture from the region, suddenly became inaccessible via their original domain. For many, the deletion of .yu represented the final loss of the former country, the erasure of its digital identity. ... > With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments.
- MichaelMoser123 3y ago> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records Don't worry, these sites probably moved to some other location - after all a website only exists while the owner has a stake in it (and is paying for that dns record + hosting/traffic)
- sublinear 3y agoIn theory they just chose another TLD and all the URLs are similar. In practice they just didn't bother and they're gone.
- freeflight 3y agoThere is a lot to worry about, the modern web has become incredible bad at retention but really good at memory-holing escpecially of old content. So much more would already be lost without the Wayback Machine. It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite [0] [0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
- sublinear 3y ago> It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite This is where you lost me. Wayback machine is a centralized repository. A decentralized system would not have prevented data loss any better without burdening peers with shit they rightfully don't want to host. Nobody wants the cost of hosting anything but their own, and only their own, content. The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
- workfromspace 3y agohttps://archive.ph/oxUel https://archive.ph/oxUel (original website does not work No-JS)
- CoBE10 3y agoThere is a documentary about Yugoslav internet: https://vimeo.com/95833310 https://vimeo.com/95833310
- candiodari 3y agoI once had to "clean up" the digital presence of someone who had committed suicide (because of how youth services treated him, years before it actually happened). Delayed it for months. Still felt incredibly bad when I finally did do it.
- suppahotslap 3y ago[flagged]
- suppahotslap 3y ago[flagged]
- cookiengineer 3y agoAnother case why the Internet Archive is one of the most important organizations of our time. A lot of people attribute this to the rewrite of history, and the far-right wing parties across the planet abuse misinformation propaganda strategies to an extent never seen before - exactly because of this phenomena. Google nowadays can't even find links from 10 years ago, let alone not show me stupid ads that have nothing to do with the search terms. The social internet ruined accreditability and transparency of where the information comes from. We need to fix this. Otherwise the people in power will be the people that control misinformation (which, globally speaking, is AIMS, Team Jorge, and Russia right now).
- zxspectrum1982 3y agoI don't know where you live, pal, but in my country, it's the extreme left that one that's rewriting History and censoring books and media. So yes, Internet Archive is the very important but not because of what you said but because of the opposite.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoNow that we have .porn, .sex, .win, .gay, .casino TLDs, I see no reason in TLDs deletion for whatever reason. If a country ceases to exist, just let this TLD be re-registered under the current conditions for registering custom TLDs. No?
- OrangeMusic 3y agoThat's the first thing that I thought and to be honest it's mildly infuriating. What is the problem they are trying to resolve here?! It's not like there's a shortage of 2 letters combinations? Just keep any tld forever.
- corbezzoli 3y agoNations die very rarely so this is probably up for discussion each time. I suppose it does become an issue when in 200 years a new country named Yurnia wants the .yu domain.
- Perceval 3y agoMaybe not as rarely as you might expect: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691134604/state-death https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691134604/st...
- OrangeMusic 3y agoYurnia gets .yr - problem solved.
- soco 3y agoI guess it's too late for .ex-yu (I'm joking! ...unless?)
- causi 3y agoIs there a useful meaning to the term "digital twin"? It seems to be used to mean whatever the author feels like in a given article.