18 ms·

Memories of .us

184 points by sabas_ge 10mo ago

jjmarr 10mo ago
Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use. [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq7eG53rKLL9ssg https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq... [2] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZsxcTI_o6qK-_uQ https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZ...
- throw0101c 10mo ago
  For dot-ca, it (used to be) historically mandated that you had to use the 'closest' geographic locale for your domain, which is how we got https://transit.toronto.on.ca https://transit.toronto.on.ca (which now goes to https://transittoronto.ca https://transittoronto.ca). At some point CIRA (the non-profit that now runs .ca) stopped making that a requirement. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com; etc. The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.
- QuantumNomad_ 10mo ago
  In Norway we have kommune.no for municipalities. For example: - Oslo https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ the largest municipality in terms of population, and home of Oslo the capital of Norway - Utsira http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ the smallest municipality in terms of population with just 217 people per 2025. - Nordkapp https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ home of the famous Nordkapp (North Cape) And there is vgs.no for High Schools. For example: - Elvebakken videregående skole https://elvebakken.vgs.no/ https://elvebakken.vgs.no/ - Nydalen videregående skole https://nydalen.vgs.no/ https://nydalen.vgs.no/ - Foss videregående skole https://foss.vgs.no/ https://foss.vgs.no/ These two and some others are called category domains and are managed by Norid, who also run the .no registry as a whole. https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-Additional-requirements-for-the-geographic-name-tree-and-category-domains https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-A...
  - ravetcofx 10mo ago
    country wide like that must be a bit of a pain for local web admins for those municipalities to make changes through the bureaucracy of government DNS/registrar keyholders. I have a friend who works for a university web services and adding any subdomain takes months to a year+ with committees, boards, meetings and approvals they have to go through first
    - Symbiote 10mo ago
      Oslo Commune will have control of oslo.kommune.no, i.e. there are DNS records pointing to the commune's DNS server. It's no different to administer than if they had oslokommune.no. (Just like dealing with bbc.co.uk is no different to administer than bbc.com.)
- Scoundreller 10mo ago
  Freenet.Hamilton.on.ca got me online in the early days! I recall a rather tech-savvy teacher struggling to write his school-board provided email address for students to submit some assignments to. Was something reasonable until the @firstclass.schoolname.xyzdsb.city.on.ca or some related silliness
- decimalenough 10mo ago
  Australia does the same for organizations regulated at the state level, like schools. However, while all other states/territories do $SCHOOL.$STATE.edu.au: https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/ https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/ https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/ https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/ https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/ https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/ https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/ https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/ https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/ https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/ https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/ https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/ NSW uses $SCHOOL.schools.nsw.gov.au: https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/ https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/ And Queensland for some bizarre reason uses "eq" ("Education in Queensland", apparently) instead of the standard "qld": https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/ https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/
  - mjmas 10mo ago
    For Queensland it looks like private schools get a .qld.edu.au domain and state schools get an .eq.edu.au one. For example: https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ .
  - sevenseacat 10mo ago
    When I was at university, we had http://cs.mu.oz.au http://cs.mu.oz.au (Computer Science, at University of Melbourne). That domain name has stuck in my head, even though it isn't in use anymore.
- basch 10mo ago
  in what I find to be unfortunate, I have noticed a trend in the reverse direction. http://shoreviewmn.gov/ http://shoreviewmn.gov/ should have a dot between the city and the state. they chose some form of human usability over precision. I trust it ever so slightly less, because it is cute before hierarchical. https://www.mvpschools.org/ https://www.mvpschools.org/ formerly https://www.moundsviewschools.org https://www.moundsviewschools.org are the domain names for a school district. The fact they chose the P between mv and school (which stands for public) makes it look like phishing or social engineering. It erodes trust in both technical decisions and branding decisions made. Because domains are hard to read, and people were never taught to read them, we lost out on being able to establish trust because something reads "mv.k12.mn.us" (or preferably us.mn.k12.mv) which is two characters SHORTER than mvpschools.org!
  - mod50ack 10mo ago
    My old school district moved from a localized URL of this kind to a .org a number of years ago (in the early 2010s). It seems to just have become the style, but I never really got it. I'm sure there was a significant cost to migrating what was a perfectly working setup to a whole new domain for website and email!
- retrac 10mo ago
  www.gov.mb.ca www.gov.nb.ca www.gov.pe.ca www.gov.ns.ca www.gov.ab.ca www.gov.bc.ca www.gov.on.ca www.gov.nf.ca www.gov.yt.ca www.gov.nt.ca www.gov.nu.ca Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sites under .gov.sk.ca and .gouv.qc.ca (comme de juste).
kraptv 10mo ago
I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality domains and they are wonderful. I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the weird hoops to get this new domain registered. I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit. A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling nostalgic and motivated to register your own: [1] https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/ https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/ [2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
johnplatte 10mo ago
.su is available for registration, I'm not sure what the "in a limited way" is about. In Russia it's used to communicate old-schoolness, approximately.
- lxgr 10mo ago
  It definitely is. In Germany, somebody was selling fraudulent public transit e-tickets on an .su domain for a while last year. Not sure who the “.su” was supposed to appeal to, but they were slightly cheaper than officially licensed ones, which probably helped more than the TLD :)
- ndiddy 10mo ago
  Outside Russia it’s limited to renewals of existing domains due to sanctions. I believe ICANN is trying to eliminate the domain entirely due to it being obsolete, although I don’t know if a formal timeframe has been established for that yet.
- 6031769 10mo ago
  Outside Russia it's used to communicate spamming scumbaggery and is almost universally blackholed.
rasengan 10mo ago
Some IRC networks still use naming as such like "server.state.country.dal.net."
morcus 10mo ago
> Technically speaking, the top of the DNS tree, the DNS root, is a null label referenced by a trailing dot. It's analogous to the '/' at the beginning of POSIX file paths. "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." to make it absolute rather than relative I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs. Neat!
- lxgr 10mo ago
  Presumably they just split the “domain” part out of the URL on // and the first / and feed that into getaddrinfo, with the OS and DNS doing the rest? But I agree, it’s definitely neat :)
- philsnow 10mo ago
  Some browsers (and web servers, proxies, and other things) treat "example.com" and "example.com." differently for various things, like the default limit of per-domain parallel connections. See for instance https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-dot/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-...
- Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 10mo ago
  They need to, as when the "." is not present, your search domains are used, but they are not used when the trailing "." is present. For example, if you enter "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com", and your search domains contain one item called "mycompany.tld", then the browser will first query DNS servers for "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.", and when an NXDOMAIN is returned, they will try "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.mycompany.tld." next. If you type "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com." in the browser directly, only the first query is attempted.
  - NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
    what's search domain?
    - adastra22 10mo ago
      The comment explains it.
dependency_2x 10mo ago
My school didn't have a domain name or even an email address, or even an internet connection. I think it had 1 or 2 BBC Micros though. I remember playing a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Funny how memory works - I assumed I'd remember nothing as so long ago, but remember sitting in the room playing that game now, can't remember why I could though (why I had free access).
- kbbgl87 10mo ago
  > a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Scortched Earth?
  - rkomorn 10mo ago
    Or one of its predecessors, Tanx.
    - adzm 10mo ago
      Based on the age of the bbc micro, no way it was scorched earth, tanx seems likely (I think it was 3d tanx? I have a vague memory of seeing this in a vintage collection)
  - phatskat 10mo ago
    Scorched Earth was such a fun game! Many hours were lost at our small home LAN parties playing SE and Quake/2/3
- navigate8310 10mo ago
  Are you talking about Pocket Tanks?
stephen_g 10mo ago
It did always make me really annoyed they didn’t deprecate .gov, .edu and .mil and transition to moving those under .us (as .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us). Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.
- Scoundreller 10mo ago
  I wonder if some anti-“west” military alliances are eligible to get their own .int just like nato.int
  - Symbiote 10mo ago
    There's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.int_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.in... I don't see why a non-western military alliance wouldn't be eligible, so long as the meet the criteria — treaty registered with the UN etc.
    - ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
      Even if they dejure meet the requirements, I suspect that IANA would be under heavy political pressure to deny the claim.
      - walletdrainer 10mo ago
        I suspect that exactly no-one cares about .int domains
  - dragonwriter 10mo ago
    They would, but even orgs that have historically had .int domains tend to move off them to either their own TLD (like CERN moving to .cern) or to other gTLDs (like the Commonwealth of Nations from commonwealth.int to commonwealth.org.) Ironically, NATO was using .nato briefly in 1990 before moving to .nato.int So, CSTO using csto.org rather than csto.int is probably just keeping up with the times, not failing to get an .int
beezle 10mo ago
I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp still ruled!
montag 10mo ago
I didn’t realize how far these had fallen out of fashion. I maintained http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us for a time, and it was so hard to remember that domain (scarcely easier than an IP address) until I tried to understand it. It’s now kennedy.crschools.us.
- easton 10mo ago
  My high school is still at www-bths.stjohns.k12.fl.us, and if it wasn’t embedded in my fingertips from working IT there I’d have no idea how anyone is supposed to remember it.
- EvanAnderson 10mo ago
  I did sysadmin work for both a .k12.oh.us and a co.countyname.oh.us. Users at both hated the suffix on email addresses. The hierarchy appeals to the nerd in me but I understand the difficulty people had trying to communicate the addresses to others. (Both now use a .com and .gov domain, respectively...)
notherhack 10mo ago
Cloudflare refuses to accept most locality based domains as delegated because they aren’t listed in the Public Suffix List[1]. So for example you can’t use Cloudflare DNS or get a TLS cert for it from them. Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
endgame 10mo ago
Absolutely fascinating history. I thought I knew DNS fairly well and I had no idea that locality-based domains were even a thing. Ah, what happened to the site design? It used to have a lovely background and monospace text.
namegulf 10mo ago
Many US cities use .us for their official web pages eg: www.ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us
aftbit 10mo ago
Wow yes, I also remember my high school's k12 domain name! What an interesting trip down memory lane; wonderful, like most of computer.rip! Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?
- toast0 10mo ago
  > Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so? I don't think so. Godaddy won't delegate new third level domains, and I don't think the second level (states) were ever delegated?? But if you can find a city.ca.us that is delegated and that person/organization is willing to register a new name, you could maybe do that.
musicale 10mo ago
> "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." https://www.gatech.edu./ https://www.gatech.edu./ does seem to work for me. It is interesting that URLs often contain two hierarchies in opposite directions: https://something.myorg.org/something/more/specific/ https://something.myorg.org/something/more/specific/
- dhosek 10mo ago
  Indeed, back in the 90s I remember trying to decide whether to do foo.bar.com or bar.com/foo for various subsites of my main domain back then.
  - jooize 10mo ago
    What is your conclusion?
    - dhosek 10mo ago
      It’s thirty years later, so things have changed, but now I would be inclined to only use a different subdomain if it required a different server.
- basch 10mo ago
  its not really two hierarchies, its just one written backwards for a while, and then forward. if you reverse the backwards part you get https://org.myorg.something./something/more/specific/ https://org.myorg.something./something/more/specific/ the dots separate computers or networks and the slashes separate folders.
  - bandie91 10mo ago
    well, more pedantically: https://.org.myorg.something/something/more/specific/ you need the null-label on the left instead of the right.
- kccqzy 10mo ago
  Yeah of course adding the extra dot will work. The dot at the end simply means do not try to append the local search domain. Interestingly bad “security” software will often block domains without the trailing dot but permit the one with the trailing dot. The problem of having two hierarchies in opposite directions means that it is advantageous to store it while reversing one of the hierarchies. I think the earliest Google Search backend used a format like org.myorg.something/something internally. This representation worked great for key-value storage systems where the keys are sorted.
joecool1029 10mo ago
bergen might have dropped the ball but hunterdon’s still works and is in full use: https://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/ https://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/ Library ditched it for hclibrary.us though. Used to be able to telnet to the catalog at pac.hunterdon.lib.nj.us
AnnikaL 10mo ago
The notion that community colleges can't use .edu no longer seems true. When I took community college classes, I got an @my.smccd.edu email address.
- toast0 10mo ago
  The rules changed several times. My community college was occ.cccd.edu when I attended, where cccd.edu was the community college district, and they had registered their domain in 1993, but now the individual colleges have their own domain names, registered in 2002, 2004 and 2007. But there definitely was a time where only 4 year schools and museums were getting new .edus
phongn 10mo ago
I grew up with *.pinellas.k12.fl.us and that domain remains seared into my memory.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
terrywang 10mo ago
The good old Internet was "del.icio.us".
- asacrowflies 10mo ago
  Isn't that an old porn site lol
paduc 10mo ago
If you want to create a subdomain, you need DNS delegation (authorization) from the owner/manager of the domain. So if you want to register xyz.ci.pemberton.nj.us, you need to ask for DNS delegation from the owner/manager of ci.pemberton.nj.us or a higher level. It's a lot easier to buy the xyz-ci-pemberton-nj.us domain.
dghf 10mo ago
> ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes of each country, and are intended for use by those countries, while gTLDs are arbitrary and reflect the fact that DNS was designed in the US. The ".gov" gTLD, for example, is for use by the US government, while the UK is stuck with ".gov.uk". Fun fact, the UK's ISO country code is not actually "uk", but "gb". IIRC, ".uk" was grandfathered in (from JANET?) as an exception: ".gb" officially existed for a while in parallel, but no one ever used it and I think it's now defunct.
jdofaz 10mo ago
I had one but the "Delegated Manager" was a local dsl isp that went out of business and I lost the ability to update the name servers for it
kidmin 10mo ago
Some minor/trivial corrections: - gTLD stands for "generic TLD"[1], not a short form of global, comes from their "generic" usage. Both two categories of TLDs are in the domain namespace which is globally resolvable. - Almost all of two-letter ASCII ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes, from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, but there are a few exceptions: the United Kingdom (GB) has ".uk"[2], Ascension Island (now part of SH) has ".ac", etc. (Yes, there are more non-ASCII ccTLDs: .新加坡, .УКР, etc.) If you want to briefly take a look at how TLD registries structure their second/third level such as "k12.or.us" or "chiyoda.tokyo.jp", see "ICANN DOMAINS" section of the public suffix list[3] (note: it is not complete) [1] https://icannwiki.org/Generic_Top-level_Domain https://icannwiki.org/Generic_Top-level_Domain [2] https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/15/is-it-time-to-retire-the-gb-top-level-domain/ https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/15/is-it-time-to-retire-the... [3] https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/

184 points by sabas_ge 10mo ago

jjmarr 10mo ago

Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use. [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq7eG53rKLL9ssg https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq... [2] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZsxcTI_o6qK-_uQ https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZ...

throw0101c 10mo ago
For dot-ca, it (used to be) historically mandated that you had to use the 'closest' geographic locale for your domain, which is how we got https://transit.toronto.on.ca https://transit.toronto.on.ca (which now goes to https://transittoronto.ca https://transittoronto.ca). At some point CIRA (the non-profit that now runs .ca) stopped making that a requirement. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com; etc. The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.
QuantumNomad_ 10mo ago
In Norway we have kommune.no for municipalities. For example: - Oslo https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ the largest municipality in terms of population, and home of Oslo the capital of Norway - Utsira http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ the smallest municipality in terms of population with just 217 people per 2025. - Nordkapp https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ home of the famous Nordkapp (North Cape) And there is vgs.no for High Schools. For example: - Elvebakken videregående skole https://elvebakken.vgs.no/ https://elvebakken.vgs.no/ - Nydalen videregående skole https://nydalen.vgs.no/ https://nydalen.vgs.no/ - Foss videregående skole https://foss.vgs.no/ https://foss.vgs.no/ These two and some others are called category domains and are managed by Norid, who also run the .no registry as a whole. https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-Additional-requirements-for-the-geographic-name-tree-and-category-domains https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-A...
- ravetcofx 10mo ago
  country wide like that must be a bit of a pain for local web admins for those municipalities to make changes through the bureaucracy of government DNS/registrar keyholders. I have a friend who works for a university web services and adding any subdomain takes months to a year+ with committees, boards, meetings and approvals they have to go through first
  - Symbiote 10mo ago
    Oslo Commune will have control of oslo.kommune.no, i.e. there are DNS records pointing to the commune's DNS server. It's no different to administer than if they had oslokommune.no. (Just like dealing with bbc.co.uk is no different to administer than bbc.com.)
Scoundreller 10mo ago
Freenet.Hamilton.on.ca got me online in the early days! I recall a rather tech-savvy teacher struggling to write his school-board provided email address for students to submit some assignments to. Was something reasonable until the @firstclass.schoolname.xyzdsb.city.on.ca or some related silliness
decimalenough 10mo ago
Australia does the same for organizations regulated at the state level, like schools. However, while all other states/territories do $SCHOOL.$STATE.edu.au: https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/ https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/ https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/ https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/ https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/ https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/ https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/ https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/ https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/ https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/ https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/ https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/ NSW uses $SCHOOL.schools.nsw.gov.au: https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/ https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/ And Queensland for some bizarre reason uses "eq" ("Education in Queensland", apparently) instead of the standard "qld": https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/ https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/
- mjmas 10mo ago
  For Queensland it looks like private schools get a .qld.edu.au domain and state schools get an .eq.edu.au one. For example: https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ .
- sevenseacat 10mo ago
  When I was at university, we had http://cs.mu.oz.au http://cs.mu.oz.au (Computer Science, at University of Melbourne). That domain name has stuck in my head, even though it isn't in use anymore.
basch 10mo ago
in what I find to be unfortunate, I have noticed a trend in the reverse direction. http://shoreviewmn.gov/ http://shoreviewmn.gov/ should have a dot between the city and the state. they chose some form of human usability over precision. I trust it ever so slightly less, because it is cute before hierarchical. https://www.mvpschools.org/ https://www.mvpschools.org/ formerly https://www.moundsviewschools.org https://www.moundsviewschools.org are the domain names for a school district. The fact they chose the P between mv and school (which stands for public) makes it look like phishing or social engineering. It erodes trust in both technical decisions and branding decisions made. Because domains are hard to read, and people were never taught to read them, we lost out on being able to establish trust because something reads "mv.k12.mn.us" (or preferably us.mn.k12.mv) which is two characters SHORTER than mvpschools.org!
- mod50ack 10mo ago
  My old school district moved from a localized URL of this kind to a .org a number of years ago (in the early 2010s). It seems to just have become the style, but I never really got it. I'm sure there was a significant cost to migrating what was a perfectly working setup to a whole new domain for website and email!
retrac 10mo ago
www.gov.mb.ca www.gov.nb.ca www.gov.pe.ca www.gov.ns.ca www.gov.ab.ca www.gov.bc.ca www.gov.on.ca www.gov.nf.ca www.gov.yt.ca www.gov.nt.ca www.gov.nu.ca Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sites under .gov.sk.ca and .gouv.qc.ca (comme de juste).

kraptv 10mo ago

I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality domains and they are wonderful. I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the weird hoops to get this new domain registered. I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit. A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling nostalgic and motivated to register your own: [1] https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/ https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/ [2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

johnplatte 10mo ago

.su is available for registration, I'm not sure what the "in a limited way" is about. In Russia it's used to communicate old-schoolness, approximately.

lxgr 10mo ago
It definitely is. In Germany, somebody was selling fraudulent public transit e-tickets on an .su domain for a while last year. Not sure who the “.su” was supposed to appeal to, but they were slightly cheaper than officially licensed ones, which probably helped more than the TLD :)
ndiddy 10mo ago
Outside Russia it’s limited to renewals of existing domains due to sanctions. I believe ICANN is trying to eliminate the domain entirely due to it being obsolete, although I don’t know if a formal timeframe has been established for that yet.
6031769 10mo ago
Outside Russia it's used to communicate spamming scumbaggery and is almost universally blackholed.

rasengan 10mo ago

Some IRC networks still use naming as such like "server.state.country.dal.net."

morcus 10mo ago

> Technically speaking, the top of the DNS tree, the DNS root, is a null label referenced by a trailing dot. It's analogous to the '/' at the beginning of POSIX file paths. "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." to make it absolute rather than relative I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs. Neat!

lxgr 10mo ago
Presumably they just split the “domain” part out of the URL on // and the first / and feed that into getaddrinfo, with the OS and DNS doing the rest? But I agree, it’s definitely neat :)
philsnow 10mo ago
Some browsers (and web servers, proxies, and other things) treat "example.com" and "example.com." differently for various things, like the default limit of per-domain parallel connections. See for instance https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-dot/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-...
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye 10mo ago
They need to, as when the "." is not present, your search domains are used, but they are not used when the trailing "." is present. For example, if you enter "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com", and your search domains contain one item called "mycompany.tld", then the browser will first query DNS servers for "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.", and when an NXDOMAIN is returned, they will try "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.mycompany.tld." next. If you type "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com." in the browser directly, only the first query is attempted.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
  what's search domain?
  - adastra22 10mo ago
    The comment explains it.

dependency_2x 10mo ago

My school didn't have a domain name or even an email address, or even an internet connection. I think it had 1 or 2 BBC Micros though. I remember playing a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Funny how memory works - I assumed I'd remember nothing as so long ago, but remember sitting in the room playing that game now, can't remember why I could though (why I had free access).

kbbgl87 10mo ago
> a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Scortched Earth?
- rkomorn 10mo ago
  Or one of its predecessors, Tanx.
  - adzm 10mo ago
    Based on the age of the bbc micro, no way it was scorched earth, tanx seems likely (I think it was 3d tanx? I have a vague memory of seeing this in a vintage collection)
- phatskat 10mo ago
  Scorched Earth was such a fun game! Many hours were lost at our small home LAN parties playing SE and Quake/2/3
navigate8310 10mo ago
Are you talking about Pocket Tanks?

stephen_g 10mo ago

It did always make me really annoyed they didn’t deprecate .gov, .edu and .mil and transition to moving those under .us (as .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us). Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.

Scoundreller 10mo ago
I wonder if some anti-“west” military alliances are eligible to get their own .int just like nato.int
- Symbiote 10mo ago
  There's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.int_domain_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.in... I don't see why a non-western military alliance wouldn't be eligible, so long as the meet the criteria — treaty registered with the UN etc.
  - ViscountPenguin 10mo ago
    Even if they dejure meet the requirements, I suspect that IANA would be under heavy political pressure to deny the claim.
    - walletdrainer 10mo ago
      I suspect that exactly no-one cares about .int domains
- dragonwriter 10mo ago
  They would, but even orgs that have historically had .int domains tend to move off them to either their own TLD (like CERN moving to .cern) or to other gTLDs (like the Commonwealth of Nations from commonwealth.int to commonwealth.org.) Ironically, NATO was using .nato briefly in 1990 before moving to .nato.int So, CSTO using csto.org rather than csto.int is probably just keeping up with the times, not failing to get an .int

beezle 10mo ago

I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp still ruled!

montag 10mo ago

I didn’t realize how far these had fallen out of fashion. I maintained http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us for a time, and it was so hard to remember that domain (scarcely easier than an IP address) until I tried to understand it. It’s now kennedy.crschools.us.

easton 10mo ago
My high school is still at www-bths.stjohns.k12.fl.us, and if it wasn’t embedded in my fingertips from working IT there I’d have no idea how anyone is supposed to remember it.
EvanAnderson 10mo ago
I did sysadmin work for both a .k12.oh.us and a co.countyname.oh.us. Users at both hated the suffix on email addresses. The hierarchy appeals to the nerd in me but I understand the difficulty people had trying to communicate the addresses to others. (Both now use a .com and .gov domain, respectively...)

notherhack 10mo ago

Cloudflare refuses to accept most locality based domains as delegated because they aren’t listed in the Public Suffix List[1]. So for example you can’t use Cloudflare DNS or get a TLS cert for it from them. Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List

endgame 10mo ago

Absolutely fascinating history. I thought I knew DNS fairly well and I had no idea that locality-based domains were even a thing. Ah, what happened to the site design? It used to have a lovely background and monospace text.

namegulf 10mo ago

Many US cities use .us for their official web pages eg: www.ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us

aftbit 10mo ago

Wow yes, I also remember my high school's k12 domain name! What an interesting trip down memory lane; wonderful, like most of computer.rip! Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?

toast0 10mo ago
> Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so? I don't think so. Godaddy won't delegate new third level domains, and I don't think the second level (states) were ever delegated?? But if you can find a city.ca.us that is delegated and that person/organization is willing to register a new name, you could maybe do that.

musicale 10mo ago

> "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." https://www.gatech.edu./ https://www.gatech.edu./ does seem to work for me. It is interesting that URLs often contain two hierarchies in opposite directions: https://something.myorg.org/something/more/specific/ https://something.myorg.org/something/more/specific/

dhosek 10mo ago
Indeed, back in the 90s I remember trying to decide whether to do foo.bar.com or bar.com/foo for various subsites of my main domain back then.
- jooize 10mo ago
  What is your conclusion?
  - dhosek 10mo ago
    It’s thirty years later, so things have changed, but now I would be inclined to only use a different subdomain if it required a different server.
basch 10mo ago
its not really two hierarchies, its just one written backwards for a while, and then forward. if you reverse the backwards part you get https://org.myorg.something./something/more/specific/ https://org.myorg.something./something/more/specific/ the dots separate computers or networks and the slashes separate folders.
- bandie91 10mo ago
  well, more pedantically: https://.org.myorg.something/something/more/specific/ you need the null-label on the left instead of the right.
kccqzy 10mo ago
Yeah of course adding the extra dot will work. The dot at the end simply means do not try to append the local search domain. Interestingly bad “security” software will often block domains without the trailing dot but permit the one with the trailing dot. The problem of having two hierarchies in opposite directions means that it is advantageous to store it while reversing one of the hierarchies. I think the earliest Google Search backend used a format like org.myorg.something/something internally. This representation worked great for key-value storage systems where the keys are sorted.

joecool1029 10mo ago

bergen might have dropped the ball but hunterdon’s still works and is in full use: https://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/ https://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/ Library ditched it for hclibrary.us though. Used to be able to telnet to the catalog at pac.hunterdon.lib.nj.us

AnnikaL 10mo ago

The notion that community colleges can't use .edu no longer seems true. When I took community college classes, I got an @my.smccd.edu email address.

toast0 10mo ago
The rules changed several times. My community college was occ.cccd.edu when I attended, where cccd.edu was the community college district, and they had registered their domain in 1993, but now the individual colleges have their own domain names, registered in 2002, 2004 and 2007. But there definitely was a time where only 4 year schools and museums were getting new .edus

phongn 10mo ago

I grew up with *.pinellas.k12.fl.us and that domain remains seared into my memory.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

terrywang 10mo ago

The good old Internet was "del.icio.us".

asacrowflies 10mo ago
Isn't that an old porn site lol

paduc 10mo ago

If you want to create a subdomain, you need DNS delegation (authorization) from the owner/manager of the domain. So if you want to register xyz.ci.pemberton.nj.us, you need to ask for DNS delegation from the owner/manager of ci.pemberton.nj.us or a higher level. It's a lot easier to buy the xyz-ci-pemberton-nj.us domain.

dghf 10mo ago

> ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes of each country, and are intended for use by those countries, while gTLDs are arbitrary and reflect the fact that DNS was designed in the US. The ".gov" gTLD, for example, is for use by the US government, while the UK is stuck with ".gov.uk". Fun fact, the UK's ISO country code is not actually "uk", but "gb". IIRC, ".uk" was grandfathered in (from JANET?) as an exception: ".gb" officially existed for a while in parallel, but no one ever used it and I think it's now defunct.

jdofaz 10mo ago

I had one but the "Delegated Manager" was a local dsl isp that went out of business and I lost the ability to update the name servers for it

kidmin 10mo ago

Some minor/trivial corrections: - gTLD stands for "generic TLD"[1], not a short form of global, comes from their "generic" usage. Both two categories of TLDs are in the domain namespace which is globally resolvable. - Almost all of two-letter ASCII ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes, from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, but there are a few exceptions: the United Kingdom (GB) has ".uk"[2], Ascension Island (now part of SH) has ".ac", etc. (Yes, there are more non-ASCII ccTLDs: .新加坡, .УКР, etc.) If you want to briefly take a look at how TLD registries structure their second/third level such as "k12.or.us" or "chiyoda.tokyo.jp", see "ICANN DOMAINS" section of the public suffix list[3] (note: it is not complete) [1] https://icannwiki.org/Generic_Top-level_Domain https://icannwiki.org/Generic_Top-level_Domain [2] https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/15/is-it-time-to-retire-the-gb-top-level-domain/ https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/15/is-it-time-to-retire-the... [3] https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/