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The way it worked is that someone nominally representing the CA State Government had* ca.us, and they in turn gave* san-jose to someone who nominally represente
by strenholme 1mo ago
The way it worked is that someone nominally representing the CA State Government had* ca.us, and they in turn gave* san-jose to someone who nominally represented San Jose, los-angeles to someone who nominally represented Los Angeles, santa-cruz to someone who nominally represented Santa Cruz, and so on. city-name.ca.us domains were still free (and charging for .com and .org domains was a new thing at the time); you would look in the zone file to see who owned* a given domain, email them with your nameserver names and IP, and they would add it to their zone.
This isn’t how things are done these days; names visible to the public are pretty much always in the form {domain}.{tld} or sometimes {name}.{domain}.{tld} (e.g. my own https://samboy.github.io https://samboy.github.io). Registration is now done by bots and companies that spam you to death to try and get more money from you (the Internet wasn’t like that in the beach.santa-cruz.ca.us days). Domain names with multiple levels of delegation aren’t around they way they used to be.
* rented/leased/had control over/whatever
- greyface- 1mo ago> This isn’t how things are done these days The old locality domains still exist, and in many localities you can still register them today by the same "email a request to some sysadmin" process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122635 Your beach.santa-cruz.ca.us domain is still in DNS, just with a broken delegation chain. You could reclaim it right now by setting up a nameserver at reality.samiam.org.
- strenholme 1mo agoI’m amazed beach.santa-cruz.ca.us is still around. I’ve given it some SSL certs and have reclaimed it: https://beach.santa-cruz.ca.us/ https://beach.santa-cruz.ca.us/ Thanks for checking the zone files of the parent domain to verify it’s still there.
- ndom91 1mo agoWait what haha. Do you also own samiam.org?
- notpushkin 1mo agoJudging by his username (strenholme) and the contents of https://samiam.org/ https://samiam.org/ (Sam Trenholme's webpage), he does indeed!