.us Domains Coming in 2002

marnanel writes "Perhaps it had to happen eventually: the .us top-level domain has been transferred to a private company, NeuStar. One of the most interesting effects of this is that second-level domains, such as foo.us, will be available for the first time, instead of the existing hierarchical county.state.us system." But not until mid 2002.

Comments

The obvious---

[HerrNewton]

AllYourBaseAreBelongTo.us

Re:The obvious---

[Anonymous Coward]

whatyo.us/ay?
somebodyset.us/upthe/bomb
forgreatj.us/tice

Re:The obvious---

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's wrong.. it's Somebody set up us the bomb, not Somebody set us up the bomb.

Re:The obvious---

[Anonymous Coward]

abig.org/y

Re:The obvious---

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf? how can the first post be redundant? am i missing something here?

/.us

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, I can get just.try.to.slashdot.us

Re:/.us

[Guillaume Ross]

That would be just.try.to.slash.us

Finally

[nyxxie]

I really want "http://all.your.base.are.belong.to.us" as my HP :)))))

Re:Finally

[quigonn]

I prefer http://synflood.at/tack/ :)) (yes, _I_ reserved the domain synflood.at already).

Re:finally

[Retarded_One]

Quiet, you fucking foriegner.

Re:finally

[nafmo]

Yeah, and reserve .gov for the future world governement, and .mil for the global military that will defend us from evil Borgs...

Re:finally

[Anonymous Coward]

We invented it. Go use your own DNS system if you don't like it.

Re:finally

[easter1916]

Will the TLD .zog become available at the same time?

Re:finally

[erikdalen]

It doesn't matter who invented it. It's still badly organized and that's a fact.

/Erik

Re:Finally

[kiwipeso]

how about http://fuck.us or http://dont.fuck.with.us

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

how does this get modded up as funny when it's the second person to post this? Yet the person who got the first post making the same joke gets modded to -1 redundant... that guy was screwed

Re:finally

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what keeps you up at night? The world has worse problems than a cluttered network namespace, you know.

Re:Finally

[altair1]

these "all your base" jokes are really really old. i dont know how they get modded up anymore, this was not funny at all...

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice. Move out of your parent's house yet, kid?

For those of us who played the original, and played many other rushed/cheap ports of Japanese games, the joke isn't just a "fad" that came and went - it's a humorous reminder of the years when those games weren't rare, but commonplace. This is why the joke has "legs" and keeps coming up.

But, hey, whatever floats your boat. Like that X-Box, right? Mmmm, mmm, Microsoftilicious!

Re:Finally

[FFFish]

The only domain worth having would be www.fuck.us!!

Unfortunately, it won't be put to any good use. Some waste of sperm will toss up a porno clusterfuck page, with unending pop-up windows when you try to close it. I'd rather see it used for something amusing.

Re:Finally

[darkonc]

nonetheless, it would be wonderful to control the 'to.us' domain...

• come.to.us
• complain.to.us
• give.your.money.to.us

kinda like if you remember when NSI wouldn't let people register domains with swears in them... (like the "f" word), so someone registered .off.com.....

I'm just wondering what lucky porn site is gonna get fuck.us

Now, why not get rid of the silly .com anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally never agreed with a "commercial" root dn. However, times have changed, and the commercial net is here to stay.

BFD.

[supabeast!]

Now I can watch companies sue everyone in sight over ownership of .us domains, too! Whee!

On the upside for NeuStar, they are sure to make a fortune from all the companies sick of getting into lawsuits over this sort of thing and buy thier .us domains right away. May I pet your Ferraris?

first asshole

[GaylordFucker]

i fucking hate women, they break your heart... love is shit... sex is shit... relationships is shit... don't get a girlfriend, that's like asking to be whipped... fuck em all

Re:first asshole

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

Dude, you should know by now that most most of them DON'T like anal!

- I throw rocks at retarded kids

Re:first asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

I *love* hate-fucking women, though!

Suck my dick, you dirty whore!
*smack* take it up the ass, bitch, or I'll choke you good!

Re:first asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

What you need is a good man.

Re:first asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

Right on!

That is the best advice so far in this thread.

Re:first asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

I always knew that Slashdot was full of faggots. You all should DIE!!!!!

Re:first asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

How about an email address at ...

[Sparr0]

spam.us
or
sue.us

Re:How about an email address at ...

[DivineOb]

or peen.us

great

[Anonymous Coward]

they can screw up .biz and .info ...

.us is just more gas for the fire

us domain jokes

[gandalf_grey]

1.2.3.us

.org.us

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be nice to start a non-profit company, register .org.us, and let other non-profit organizations register domains on it really cheap.

Re:.org.us

[Anonymous Coward]

Go on then.

Re:.org.us

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have the time to manage something like that.

Re:.org.us

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not. We all have to make money somehow. It is something called CAPTALISM. And it is a good thing, not a bad thing like this site like to tell you.

COME TO DADDY

[GaylordFucker]

i love the Aphex Twin... i hope those stupid fucks who were gonna plan another Columbine in Massachusetts get executed... but unfortunately, thanks to all the stupid liberals in this country, we cannot do cruel and unusual punishment anymore to criminals... liberals are seagulls, they squawk, eat shit and are nursed by the government

Re:COME TO DADDY

[Guns n' Roses Troll]

I just picked up the Donkey Rhubarb CD a few days ago. Neat packaging. The songs aren't very good but it filled a hole in my collection. I still think Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is his best, although the Polygon Window releases were up there too.

.edu and .gov

[jeriqo]

What will happen to these TLDs: .EDU and .GOV ?
Since they are only used by the US governement and US schools, i think they should be moved to .EDU.US and .GOV.US

Just my thoughts..

-J

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Look Bub, the United States invented the Internet and the DNS system. .edu, .gov, .mil, etc. are all for US based interests. So sod off. You're just jealous that some Urope0n country didn't invent it.

Re:.edu and .gov

[eric6]

perhaps .gov is used only by government institutions, but .edu is not used only by governments schools. private universities (like mine, NYU) use .edu also (nyu.edu).

also, in the name of simplicity i think we should keep things as they are: established and shorter than the proposed change.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Ark42]

and .mil ? ...

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe invented America, so I don't want to hear any more noise from the colonies. Shut up and keep bringing us our cotton, tobacco and oil.

Re:.edu and .gov

[erikdalen]

yes, and look what a mess the DNS system is!

Re:.edu and .gov

[Krapangor]

Hahaha.
While the US DID invent .mil .gov .edu etc.
Europe DID invent latin and greek letters.
Without us you would have to write your domains in babylonian, hebrew or chinese letters.
BTW, we hold all copyrights for the latin and greek alphabet, so start rolling the money over or stop using our IP !

Re:.edu and .gov

[imrdkl]

I would like to wash the feet of the parent post.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

We only use the latin derived languages because the European's killed all the native americans and thus their languages

Re:.edu and .gov

[nafmo]

Since they are only used by the US governement and US schools

There is at least one non-US .edu domain: mm.edu. .gov is quite US-only, though.

But it's strange that this happens now, when most other national top-domain has lost their "national" feeling, with USians controlling domains like .nu where a lot of Swedish companies (and even branches of the government) have sites (since "nu" means "now" in Swedish).

Oh, well, perhaps we'll see non-US domains under .us? That would be the perfect retribution...

Re:.edu and .gov

[nomadic]

Why? I'm usually the least jingoistic American in the room, but it WAS invented here, and it was intended to be a US-centric network. Should the US really be penalized for being generous enough to let everyone else onto it?

Plus, non-US organizations are free to use the non-country specific TLDs. Check out london.edu, nokia.com, or un.org.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

As an American, I was amused by this rude, obnoxious comment. Sir, I salute you.

Re:.edu and .gov

[FiendBeast]

I think that the good people at CERN would disagree with that statement. Also, generosity had very little to do with allowing others access to the internet, it was mopre like $$$.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, but we banished those bastards to the collonies.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it has nothing to do with money, it was about research. There was very little money involved until the web was created, by someone at cern. I'll assume that you are just confusing the internet and http, because cern had nothing to do with the early internet.

Re:.edu and .gov

[1alpha7]

I think that the good people at CERN would disagree with that statement.

You're thinking of Tim's development of the Web. The Interent and the Web are not synonymous.

1Alpha7

Re:.edu and .gov

[nomadic]

Flamebait? Yes, I don't believe in what I said, I just said it to provoke argument. Sure. That was sarcasm, in case the braindead cretin who modded it down was as clueless in reading this post.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Plisken]

Eurotrash women are fucking ugly

Re:.edu and .gov

[veltyen]

It always intrigued me that the only truly international government is the US. It must be true, there is no whitehouse.gov.us, just whitehouse.gov.

As for what should happen? The .EDU domain should only be used by truly international educational institutions. Which means for those
world series loving Americans, more then one country.

.GOV should only be used by the true international world government.

That leaves the only valid .gov site as illuminati.vatican.gov

Veltyen

Re:.edu and .gov

[Megs]

"private universities (like mine, NYU) use .edu also"

Yeah, but if NYU weren't an accredited university, I don't suppose you and I would be here, now would we?

Point is, anyone can eschew their national country code and register .com and its brethren, but .gov is only for the US gov't and .edu is only for US accredited post-secondary institutions. It doesn't sit too well with those of us who like to think of the internet as transcending the nation-state and all that.

Meghan

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

says the one living in the country littered with trailerparks.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

.GOV should only be used by the true international world government.

wto.gov

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

We only use the latin derived languages because the European's...

Obviously you don't use them very well. Where did you learn grammar?

HINT: apostrophes are for possessives
(TRANSLATION: apostrophe's are for possessive's)

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect spelling AND politeness!? Are you sure you're from the USA?

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but surely the Vatican should have their own country-level domain, if they don't already.

imthefuckingpopeiam@vatican.vt

Re:.edu and .gov

[mgv]

Well, the US military is clearly planet wide in scope, so I don't see a problem with a TLD here.

Maybe China might get upset, but really who else is going to host a website covering what parts of the world are worth invading? Examples such a the British invasion of the Faulkland islands or even Indonesia little invasion of East Timor really wouldn't warrant a TLD, and really belong in a subdomain such as enemies.mi.uk, for example.

With terroists.location.mil its pretty clear we are talking about Afganistan.

Michael

Michael

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

The following countries would be upset:

http://www.state.gov/www/regions/independent_sta te s.html

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Might as well cite Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots here.

Re:.edu and .gov

[thogard]

someone used to have an email address of the form
xy@va

It was quite valid and the shortest FQ email addres I've seen.

Re:.edu and .gov

[NerdForChrist]

Well, since the internet is owned by the US govt, they have every right to have it the way it is. Right?

Re:.edu and .gov

[BrianH]

The last time I looked .edu was open to any accredited school issuing a 4 year degree. There was no requirement that the school be in the U.S.

Re:.edu and .gov

[operagost]

Your post is pretty much one big mass of misinformation, as:

- .edu is used by several universities outside of the US, such as oxford.edu (which is a redirect)
- The moniker "World Series" is at least technically accurate. Ever heard of the Montreal Expos and the Toronto Blue Jays?

BTW, good luck on that cute stab at the Holy See. I tried to make a little joke about Chi Rho and Windows XP and got a nice troll -1 from an apparently humor impaired moderator.

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

Not whitehouse.com?

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't you know that the US government is responsible for more than the .us domain... Aren't they the unofficial undemocratically elected rulers of the world ? Why else would they have military forces in so many countries e.g Japan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Germany, Australia....

Re:.edu and .gov

[funky womble]

Unseen University has an .edu, and it's not even on the planet :)

Re:.edu and .gov

[Anonymous Coward]

.org is meant to be for non-profit... so, surely wto shouldn't have anything to do with that!

Anyway, it should be .int for international organisations. (Like eu.int, f'rexample).

Thank God!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we can start charging money for these domains.. woop! I had lost hope in our capitalist system that we were still giving domains away for free.

Will

[Anonymous Coward]

John Katz show up in my driveway like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas if I registar Slashdot.us?

Re:Will

[Anonymous Coward]

No! But he might install a hidden camera in your toilet!

US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone noticed that the .us TLD is now using (A|B|C).GTLD.BIZ for its root nameservers?

In other words, if you don't accept the ICANN version of .BIZ, then you might not be able to resolve stuff in .US. Very interesting.

Re:US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. Resolvers are almost always set to use a known list of IP addresses - otherwise you have a bootstrap problem :) So whether you're using some "alternate DNS root" servers or not is irrelevant. This is only a problem if you're one of those strident .biz protesters and wipe out the .biz server(s) from your cache listing.

Re:US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

That's my point... some people are.

From http://www.opennic.unrated.net/:

The OpenNIC membership overwhelmingly (80%) voted to not include ICANN's .biz collider in our root.

I assume that means people using their root won't be able to descend into .us space due to this. Big deal you say, well, I work for an outfit in .us space and use them as my primaries. I have backup connectivity and redundant routing, but this latest turn of events just exposed a common path. Now I have to add ANOTHER primary that doesn't sit behind that setup. Blah.

BTW, I think the whole concept of "my root vs. your root" is flawed, and that the root should be totally up for grabs and let capitalism take effect. You know, define the "foo" TLD to be rooted in dom1.com and dom2.net, so when you go to http://www.foo, you're really going to http://www.foo.dom1.com/ or whatever. This could probably be done with some nsswitch magic, and leaves it up to the clients. Hooray!

Re:US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD

[Zebaulon]

Well, not necessarily. You should be able to edit your root zone file (the one that BIND uses as the "." zone) and do something like this:

A.GTLD.BIZ. A 209.173.53.162
B.GTLD.BIZ. A 209.173.57.162
C.GTLD.BIZ. A 209.173.60.65

That way, whenever BIND finds that those are the nameservers for .us - and then goes to resolve those - even though you don't accept ICANN's .biz, you still have glue records for those servers. Of course, that will interfere with any "a.gtld.biz" etc. records that whatever .biz you use has. If that's an issue (and I doubt it is) you can probably do a number like this in the same file:

US. NS A.USDNS.FUZZY.
US. NS B.USDNS.FUZZY.
US. NS C.USDNS.FUZZY.
US. NS D.USDNS.FUZZY.
A.USDNS.FUZZY. A 209.173.53.162
B.USDNS.FUZZY. A 209.173.57.162
C.USDNS.FUZZY. A 209.173.60.65

At that point, you'd interfere with any other existing USDNS.FUZZY out there, but I don't know of any .fuzzy registrars. :) And for most people, the first idea won't be a problem anyway.

As far as I know, those two methods should work. :)

Uggh.

[KWSN-MajorKong]

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Re:Uggh.

[KWSN-MajorKong]

Well, since it seems that a moderator has misunderstood my above comment and declared it off-topic, allow me to revise and extend my remarks for the purpose of showing why it is not offtopic. My statement "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi" refered to my disgust at the 'commercialization' of yet another domain. The latin phrase translates literally as 'Thus passes the glory of the world', but a more modern idiom would be 'Things have gone to hell in a handbasket'.

I have been involved with computers in one fashion or another now for almost 3 decades (since '73), and I watched the rise of the Internet with a great deal of interest. However, lately, I have watched the beginnings of it's fall. Business interests are doing their best to change what once was a medium for the free exchange of ideas into just another revenue stream for themselves.

So, I apologize if my previous attempt at a clear and concise expression of my disgust over the current trend of commercialization of the internet was misunderstood. It was my first post to this forum, although I am a regular reader. Next time I post on a topic, I will attempt to have more clairity in my wording.

You folks have a nice day!

Just what we need

[ajuda]

Yet another domain to remember. We've got .info, .biz and now .us all in the past year. Now tell me again how we're better off.

All these domains do is make things more complicated for those of us who have to remember all these web addresses and more expensive for companies trying to protect their trademarks in cyberspace. Maybe we should REDUCE the number of domains... From now on let's just just .gov, .com and .edu. Enough already!!!

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe .us is new to you if you've never heard of the country code tlds, but most of us have been using them for several years now. They're just changing the subdomain registrar for .us.

Re:Just what we need

[ajuda]

But the .us country code didn't use to allow coke.us and things like that... it used to be that only geographical type names could be had like bob.boston.ma.us or something

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we need more TLD's (and TLA's!), not fewer.

And we need control of these TLD's spread over a larger number of companies, so there will be competition between them.

And we need as many as possible of these TLD's to be first-come, first serve TLD's, free of copyright and trademark concerns. For starters, we could use a .alt, like the Usenet groups, open for anyone for any purpose whatsoever.

If corps want to protect their trademarks, they already have .com, but give them .corp, .inc, .llc, .ltd, .gmbh, or whatever else floats their boat, exclusively for corporate use.

If you can't remember all these TLD's, then tough. Natural competion will sort out which TLD's are useful and which are not. Google will find them for us, regardless.

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, then we can knock off .mil and .org, I'm certain the military, and a large number of nonprofit organizations will appreciate that.

Re:Just what we need

[sn00ker]

But the .us country code didn't use to allow coke.us and things like that... it used to be that only geographical type names could be had like bob.boston.ma.us or something

So force the powers-that-be to treat .us like every other ccTLD, with a secondary domain required as well. Then you would be just like everyone else, and it wouldn't be an issue.

The whole non-ccTLD thing was a monumental fuckup, let's face it, with its only upside being convenience. We now have uppity Yank companies who refuse to do business with anyone who doesn't have a .com domain, because they refuse to acknowledge the validity of ccTLD formats - I won't go into the whole issue of American insularity that this brings to the fore.

Re:Just what we need

[jester]

You're missing the point ... in the real world, each country has had their own domain since year . ... so we have .uk, .es, .de etc etc. Why the f*ck do u yanks think you have the divine right to not have one for your country, and can just clog up the .com/.net domains.

Re:Just what we need

[drsquare]

Because Americans are ashamed of their nationality.

I got "r" and "are"

[imrdkl]

Therefore, toys, hats, belts, boots, and any other damn thing that'll make me a buck.

Squatters.r.us

Re:I got "r" and "are"

[wadetemp]

That leads to a question I've been having. I thought single and two letter domain names were out of the question. For example, I wanted w.net, but no registrar I could find would allow it. So I went though all the domains, and noticed that only z.com seems to be a functioning website (redirects to Nissan's website.) What's the story on these? How did Nissan get z.com? And why can't I do the same with w? It seems like quite the opportunity.

Re:I got "r" and "are"

[ncc74656]

So I went though all the domains, and noticed that only z.com seems to be a functioning website (redirects to Nissan's website.)

x.com goes to PayPal and q.com goes to Qwest.

Since you also mentioned two-letter domain names in your post as being verboten, what about Hewlett-Packard or Texas Instruments? (You need the "www." in front of them, though, to access their websites. General Motors, OTOH, works without the "www.")

Re:I got "r" and "are"

[wadetemp]

Huh, you are right. I was just blindly typing the addresses in so maybe I didn't wait long enough on x or q.

But really, a while back when I was trying to get a domain name every registrar I went to would NOT let me sign up for a 1 or 2 letter name. I agree that they are in existance, but how did these happen? Which registrar do I need to go to? :)

Re:I got "r" and "are"

[NevDull]

x.com goes to paypal because there used to be an "internet bank" which went by the name x.com which provided checking accounts, debit cards, and had some mutual funds. They bought PayPal and then stopped their x.com banking crap.

Q is Qwest's ticker symbol. I'd assume that TI and GM are their symbols as well, though HP's is HWP, so...

OK, so there wasn't *really* a point.

:)

Other domain suggestions:

[A_Non_Moose]

serverkiller.slashdot.us for those that want to testt there websites.

or

theshortb.us for archival of all score 1 posts.

and

RIAA.us, MPAA.us and FUCK.us, because after all they are 4-letter words meaning the same thing, right?
(I suppose that TLD in this case would mean Top Level Dicks...but I digress....)

Whatever.us?

[Codeala]

Are they going to allow any type of "second-level" domain name? ".us" is commonly known as a country for the rest of the world, and is quite common outside of us (eg bbc.co.uk). Many countries also has fixed numbers of second-level domains, eg com.au, net.uk, org.ca Will that be the case here?

If not who will get screw.us? A p0rn site or another "name your price" e-tailer site?? ;-)

Re:Whatever.us?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you new to the internet?

Re:Whatever.us?

[mgv]

The UK tended to use 2 letter domains, and in fact sometimes quite a bit more than expected:

Oxford university is www.ox.ac.uk

(ac = academic).

I don't know why, and I think that they gave in with .org and .net (beats .og.uk !)

Although as a country they do seem to like short sharp categorisations for most things.

MIchael

Re:Whatever.us?

[funky womble]

We've had ac as part of domain names since before some clever person decided to adopt the bizarre USian way of writing them the wrong way round. It took years to try and change the memory imprints for ic.doc and hensa.micros...

I think we're just going for pronouncable domain names. (Well, for the most part). ac.uk, co.uk, org.uk, net.uk, police.uk, gov.uk, nic.uk, parliament.uk, mod.uk, though there are the remnants of govt.uk and orgn.uk still hanging around. And we've got the nearly very sensible .ltd.uk and .plc.uk which only registered companies are allowed to use, but it never really worked because they have to follow the exact spelling of the registered name, which are often a bit stupid, unless chosen with this use in mind. bl.uk, icnet.uk, nel.uk. And mullermartini.uk, whatever exactly that is..

But, by quite a long way, I think the prize for the funkiest of them all has got to go to jet.uk, fantastic!

Some ideas...

[BoarderPhreak]

There is no justice. It's just.us.

long.live.the.us
you.missed.the.b.us
time.to.disc.us/s
come.to.us
visit.us
screw.us
i.hate.the.us

Okay, that's enough...

so..

[RainbowSix]

porn sites are going to spam me with www.screw.us?

Re:so..

[suss]

porn sites are going to spam me with www.screw.us?

So? Spam them back as www.screw.eu!

Re:so..

[warpeightbot]

I'm just dreading all the spam I'm going to get as a *former* domain holder about "RESERVE YOUR HOT NEW .US DOMAIN NOW!!!!!"... I get enough bullshit about .biz and such like already....

<sigh>

--
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
-- H. L. Mencken

not a smart thing to do to begin with

[GaylordFucker]

the fact that .us was a government owned TLD, think about it... you really think that they won't care if someone buys fuckthe.us? or something like blowupthe.us? trust me... they're not gonna let it slip by like it's nothing...

"Funny" domains coming up...

[RPoet]

http://all.your.base.are.belong.to.us
http://toys.are.us

Any other funny URL predictions?

Re:"Funny" domains coming up...

[DivineOb]

How about... this joke was already posted before you posted it.us

Re:"Funny" domains coming up...

[FaasNat]

Actually, wouldn't it be

http://toys.r.us ?

I would make it a backwards 'R,' but my keyboard got stuck.

.asm

[lowtekneq]

im still waiting for .asm so i can own http://www.org.asm. But as for .us i wonder how many people will get anti-american sites, www.taliban.says.fsck.you.us/ or www.bomb.the.us/. And what kind of action would be taken against the owner(s).

These domain names were just brain farts, i do not support acts of terrorism.

Re:.asm

[Anonymous Coward]

support acts of terrorism

Your post has been noted by the Office of Homeland Defence. Please stay where you are, we'll come pick you up. Thank you.

Re:.asm

[chregu]

Why wait for .asm, when you already can have .sm.
Get http://www.orga.sm quick. It's still available.

Competition for AskJeeves?

[BoarderPhreak]

Look out, here comes "ask.us!"

.us domain:

[Jucius Maximus]

http://slashdot.us

Re:.us domain:

[sward]

http://slashdot.us should be the domain used for site owners to submit their links.

JTFTR

[Anonymous Coward]

Just Trolling For Teryl Rothery

damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to hear that your relationships turned into shit. That's a real bummer.

Maybe if you took a shower and try to have a less forcefull and immature personality, chicks tend to dig nice guys belive it or not.

The only other advice I could give you is to pump your arm faster and your sexlife might improve.

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why you're posting on /. instead of fucking your girlfriend, right mr. niceguy?

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

just in case anyone was wondering, I shall quote a definition from the Womens Dictionary:

nice guy = big paycheck

Re:damn

[GaylordFucker]

i hate anonymous cowards... but you're an exception, thanks mr. beat the truth out of mr. nice guy

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. Open your eyes. It's a chick who digs trolls. Go talk to her!

Re:Other domain suggestions:..oops

[A_Non_Moose]

testt? testy? testes....heh, corrected my typo only to make it again...sigh.

dang, should have been (less than symbol) 1 posts.....

Looks like I'll be the owner of the shortb.us domain... :\ ... for that one.

spieslike.us,....

[Blaede]

comewith.us, magicb.us, dontfuckwith.us

finally

[erikdalen]

Finally USA gets a top domain like all the other countries have. It might bring some order to the chaos.

Now if only .gov and .mil could be transferred to .gov.us and .mil.us it would almost be a perfect world :)

/Erik

hahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha.. hilarious!

Weird

[Cally]

I could have sworn I'd seen .co.us URIs before this?
Hmmm, obviously I know less about the history of the DNS than I thought I did :) (Which reminds me: aren;t NeuLevel the people responsible for trying to fork the DNS root (ie., break the DNS) by issuing domain names in non-ICANN approved, and in the case of .biz, conflicting TLDs?

Everytime this comes up on nanog, I tend to glaze over. I should pay more attention, I know...

Re:Weird

[FiendBeast]

You probably saw .co.uk because AFAIK there is nothing that ends in simply .uk, ie we have .co.uk, .org.uk , .sch.uk. Someone earlier said that there may be a limited number of second-level domains.

Dibs!

[goatman.cx]

I get dibs on Fuck.us, that's going to be a fucking cash cow domain for a porn site.

umm

[Anonymous Coward]

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

that pretty much says it all.

Open to Afghans?

[Knunov]

If so:

please.stop.bombing.us

(will it be Funny or Flamebait?)

Knunov

Re:Open to Afghans?

[Cheetah86]

Nope, according to the linkage from the article, the party registering needs to be in the US, whether person, corporate, non-profit or government. So, no, its not open to other countries.

Re:Open to Afghans?

[TomK32]

I guess flamebait, anyways dot-us aren't open for Afghans (or any other non-US citizen) otherway I'd like to order you.shall.not.mess.with.us

Re:Open to Afghans?

[iocc]

dont.nuke.us :)

Re:Open to Afghans?

[imrdkl]

Your desired domain name: Nuke is reserved.

Please try a different name, or press Here for help.

Re:Open to Afghans?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about (-1 Overrated)...

*.co.us isn't what you think it is...

[Svartalf]

That would be stuff in the state of Colorado in the current, soon to be extant, scheme of DNS entries in the .us domain.

Cumming soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fuck.us
http://lick.us
http://pee.on.us
http://get.your.perv.on.with.us

Re:Cumming soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bomb.us

Is this really that important?

[yobbo]

Most american companies use .com as their site. When you look at a web address, you look for the .au, the .uk, or other country code at the end. And if you don't see it, it's human nature to assume it's an american site.

Re:Is this really that important?

[nafmo]

Unfortunately, .com and friends is much too polluted to be able to make that distinction. But then again, so are most the national domains as well, so I don't really see why this would be any better.

Perhaps we should just scrap the current DNS system and create a new domain structure from scratch? That would be something...

Re:Is this really that important?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, another American who assumes they are the centre of the universe.

Full list of domains

[Anonymous Coward]

Country domains

I wonder when we'll see http://goatse.va ?

Re:Full list of domains

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder when we'll see http://goatse.va ?

+5, Funny as hell

Wow.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Not only will the last orthodox free registrar be gone forever, but we'll have 20 million all.your.bases.belong.to.us variants.

Then again, because certain municipalities were delegated to various ISP's it wasn't necessarily free... in Richmond, VA i2020.net wanted $200 per year for mydomain.richmond.va.us. This was only after 6 hours on the phone, trying to convince various people there that they had it delegated to them...

Maybe I take these things too seriously, but it makes me sick just thinking about it.

Jon Katz fodder

[Anonymous Coward]

NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- Three students from New Bedford, Massachusetts, were being held Sunday, charged with planning a deadly assault on their high school that they promised would be "bigger than Columbine," police said.

In a plan that echoed the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, the three planned to detonate a bomb and then gun down teachers and students as they fled the school before shooting themselves, police said.

A letter outlining the plot was found by a school janitor, police said.

Three juveniles, including one identified by police as a 17-year-old, were to be arraigned Monday, a New Bedford police sergeant who did not give his name told Reuters.

Police started investigating the plot last month after a student told a teacher of rumors that an assault was planned, New Bedford Police Chief Arthur Kelly was quoted as saying by The Boston Globe.

"The verbal threats brought up Columbine, that it will be bigger than Columbine," Kelly told the Globe.

Police searched the students' homes and found bomb-making directions, shotgun shells, knives and a flare gun. They also found photographs of at least one of them with weapons, the newspaper reported.

The 17-year-old boy is being held on $10,000 cash bail, and the two other boys were being held on $5,000 bail each, the Globe reported. They face charges of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and possession of ammunition.

On April 20, 1999, two students armed with assault weapons killed 12 students, one teacher and themselves at Columbine High School in one of the worst instances of school violence in U.S. history.

Fair.

[famazza]

I always thought it's fair that US companies register themselves as .com without .country sufix. It's fair because internet has born in US.

But ITOH every country has its own sufix and US has none. Now each country has its own sufix and also can register a "country-sufix-less" domain. It's much more fair to everybody.

Well, it's good to have .us domains, for me it sounds that www is becoming much more world than web.

Re:Fair.

[haruharaharu]

I always thought it's fair that US companies register themselves as .com without .country sufix. It's fair because internet has born in US.

That's not how it's set up. .com is for companies. No mention of them being US, just commercial. If you want a regional domain for the us, use .us.

Re:Fair.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I'd agree.

I've always thought of .com/net/org as a international/US domain. Not just US. I think it would be good to have a .us.
It's as if the .coms are being used as an interational suffex. Even though a site may not be based in the US, they might have a .com to show that they are expect an international audiance.
Sometimes is's even sillier, like when people get somethingNZ.com, and don't even bother to get something.co.nz or somethingNZ.co.nz. When the site is clearly supposed to be local.

So, don't think that MS or Canon, IBM, even slashdot (any big company, or location irrelivent sites) will be getting a .com.us for their main domain anytime soon. But maybe walmart.com.us might appear (or any other US only places).

Re:Fair.

[famazza]

.com was just an example. Do you want another one? What about .gov and .edu?

Here in brazil governmental sites uses .gov.br what about in US? It's .gov and not .gov.us.

That's what I meant. Not only to commercial sites, but also for government, educational, etc

(Sigh)

[Ed Avis]

Dammit, why couldn't they take the opportunity to do it *right* for a change? .com.us domains should be given only to a real corporation with that name. .tm.us should be administered by the USPTO and subdomains given strictly on the basis of trademark ownership. Conversely, trademark considerations should not impinge on the other subdomains - as long as it is clear that this is the case, so nobody gets misled.

You could also have .org.us strictly for non-profits (or maybe .charity.us for legally recognized tax-exempt charities), .fcfs.us for strictly first-come-first-served assignment, and so on.

Still, one positive feature of the new setup is that there won't be artificial scarcity created underneath the .us domain. Someone can buy .co.us and happily hand out the levels below that. At least until the lawyers get their hands into it...

(Possible new business for Sealand: lawyer-proof .sealand domain names. If you can get yourself assigned a country code that is.)

Re:(Sigh)

[rvaniwaa]

Someone can buy .co.us and happily hand out the levels below that. At least until the lawyers get their hands into it

Umm. .co.us should be all Colorado domains in the US...

Re:(Sigh)

[truesaer]

Do you seperate your M&M's into groups of colors, and carefully eat them in order to keep an equal number of each color at all times? No one wants to have to remember whether the group/company they're looking for is registered as a trademark or first come first serve, etc. We don't need any pain-in-the-ass buerocracy that will determine if we're truly deserving of a specific TLD either. This just makes things confusing and annoying.

I think the big secret about the TLD system is that it isn't pefect, but it works as well as any other system would. Your system would not stop the lawsuits due to trademark confusion just because someone registered it as mcdonalds.fcfs.com instead of mcdonalds.tm.com. The only real problem with the DSN system is that it is hard to get the exact name you want. But that is going to be the case with any number of TLDs I believe, because people will buy them up either way.

Making people prove they deserve a domain is even worse....it takes time, and would be an anchor on the internet. I don't want to have to wait 2 weeks to get some pinhead to approve my registration application.

Unfortunately, big corporations have an advantage over an individual. Such is life.

Re:(Sigh)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, silly foreigners... in such a rush to foist their bizaare rules on .us, they don't check to see if anything actually exists there yet.

FYI - any two-letter state abbrieviation is already taken, in the context of preceding .us (.il.us is Illinois, .ca.us is California, yada yada yada).

I'm curious to know whether (now that .us is controlled by a nice, friendly third party - just like Network Solutions!) existing .us domains will have to start paying fees to them. Or will at a future date. If so, this would be a major windfall to the company - and a major scam for taxpayers, since all existing .us domains are taxpayer-funded entities - schools, government agencies, etc.

Re:(Sigh)

[Ed Avis]

We don't need any pain-in-the-ass buerocracy that will determine if we're truly deserving of a specific TLD either.

I agree, but some people will try to inflict PITA bureaucracy whether you ask for it or not. Witness the arbitration system for .com (guinessbeersucks.com, gateway.com and so on).

My suggestion was aimed at keeping these people in a contained space. They can have their legally regulated .tm and .com domains - where the rules are clear and explicit, and not as arbitrary as the current system - and everyone else can use .fcfs for first come, first served.

Ack.

[Scoria]

While a little OT (read the whole comment, moderators, before modding me down), let's hope the Government doesn't go ahead with "online voting." Imagine the heightened possibility of fraud.

"Alternate voting site: scriptkiddies.nebraska.state.us"

Some people not knowledgeable enough to know the difference could be tricked into giving away their SSN, name, home address... everything somebody needs to make credit cards out of them.

Re:Ack.

[freeweed]

Some people not knowledgeable enough to know the difference could be tricked into giving away their SSN, name, home address... everything somebody needs to make credit cards out of them.

I'm not quite sure what the point of your post was, but assuming you think that online voting is a bad thing because of the above... well sir/ma'am, I guess we should outlaw telephones, too. They've been used countless times to defraud people who should know better into giving up personal information.

Then again, these days ignorance IS a legitimate excuse for stupidity. Sigh...

Re:Ack.

[Scoria]

Perhaps I misstated my comment so well that the point of it became too obscure to easily comprehend.

The relevance of my comment is that if the government went ahead with online voting, the URL would most likely be one with a .us suffix.

I can only imagine AOL users receiving a "vote now" e-mail from "ted@geocities.com" and completing the attached "official form."

Less relevant are the inherent security flaws in such a system; it's quite unlikely you could ensure reliability and security.

Telephones are direct (if insecure, when you get down to it) communication. You're quite simply comparing apples to oranges with your "let's outlaw telephones" argument.

Maybe this will get your collective minds going

[Sludge]

Words ending with "us"

Re:Maybe this will get your collective minds going

[Anonymous Coward]

404 ends in "04" not "us"

Re:Maybe this will get your collective minds going

[Sludge]

Right. Uh, try this url

Re:Maybe this will get your collective minds going

[Bob Uhl]

Or, for those not yet quite as familiar with the shell as they hope to be, simply use the following command:

grep us\$ /usr/share/dict/words

You may wish to pipe the output into less, or redirect it into a file.

THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE!

[Anonymous Coward]

www.lookatmydistendedan.us

And what this means is:

[Kymermosst]

The last bit of organization associated with United States centric domain name organization is gone.

It sucked when .net, .org, and .com were relegated to equals rather than their intended purpose.

Now .us will just be the same.

The evolution of things? It's like this:

1. In the beginning, commercial companies who were not network infrastructure providers could only register .com, thus leaving .org and .net free for nonprofit orgs and network providers.

2. Bill Clinton came along and gave the internet to the corporations, and suddenly U.S. companies registered their names in .com, .net, and .org. Thus, using even more namespace.

3. .biz comes along, and those same companies will now have FOUR names in the namespace.

4. Now .us will be exactly the same. Now those companies will just have mytrademark.com, mytrademark.net, mytrademark.org, mytrademark.biz, and NOW mytrademark.us.

So, can anyone tell me what good this move is, rather than making them register under county.state.us?

Anyone else remember when domain names were free and you never got spam on usenet or e-mail? It was the giving up of .org and .net brought about by Clinton-Gore that got us where we are today.

When Gore "invented" the internet, what he and Clinton invented was the destruction of it's beauty as a free exchange that wasn't dominated by giant corporations wielding laws like the DMCA.

Re:And what this means is:

[imrdkl]

Some of the very, very first Mom and Pop providers (~1990) got feeds from .edu. And this is part of what put internet in the hands of the individual in our country. (at least outside of The Well and Netcom crowd and elite bands of graduates)

The move was afoot long before Bill and Al came in.

Re:And what this means is:

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else remember when domain names were free and you never got spam on usenet or e-mail?

Anybody else remember when the Internet was strictly government run and only really big geeks could play on it and you only had 300 baud links and the practical uses of it were nonexistent?

Cry me a river...technology progresses. Deal with it. Stop living in the 70s.

Re:And what this means is:

[mpe]

Bill Clinton came along and gave the internet to the corporations, and suddenly U.S. companies registered their names in .com, .net, and .org. Thus, using even more namespace.

Not just their names but also names of their products, even advertising slogans and misspellings. Also quite a few things ended up as .com which were never commercial entities. Effectivly .com=.misc1, .net=.misc2 & .org=.misc3

Re:And what this means is:

[devonh]

just a small comment.. as far as i can remember, there was always "spam" on usenet. just wasn't for viagra, that's all. ;)

- dev0n

Re:.asm [a bit OT, watch out]

[CoolVibe]

I doubt you will get it from them.

From their registration rules:

B.0.1 Identification

The domain name that is requested for the registration of an entity must neither be misleading nor obscure. San Marino RA can inform the applicant about possible ambiguities and ask for a changed application.

NOTE: The domain name that is chosen for the registration must be similar to the applicant entity name or it must be similar to one of its services, products, trade-marks and so on in order to assure an easy identification of the name itself.

So, unless your last name is Orga, or own a company that's called that way, you're not gonna get it from them.

Dunno about sex sites though: "So what do you sell?", "Well, we provide people with orga's, don't know what they are?" :-)

But will they be used?

[pwagland]

I mean, great, now they are available. But will anyone actually use them? Except in the "humourous" ways evidenced here on Slashdot?

I can imagine that some large companies will get the domain, simply to "collect the whole set", but do you seriously imagine that you will start to see adds for www.ibm.us on the billboards? I just simply don't see it happening.

Although i would like to see who ends up with trust.us ;-)

Re:But will they be used?

[Chelloveck]

I mean, great, now they are available. But will anyone actually use them?

To the Great Unwashed Masses, the only domain worth knowing about is ".com". I was trying to set up a "Reply-To" line for my SprintPCS mail. When I called their tech support, I was told that my email address <xxxxx@xxxxx.chi.il.us> was invalid 'cause it didn't end in ".com"! *sigh*

If it doesn't start with "www." and end with ".com", the muggles just can't cope with it.

NEUSTAR CAN KISS MY

[sloop]

Am I the only one who is enraged? Neustar sucks! Look at what they did with .BIZ - just a new hyped up domain so they can bring in loads of money for companies scrambling to protect their trade name.

The .US domain has been used for years without problems. I don't see why the Dept of Commerce needed to hand this over to Neustar. Neustar is going to be charging and making ungodly sums of money.

The United States is a LARGE, well-connected country. It is NOT practical to give 2nd-level domains (joeblow.us) out to the public. The system of org.locality.state.us is much more fair as there will be less disputes. Granted, companies and organizations that span more than one locality or state should be allowed to have lower-level (3rd or maybe 2nd) domains.

I emailed Neustar (that is the stupidest name of a company I have ever heard) last week about some of these issues I am concerned about, and never received a response.

As a .US domain owner, I am pissed off.

Overly confusing?

[moosesocks]

This comes at a very bad time. The .us extention should have been available since the beginning. Extentionless domains (.com; .org; .net) should be classified as "worldwide sites", example: www.amazon.com should lead to Amazon's worldwide site, or a portal page that leads to Amazon's localized sites (amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, etc..). Instead, amazon.com leads to amazon's USA homepage. This is clearly wrong and a problem. The .com extention should be intended for non-localized sites, not the american site (are we too good for our own extention)?

This also leads to another problem. Smaller sites don't want to have to manage two extentions (for the sake of costs and fragmentation). A few poltically-correct people will start typing in .com.us, instead of .com, leading to a 404 or the inevitable: the site of some domain stockpiler out to cheat a few innocent individuals out of their money.

Here's a scenaraio:
Small US based business with a website, does no international business. Clearly, Company X shouldn't have to buy a .com domain, because they are strictly a US company (just like most foreign companies do). The webmaster makes the politically-correct decision to purchase a .com.us domain.
Once the site has been up and popularized, a potential customer hears about the site; oxygenrx. He types oxygenrx.com into his browser... 404:not found. The potential customer releases a string of obcenities, then proceeds to a competitor's site. The opposite of this is true as well.
The obvious solution to this problem would be to buy a .com domain. But, the webmaster shouldn't have to: oxygenrx isn't a worldwide corporation.

Another way to put this into perspective is with the naming of a company.
For example, there is a company: Brooklyn Cheese House inc. From the name, you can tell it is strictly a small local business. One day, the managment changes it's name to Cheese House International. But, it's not an international business: it's still a small retail store in Brooklyn. Surely this will confuse customers (probably those who choose to patronize a local business over a large one). Same concept with the domains: a proper name prevents confusion and improves business.
Of course, this can't all be credited to the lateness in the availability of .us domains. It mixes in politics, the stupidity of the average Joe AOL-user. Another solution could be simply removing locale specific extentions... AHHHHHH!

Re:Overly confusing?

[rjamestaylor]

This is clearly wrong and a problem.

You are kidding, right?

Re:Overly confusing?

[thecarson]

You're wrong. Amazon.com in other countries yields the language of that country. Amazon.com accessed from mexico displays a Spanish page, etc..

It has nothing to do with browsers and language settings, just the international status. Language settings often override it though.

Re:Overly confusing?

[aduthie]

In your scenario, Company X needs to sack the person responsible for deciding what domain name(s) to buy for them.

Since the floodgates have been open so long, it's very much too late for any of these scenarios to take place. Yes, it's confusing, yes, it's a pain in the ass, yes we're stuck with it.

It's bad enough trying to explain to someone that the website is "anything-but-www.domain.anything-but-dot-com." Just you try and explain it's at "hostname.subdomain.domain.us."

On the other hand, it will be yet another way to spot those who get it and weed out the rest.

Re:Overly confusing?

[The_Messenger]

The .com extention should be intended for non-localized sites, not the american site (are we too good for our own extention)?

Oh, please. The World Wide Web was originally a US government system, paid for by the taxes of US citizens. That's why everything is "biased" towards the US, mmmkay? Get over it.

If you don't like it, why not create your own internetwork and your own DNS? I'm sure that the urotrash^H^H^H^H^Hpean Solidarity Movement -- you know, the shadowy foppish uro-cabal behind such bright ideas as the uro, the urofighter, and Canada -- already has one planned, and it's probably based on .NETbeui. *snicker*

(Of course, every time that someone brings this up, the International Nonsense Moderation Squad mods him into oblivion. I'm prepared.)

Re:Overly confusing?

[Anonymous Coward]

The World Wide Web was originally a US government system, paid for by the taxes of US citizens.

I know I Have Been Trolled, but since when is Switzerland, where CERN is located, part of the USA?

Re:Overly confusing?

[mpe]

Oh, please. The World Wide Web was originally a US government system, paid for by the taxes of US citizens.

Utterly wrong, it was invented by a British man at CERN (an international organisation based in Europe.)

Re:Overly confusing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh... I'm hoping for a couple more bites this morning.

-- The_Messenger

Re:Overly confusing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? I don't know what you're talking about! Especially since CERN is actually located in Austin, TX!

And even if it were located in Switzerland, urope is pretty much just the 51st State of America! We're just too ashamed to let you attend Congress.

-- The_Messenger

(I don't know, do you think that the gratuitous urotrash-bashing overdid it? If I had just posted the first paragraph by itself, I would've gotten at least two more replies pointing me to CERN webpages.)

Re:Overly confusing?

[Anonymous Coward]

replies pointing me to CERN webpages.

Here you go.

Take a great system...

[Morvandium]

I can see why it is happening, but the organization scheme of county.state.country, imho, was a good organizationalk system -- but one that wasn't truly taken advantage of enough.

Re:Other domain suggestions:..oops

[AdmlTroll]

Testes. Testes. One, two... THREE????

Osama just registered his domain

[Anonymous Pancake]

www.bomb.the.us

I think

[Anonymous Coward]

Www.slashdot.us would be a great place to mirror sites before we post stories and take down poor 3rd party servers.

MODERATORS ON CRACK

[Anonymous Coward]

how can that modded down as of topic

Re:Other domain suggestions:..oops

[ncc74656]

testt? testy? testes....heh, corrected my typo only to make it again...sigh.

dang, should have been (less than symbol) 1 posts.....

&lt; is your friend:

dang, should have been &lt; 1

gets rendered as

dang, should have been < 1

time to repair am injustice

[Uzull]

all those .com, .gov, .mil, .edu, .org misused by us companies and institutions.... all these domains should be reorganised to be subdomains of .us.
So all countries in the world of internet are equal. For the moment the US are more equal than others. They are the pigs of the internet animal farm.
And Europe should obtain a .eu domain.
the internet is no more a exclusively american issue.
i will tell such thing to my favourite european parliament deputy : )

BEWARE

[TheSHAD0W]

A rogue domain operator, TLDUSA, is busy spamming offers to sell/buy .USA domains for $59 per year. These are NOT .US domains, and whether or not someone will be able to contact those domain servers is problematic.

Re:BEWARE

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, I always take spammers at their word and don't bother to note the actualy TLD of my domains. THanks for your dopey suggestions!

Who let the optimist in here?

[john@iastate.edu]

Finally USA gets a top domain like all the other countries have. It might bring some order to the chaos.

First, we've have a top level domain like all the other contries have had -- each with their own rules and rulers -- it's just that ours were outstandingly misguided.

However, I have little confidence that the new ones will be any better. In any event, there is no chance that <big-american-corp> is going to give up <big-american-corp>.com -- they'll just have <big-american-corp>.com.us too -- wheeee, won't that be special!

In other news....

[Cosmic Cow]

Taliban registered in advance itsnot.us

Duplicate!

[jasonzzz]

This post

http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/30/2331218.sh tm l

in October already talks about Neustar picking up the .us domain management...

Australia, and the rest of the world.

[Tyreth]

So is there a foo.au?

Seriously

[simong]

It has to be .com.us, .org.us, .net.us or it's a complete mockery of the international system. Leave the local system in place and do something sensible. Are ICANN so toothless as to not enforce this?

Re:Seriously

[Royster]

It has to be .com.us, .org.us, .net.us or it's a complete mockery of the international system. Leave the local system in place and do something sensible. Are ICANN so toothless as to not enforce this?

ICANN dosn't enforce any use of country domains. Only few of them, like .uk, have the equivalent of com/edu/org in the second level.

Re:UK 2LDs

[smcv]

AFAIK, there is precisely one exception to the rule where nobody is directly allocated a second-level domain - nic.uk is the domain of the UK domain registrar, who can award themselves any .uk domain they feel like :-) and chose "nic" (presumably if ICANN gave .uk to some other company, they'd point www.nic.uk to the new one's web server). However, there are quite a few fairly obscure UK 2LDs other than the well-known .co.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk, .ac.uk (academic, like .edu) and .gov.uk. Examples include .nhs.uk (National Health Service - public-funded hospitals and so on), .police.uk (police forces, like cambs.police.uk for Cambridgeshire), and .ltd.uk and .plc.uk (only available to registered UK companies, and they have to use the closest domain-compatible version of their official name - e.g. FooSoft UK Limited would have to use foosoft-uk.ltd.uk and Whatevername Industries PLC would have to use whatevername-industries.plc.uk)

oh no!

[reo_kingu]

god.help.us haha, sorry, I couldn't help it.

Rolling in his grave

[ziegast]

I was initially pissed off, too. If Jon Postel (the original maintainer) were still alive, I wonder if anyone could have laid a commercial hand on the US TLD. I once tried in the early 90's to get a non-RFC US zone registered and met heavy resistance from Jon. I gained new respect for his keeping the purity of that domain.

Interestingly enough, NeuStar is headed by a bunch of folk that include an IETF dignitary or two (eg. Bill Manning).

The following document details how they're going to implement everything. Section B-3 goes into what you can and can't register under ".us" as well as gives info about the trademark "sunrise" period. At least it looks like they did their homework. There won't be any "com.us" or "xxx.us", but "screw.us" and "slashdot.us" seem quite feasible.

While I don't agree with them in principle, it looks like it could have been worse.

- ez

Who fucking cares?

[Genghis Troll]

Is the imminence of domains like "fagsr.us", "fuck.us", and "takearideonthemagicb.us" really "stuff that matters"? FUCK YOU!!!1!

Should've been from the start!

[rice_burners_suck]

It should have been this way right from the start. Every country should have its country code as its top level domain, and that should be subdivided as best convenient for that country. In the U.S., each state would be assigned a 2-letter name under .us, and that state would be responsible for subdividing further. A big state like California might subdivide further by counties.

It should never have been simply "something.com"--this may have actually helped lead to the .com mess of the past several years, which has screwed up the tech sector so badly. ("Hey! Here's a business idea! Better register that domain name NOW before someone gets it, write up some press releases, and we're millionaires!" It's all psychology. Make the system more organized and its users will have to be too.) From the very start, people would have gotten used to the fact that some company's domain name is something.county.state.us or something.city.state.us or whatever. (Subdividing by city actually makes more sense (to me) than by county, as your snailmail address includes your street address, city and state, not your county.)

Furthermore, .net, .com and .org should only have existed for international entities; .net being for network providers; .com for multinational commercial entities and .org for multinational nonprofit organizations. ONLY! These domains, and only these domains, would be regulated by some international mess of a bureaucracy. Their rules would include a minimum number of countries you have to do business in before getting a domain like that. For example, you must do so many millions worth of business in, say, 10 countries in order to get a .com.

When limited to the U.S., these entities would have to get a .com.state.us address, and the name must be the name of the business (or entity). Registered trademarks would get a .tm.us. Federal government sites would get a .gov.us. State governments would get a .gov.state.us. County and city governments would be further organized in a hierarchy.

In short, by using rules that make sense to KNOWLEDGEABLE computer folks, a very large mess wouldn't exist now. Huge technical problems would be reduced to nothing. Legal problems would nearly go away too--we wouldn't have people fighting over domain names and stupid stuff like that. (If there was a fight, it could only happen between people in the same city (or state in the worst case) and there would be no authority to handle it--all names are first-come-first-serve. (The protection is already in place, since you have to own the appropriate trademark or have the appropriately named business in order to have that domain name.) And if all else fails, one party could buy the name off the other, as was done in the past.)

The way the system is today causes another big HUGE chunk of bureaucracy that is totally unnecessary and costs a lot of money and headaches. OH WELL.

Re:Should've been from the start!

[jasonzzz]

20/20 hindsight and wishful thinking doesn't fix messes. The .com, .net, system we the netizens have today allows the mom-n-pops to have at least some semblance of competition with the truly internationational (or even the not so truly) shops. Okay, maybe not true competition, but at least equal footing as long as no one invokes the IP rules. If the setup is done right, you won't be able to tell if its mom-n-pop-coffee.com or *$.com or some other specialty coffee place and if the product is good, you will still love it.

Re:Should've been from the start!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do I recieve my personal email?

.philadelphia.pa.us?
Great, I just moved to .montgomerty.pa.us... So my email address and web site URL changes? Fuck that shit --- my domain name is geographically irrelevant under the current system, and I like it that way.

Re:Should've been from the start!

[orius_khan]

It should have been this way right from the start. Every country should have its country code as its top level domain, and that should be subdivided as best convenient for that country. In the U.S., each state would be assigned a 2-letter name under .us, and that state would be responsible for subdividing further. A big state like California might subdivide further by counties.

yadda yadda yadda

In short, by using rules that make sense to KNOWLEDGEABLE computer folks, a very large mess wouldn't exist now. Huge technical problems would be reduced to nothing. Legal problems would nearly go away too--we wouldn't have people fighting over domain names and stupid stuff like that. (If there was a fight, it could only happen between people in the same city (or state in the worst case) and there would be no authority to handle it--all names are first-come-first-serve.

Yes, this is all very clear in hindsight, but you're completely forgetting that the internet had to be created from nothing. This is not some obvious flaw that no one has contemplated until you, our resident genius, brought it to our attention.

As with anything that eventually develops into something vastly different from what it was originally intended to do, the internet naming system was NOT developed in the most efficient way to handle the problems that crept up 30+ years later. When the Department of Defense personnel were first starting to design ARPAnet, they didn't say to themselves "Gee, this secret military project we're making... it's supposed to be a communications network for Defense stations throughout the country that can survive a nuclear assault that destroys certain parts of the country... What if someday in the distant future it expands into a worldwide network of mostly civilians and is used by hundreds of millions of people from all over the world who want to be able to categorize their businesses according the city,state, and country? Maybe we should take that into account!". No, they didn't say that. Which is why we have the awkward system we have now. It originated in the U.S., so the U.S. names are going to be a little bit different until they are slowly revised. Stepwise refinement! Look it up!

All you people who cry out "Duh!" at things like this don't stop to consider that great things are not created instantly and perfectly. (It's like saying "Why didn't the Wright brothers invent a 747 instead of that dinky single propeller plane? Everyone KNOWS that a jet engine is far superior to a prop motor!")

A project (DARPAnet) was morphed into something very different (the Internet), which suited a new need (worldwide interconnectivity of businesses and individuals) that didn't exist when the project was started. Naturally everything did not work perfectly. There is a problem with the naming conventions. So the naming convention system is being tweaked (ie. news post of today). This is not some drastic change due to a grand revelation, but is the slow, natural progression of all things.

Re:Should've been from the start!

[5KVGhost]

IMHO, attempts to subdivide domains strictly by geographic regions would simply not work. Aside from being hard to remember (regardless of what you're used to, a long, multipart domain name is harder to remember than a quick short one) the location of a business that isn't strictly brick-and-mortar is largely meaningless to customers. Where is Slashdot.com located, and why should I have to care?

And it doesn't even fit well with those brick-and-mortar entities. Suppose my business is physically located in one state, but incorporated in another? What if I have multiple physical locations? What happens if my business moves across some arbitrary geographic boundry, like between counties in a large state that's been further subdivided?

When more than one entity owns a trademark, who gets to use it, and why? What if my business is incorporated under a different name than that which is generally used with the public? Suppose my company merges with another? What exactly counts as an "international" contact when parcelling out TLD entries, and why are only large million-dollar businesses deserving of such a privilege?

In short, how are customers supposed to relate to utterly arbitrary (to them) stuff like this, and why should they be expected to?

Problems like this are exactly why so many businesses use toll-free phone numbers, PO Boxes, etc. - to avoid all the hassles that come with coupling yourself too closely with any particular physical location and to allow flexibility in your business operations. Reversing that trend on the Internet would just (re)introduce a host of old problems that don't even need to exist in a new medium.

I don't mean to sound harsh. To paraphrase Winston Churhill, the current domain system is the worst, except for all the others. The reason that .com and other TLDs are so popular is not because of evil corporatate brainwashing and stupid users. It's because they're much more friendly and generally more sensible than the alternatives. Trying to shoehorn users into a "logical" system that doesn't account for how the users actually think is generally a mistake, and the kinds of legal and technical problems we're seeing now would still be present in any other system, just in different forms.

I had "z"

[ziegast]

So I went though all the domains, and noticed that only z.com seems to be a functioning website (redirects to Nissan's website.)

I was the first to register Z.COM. IANA once gave a directive that said, "all one-letter names shall be reserved to enable name-hashing at a later time". Working for a company that registered domain names on a daily basis, I thought, "If X.ORG can have a domain name, why can't I register Z.COM?" To my surprise, it worked! The following month, IANA gobbled up all the rest of the one-letter names.

A few years later, I started having people knock on my door monthly saying they'd buy or trade my domain. They didn't see much of a value to it, and neither did I. While I was a bit altruistic, I did have a price in mind where I'd do away with my domain. One day this guy offered me 50% more than that price, so I took it. It went toward a down payment on a house that later made me some real money.

The guy tried to make a simple Z.COM web portal out of it. Their gimmick was that all one had to do was hit "z" on their web browser address, and poof, there you were at Z.COM. The portal never gained momentum.

Other people bought it from him and tried again to make a portal out of it, but their gimmick was to give "lifetime" e-mail accounts if they visited the portal regularly. Again, another Z.COM portal failed, and those "lifetime" addresses disappeared with it.

The next purchaser was apparently IDEAlab. They never did anything with it and with their financial demise probably thought they should sell/dump it for whatever they could.

Enter Nissan. My guess is that they might release or re-release a "Z" car in the future.

I mildly regret selling the name away. I thought the purchaser would have done something better with it. I could give Nissan a web redirect as good as anyone else.

--
Eric Z iegast
eric@z.com
uunet!z!eric

(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[maggard]

Ed Avis writes:

.com.us domains should be given only to a real corporation with that name. .tm.us should be administered by the USPTO and subdomains given strictly on the basis of trademark ownership. Conversely, trademark considerations should not impinge on the other subdomains - as long as it is clear that this is the case, so nobody gets misled.

It's so easy to be sure of oneself when ignorant.

Exactly which "Olympia" gets that olympia.us? Olympia Pizza down the street from me? One of the 1,000 other unrelated Olympia Pizza's across the US? Olympia Cruise Lines? Olympia Finance Corporation? Matt Olympia?

What about trademarks? NT goes to Microsoft or to Nortel (nee Northern Telecom)? What about the dozens of other trademarked NT's in various fields? NT adhesive or NT car parts?

Sigh - Ignorance must be bliss.

Re:(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[Russ Nelson]

It goes like this:
If ignorance is bliss,
'tis folly to be wise.
-russ

Re:(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[Sabalon]

The IOC - don't you know...congress gave them ownership over Olympic and therefore they think they own anything similar.

Re:(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[Ed Avis]

I was thinking of .tm subdomains corresponding to trademark categories - so olympia.food.tm.us, olympia.travel.tm.us, and so on.

For .com.us, I was thinking of a company registered with that exact name. Company names have to be unique, right?

Re:(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[orius_khan]

For .com.us, I was thinking of a company registered with that exact name. Company names have to be unique, right?

No, they don't. And even if they did, they're registered at the State level, NOT the national level, so you could have 50 different businesses, all 'properly registered' with the same name, and each with a valid claim on the domain name. And that wouldn't prevent individuals from starting a "company" to register the domain name. Corporations have to be incorporated at a state level, but it is even simpler to start a sole proprietorship or partnership and register a "fictious name" (not in the sense of a 'scam') for a company with whatever company name you want. Although, it would be more difficult than the current system of "register whatever you want".

I do agree though that adding a layer of beuracracy would only slow things down and would not help solve anything. (see: patent office)

Re:(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[Ed Avis]

If company names are unique only at state level, then I'd suggest .com.tx.us and so on. The idea is to make a defined space where company names determine domain ownership, so that companies will not be able to claim ownership of other domains (like .org and .net) for the same reason. Make it clear that foo.org has no particular connection with Foo, Inc. whereas foo.com.$STATE.us does, and you should eliminate at least some of the lawyeritis that clogs the current TLDs.

Re:(Sigh) Ignorance must be bliss

[mpe]

Exactly which "Olympia" gets that olympia.us? Olympia Pizza down the street from me? One of the 1,000 other unrelated Olympia Pizza's across the US? Olympia Cruise Lines? Olympia Finance Corporation? Matt Olympia?

Tnus you need geographic parts (which is what exists now) and most likely "type" parts of the name. Certainly you need those for trademarks.

What about trademarks? NT goes to Microsoft or to Nortel (nee Northern Telecom)?

Most likely domains for companies should be restricted to legal or trading names. Rather than those of products. Also Nortel is a Canadian company IIRC.

Yes, I remeber the net of the 70's

[kfg]

Which was when the virtually the *only* uses of it were practical. Yes, even usenet was largely a practical use back then.

I have to assume, however, that you do not.

If you did you would be aware that the changes in the net that the original poster was bemoaning have nothing, I will repeat, emphatically, NOTHING, to do with technology.

They are all strictly factors orginizational, politcal and legal. They are *human* changes, and thus behavioural.

Thus, the proper tools for change and improvement are the tools of human interaction. Debate and disent being chief among these.

If I might paraphrase Linus Torvalds, if you wish to actually say something of value to the issue, show me the argument.

KFG

I hate top-level extensions

[Spinality]

I've never really seen the benefit of the top-level qualifier. It classifies sites based on a secondary property (.edu vs .com vs .org) which is not fundamentally related to how we (I anyway) view the net. I guess I can see some value in dividing up the namespace by gross geography, but even there the value seems limited; I don't see why there needs to be a 'slashdot.fr' for example. I'd rather see a single, uniform name space administered by some user-friendly process. Then we'd just say 'slashdot' or 'amazon' or 'snopes.' If you want to set up a private subdomain for your company or your nation, then fine, go at it. I see no advantage in being able to support distinct 'amazon.com,' 'amazon.net,' 'amazon.uk,' and 'amazon.sex' -- as a user, or as a business, I want a single unambiguous identifier that is reasonably free of confusion.

But that's just me.

Re:Duplicate! Duplicate!

[jasonzzz]

Redundant=1

Really now. It's the "original" post that's redundant, not the comment, doht!

A way around the mess

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Google search as your "dns server". You don't even have to type ".com"

About f'ing time!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about time they got this done ...

The current system has led to some truly abominable domains being awarded. Why should a local park in the U.S. have a global domain name? Why should the U.S. get .gov when no other government can get it? For that matter why should governmental entities in the U.S. have domains other than gov.us? Why should a local bar/pub have a global domain name?

It was idiocy to have .edu/.com/.org/etc be so common ...

- David

.us TLD

[baomike]

Whats the deal. This has been around for years.
I have one, the city of Eugene has one , the
state of Oregon has one. The admin has changed which may be for the better or the worse ????

yeah yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

yet.another.silly.thing.ending.in.us

.co. versus .com domain

[alonsoac]

Some people are saying that the correct way of doing things is that every company registers under its own country code and only use .com domains for international or global pages.

This sounds fine but to me in Costa Rica a .co.cr domain costs $50/year and I must go to the bank to pay for it, whereas a .com domain costs like $8 and I can pay over the internet.

Of course we got ourselves a .com domain as many others here.

So the point is if we wanted it to be all nice and pretty then there should be a standard that all registrars should follow (pricing, registration and update procedures). This is a big mess now and there is probably no way to fix it now, even if there was some real international interest.

http://toys.r.us

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect!

and where do personal sites belong?

[Technodummy]

Some people go for .net as they're on the net, others go for .org as they're not trying to make a profit.

Where are the little guys supposed to go? they're not .biz, rarely .info

Russian backwards 'R' says 'ya'

[yerricde]

http://toys.r.us ? I would make it a backwards 'R,' but my keyboard got stuck.

Given that the Cyrillic letter whose glyph looks like a reversed Latin R ('', charentity &#1071;) says 'ya' in Russian (see the TETIS story and ndex.ru), the correct hostname would be toys.ya.us.

Colorado: .co.us

[yerricde]

When limited to the U.S., these entities would have to get a .com.state.us address

Except in Colorado, where you could conceivably get .co.us to match .co.uk. Similar parallels exist such as Nebraska (.ne.us) to parallel .net, Oregon (.or.us) to parallel .org, and Alaska (.ak.us) to parallel .ac.uk.

Dumbass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Vatican is .va. Do you not know how to look things up?

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the /. crew will register fuck.us.

I am pervert!

[Smurfy]

does this mean somehow I can get cl.it.or.us?

had to ask...

peace in...
-smurf
New York.San Francisco.Bend

Re:I am pervert!

[radja]

try it in iceland.. fat chance though..

//rdj

Re:I am pervert!

[Anonymous Coward]

What about eat.us, pork.us and molest.us? With appropriate digital art, of course.

toys.r.us

[Anonymous Coward]

toys.r.us

Re:.org for non-profit organisations????

[shaunak]

"You could also have .org.us strictly for non-profits (or maybe .charity.us for legally recognized tax-exempt charities),"

If .org domains are for non-profit and/or tax-exempt charities, why is this http://slashdot.org ????
If I'm not mistaken, CmdrTacho gets a lot of money out of this website as do many other people.

???

Re:.org for non-profit organisations????

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, the tacho in CmdrTacho was intentional.
Shaunak.

all.your.base.are.belong.to.us

[Anonymous Coward]

all.your.base.are.belong.to.us

lin.us

[Anonymous Coward]

trust.us
visit.us
buy.us
shop.us
register.us
mark.us
track.us
monitor.us
implant.us
clone.us
brainwash.us
trade.us
sell.us
encrypt.us
watch.us

Re:lin.us

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine they all would redirect to microsoft.com.

If these guys are smart and want to make a buck

[zardie]

Simple idea for them.

We know how popular domains such as "to.us", "r.us", "are.us" and so on will be just from the response here.

These domains will go first.

If they charged, say, $10,000 for any domain sold within the first month, I'm sure they'll go a lot slower. The registrar will make a small fortune and the companies will finally start having to pay for their domain. After all, they'll almost certainly have something in the com/net/org namespace.

If you're going to jump in and say that the companies with the dollars are getting an unfair advantage, well, think of it this way. The companies will get their domains anyway, and if they don't, I'm sure they'll sue whoever for "trademark infringement".

Otherwise some private squatter will register half the namespace and make a fortune on their own greed.

boo to DNS, let's go back to using numbers and a phone book-like directory.

Re:If these guys are smart and want to make a buck

[jasonzzz]

Remembering, it's not selling. Leasing, or licensing - maybe, but not wholesale cash and carry.

These darn things are so hot, they can probably go for $1mil cool ones per month and you will still get takers.

Re:.org for non-profit organisations????

[Ed Avis]

It always used to be that .org was for non-profits, but the rules have gotten relaxed over the years (AFAIK). If you made a domain strictly reserved for non-profit organizations, then corporations would not be able to sue for ownership of (for example) gateway.org, if a nonprofit group with that name legitimiately owns it.

I'm talking about how things _should_ be, not how they are :-(.

I believe

[(c) Penis]

I believe that the correct spelling would be "xy@vo".

Corruption of US DoC

[Garry Anderson]

The United States Department of Commerce may have done some underhand dealing for the .us TLD. For just one - they give it to a business that run the illegal .biz lottery. Did DoC open .us for tender?

The United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization and the United States Department of Commerce are hiding the simple solution to trademark and domain name problem.

Virtually every word is trademarked - Alpha to Zeta or Aardvark to Zulu, most many times over (even in same country).

Trademarks are for the good of the people, as well as business. Most trademarks share the same words with many others in a different business and/or country. For example, 'cat' is used in 1746 trademarks in the USA alone. The authorities are allowing certain trademarks to be abused by their owners, giving them dominance over others. This is against unfair competition law.

The US DoC do this purposefully, also knowing they abridge peoples right to use these words - even the common words you learnt with your A B C's - like apple, ball and cat. This violates the First Amendment.

I have been in contact with various Government bodies (US and UK) and attorneys for quite some time now - they understand arguments perfectly. Nobody has denied the assertions made, not even UN WIPO.

Like I say, most trademarks share its name or initials with many others. When authorities could put trademark identity beyond shadow of doubt, they are either devoid of intelligence or corrupt. I have come to the logical conclussion, that they are corrupt.

Please visit WIPO.org.uk to see the simple solution.

What I want to know is...

[Pendant]

When is someone going to set up .them?

and I'd like to have...

[SeeFood]

big.us.dick.us

and I guess we'll see a bunch of companies choosing latin-sounding names for the better looking domain name.

now stay away or I'll give you lup.us :)

Why is this good?

[uslinux.net]

Why does everyone feel this is good? I thought the internet was supposed to bring about globalization - where your location didn't matter for you to do business. Country-specific TLDs such as .us, .uk, .fr, etc might seem reasonable for companies which are specific only to that country, but will only muddy things more.

Suppose someone registers ibm.com.ru who isn't IBM. Suppose that country doesn't care about that person infringing on IBM's trademark? Now suppose someone in that country assumes ibm.com.ru is the country-specific site for IBM. What is IBM's country specific site is ru.ibm.com (which is how I think it SHOULD be). I can definitely see a problem here.

Does IBM register EVERY IBM.com.TLD as well as IBM.com? Should they have to do so? Seems ridiculous to me. TLDs should say something about the type/business of a company (which they no longer do) instead of stressing location. Furthermore, things will get muddier as the managing bodies decide to do force stupid things later on for "more organization" like "company.businesstype.city.state.country". Type rather than location isn't perfect, but it's BETTER than what is being proposed.

What we need are BETTER TLDs. .com, .net, and .org are obviously too cluttered, and domains like .tv are just plain dumb (how about .media anyone?) A better TLD structure would be something like:

.media - for TV, Radio, Newspapers, and the like
.isp - for ISPs, since the .net domain is now meaningless
.retail - for retail businesses like Amazon, Sears, B&N, etc.
.pr0n - you get the idea
.linux - of course!

and, of course, some sort of governing body which FORCES the general business of the company to be related to the domain, or else forfeit their domain name (after a reasonable appeals process, of course). The existing .com, .net, .org, etc domains could be left, or phased out over the course of several years.

Re:Why is this good?

[markmoss]

Globalization doesn't always make sense. If you are ordering pizza, for instance, it would probably work a lot better to go straight to (say) internetpizza.kalkaska.mi.us than to go to internetpizza.com and hope that this web site would link to the correct store. It ought to be possible to build a geographically aware national or international site, but in my experience, usually where I live is not in their system, and their attempts to find someplace nearby are off by 200 miles...

Other Root TLDs...

[RoadWarriorX]

Considering that TLD are controlled by ICANN, I went searching for other TLD domains. I found out that there is underground (i.e. not official) heirarchies of alternative TLD's. It did not surprise me. The Internet DNS is, presumably, ONE large, distributed database. However, who says you cannot have many large, distributed DNS database. These "alternative" DNS heirarchies also has the ICANN TLD's (.com, .net, .org) in them for backward compatibility, but introduce 100's of other TLD's ( .radio, .hotel, .god, .etc). The downsides are the fact that potential visitors must have their DNS configured to use the heirarchy, and the collision of the namespace with ICANN, mainly the .biz TLD. Check it out at the You Cann Site.

Oh, you Europeans and your inferiority complex

[Anonymous Coward]

The United States is where the internet and the telephone originated, so we get to make the rules concerning the low-level stuff. That's why the top-level domains are implicitly U.S.-based sites, and why the U.S. has country code "1".

You European lamers would be goose-stepping around town speaking German to each other if it wasn't for the U.S. saving your asses, so don't even try to tell me you think your countries are America's equals. Even the WWW, though actually created by a non-American, was conceptualized by an American decades ago. You don't like how we're running things, fine-- then go invent your own God damned world-wide network the European way, see how far you get.

Re:Oh, you Europeans and your inferiority complex

[Anonymous Coward]

You European lamers would be goose-stepping around town speaking German

If only you hadn't carved up Europe between the syphilitic chewing-gum culture and the communist Mongol hordes, but instead had helped overthrow Hitler and invade the Soviet union together with the Glorious German and volunteering forces, that sweet dream could have been true today!

Timely

[Syberghost]

Wow. This was really big news, a month ago when I submitted it.

Now it's just a press release. Press Releases for Nerds, Stuff That Mattered Last Month.

.GOV

[wls]

.FED.US and .GOV, managed by GSA, are being contracted to SAIC.

In short, they live.

_shouldn't_ affect us

[bakunin]

I don't this that would affect OpenNIC users. When I re-wrote OpenNIC's root build script this summer, I made a few changes to is that should prevent this from affecting our users:

1) we have a list of the ICANN root servers' IP numbers (just as an DNS server does in its cache zone file) from which we download the names and IP numbers of the TLD servers

2) we assign new names to those root servers, rather than using the names we're given, to prevent exactly this sort of cross-root pollution

3) we have the A records for the TLD servers' IP numbers in the root zoner itself, which means that an ICANN .biz name _can_ appear in our root this way) so, though you will be able to resolve that name, it's a bug; we should replace the names for the TLD servers as well to block cross-zone pollution as well.

Thanks for pointing the bug on 3) out, though it's a different one from what you were speculating about. ;-)

-robin

Punishment.

[saintlupus]

now stay away or I'll give you lup.us

Hey, what did I do?

(Thanks for the idea, though. Hmmm.)

--saint

Ignorance check!

[hawk]

> Which means for those
> world series loving Americans, more then one country.

uh, check on what the "World Series" is . . .

It does *not* mean "world champion," and never did.

"World" was the name of the now defunct newspaper that schemed to get the champions of the two major professional baseball leagues to play each other. They slapped their name on it. The event and its name have outlasted the paper by decades . . .

hawk

Faulklands worth invading????

[hawk]

Come, now. To get all 3 houses, and the 27 goats? The only reason for the invasion was to prop up the popularity of a military junta with a meaningless campaign. The only reason for the british to respond is that if you *don't* respond when when some 2 bit dictator takes your territory, you encourage the 1 bit dictators . . .

hawk

Yes yes, it already was, but got ignored

[RomulusNR]

In fact, about six years ago, private domains were encouraged to get *.us domains, instead of *.com domains, which were specifically for commercial ventures. Likewise, *.net was only for network providers, and *.org was only for non-profit orgs. But when the NSF stopped paying for everyone's domain name, InterNIC / Network Solutions took control of how the domains would be allocated among purposes, and that was to not allocate them at all, but blow them wide open to everyone. This of course maximised NSI's ability to sell domains. (NSI did not and has not controlled (*.us).

Web-era veterans might remember Netherlands BBS, originally at netherlands.ypsi.mi.us ('ypsi.mi' because it was located in Ypsilanti, Michigan). Eventually it was changed to nether.net. This of course worked in NetherNet's favor, because they then had a shorter hostname, and users did less typing, and there was much rejoicing.

Regardless, the current system is hardly bureaucratic -- its the opposite, uncontrolled and manipulated for profit over most beneficial function. And the solution of throwing more TLDs at the problem will only end up spanning the problem across TLDs. Sure, ICANN tells the TLD applicants who were lucky to win their lottery disguised as a review process that they have to limit who can get domains under their TLDs, but if ICANN's pattern of bending to commercial pressure continues, I expect that rule to hold for two years max.

Without a high-level directory, it was inevitable.

[Fastolfe]

DNS was never well-suited to be at the layer users interacted with the Internet. Its purpose was to identify nodes on the Internet with names. If you wanted to find the web server for a given company, you weren't expected to know or remember the company's web server's hostname; you were expected to locate them on a directory and have the software automatically send your web browser to the correct URL behind-the-scenes. Heck, even URL's weren't meant to be human-visible.

The problem is that the directory technology never matured fast enough, and was never adopted globally enough for it to serve that purpose. We're just now getting LDAP to start serving in the capacity of an e-mail directory, but short of the numerous incompatible search engines and proprietary "keyword" services out there, nothing has been able to do the same thing to sit above the DNS layer in a sane fashion.

If things had turned out the way they should have, DNS space wouldn't be traded like such a huge commodity, and we wouldn't have everybody and their freakin' pets with their own domain space sitting right off the top-level domains like we do today. It would end up as a nice hierarchy, but nobody but the techies would even care because it's not something generally exposed to the public. It's just ridiculous the way things are today.

Another poster mentioned that having his identity associated with a geographical domain name would suck since he'd have to rename everything when he moved. If things had been done right, this wouldn't really be an issue. The only naming that would need to change would be the naming of the Internet hosts that would move with him. If he was using a geographically-identified ISP and moved, he'd probably need to get a new ISP anyway, so his e-mail address would have changed. If he was hosting his own e-mail on his geographically-identified hosts, his hosts would have to move with him, so not only would he have to renumber, but yah, he'd have to rename as well. This really wouldn't have been as bad as it seems, since a higher-level directory would be what's linking his name and identity with his e-mail address, so after changing the address, a quick trip to the directory's update function would still allow him to receive his e-mail.

I really don't see a huge problem with the top-level generic domains like .com and .org, provided they were used for the purposes they were intended. It's just a namespace. Companies or individuals that are not geographically centered shouldn't be forced under a geographically-centered domain. You have to root those guys somewhere, so the generics are the place to be. I was rather distressed to hear that new TLD's like .biz were going to be opened up. I see no distinction in functionality between .biz and .com, and they're still intending to open them up for anyone that wants one. Now we just have ambiguity when people are trying to locate businesses. Do I try www.microsoft.com or www.microsoft.biz?

But who knows, this may force a globally-recognized directory of proper names to services. As the number of "equivalent" top-level domain names increase, so does the ambiguity. Users are going to start using search engines more to locate an organization, which I see is a good thing, and the overall value of DNS space will begin to diminish.

Things will get there eventually, but many of us will be banging our heads on our desks in the mean time...

Why not localize the browsers instead?

[Angerson]

I don't pretend to understand a lot about the intricacies of the various implemented TLD system(s), but why not localize the browser to translate mycompany.com to mycompany.com.us? This way if you were trying to access Amazon's Australian site from inside Australia (and using a localized Australian browser) you'd just type in Amazon.com and be forwarded to Amazon.co.au? Likewise, if you were in the USA, type Amazon.com and you'd be sent to Amazon.co.us? Of course you could always manually type the address as well, thus being able to access non-US specific versions of a website.

It seems to make a lot more sense than manually localizing the heck out of every domain name. Especially when I don't see the country extensions as anything different than the company codes used for our phone network. You certainly don't dial the US country code to make a US to US call, neither should you do it for the web.

Re:Why not localize the browsers instead?

[Manuka]

You certainly don't dial the US country code to make a US to US call, neither should you do it for the web.

Might I remind you that the US country code is '1' and you dial it every time you make a long-distance call...

Re:Why not localize the browsers instead?

[Angerson]

Heh, oops. Maybe I should stick to making comics. But seriously I still think localized browsers might be a good solution.