Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

UK Parliament Domain Without Registrar

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the heller-uses-easydns dept.

asobala writes "According to this story at The Register, the UK parliament is using the domain www.parliament.uk. It's a top-level domain because it was registered before August 1996, before Nominet handled .uk domains. But since there is no registrar, they can't prove that they own it."

11 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Several options to solve this problem... by Akardam · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, short of going in and holding a gun to Thwate's head, they have several options, as I see it:

    1. Setup www.parliment.govt.uk, and have the webserver that handles www.parliment.uk redirect /(.*) to www.parliment.govt.uk/$1.

    2. Sign their own cert.

    3. Farm out the credit card transactions themselves to another site.

    I guess if they got smart about it they could go through some sort of legal process that confirms that they have "ownership" of the netblock that the DNS servers for parliment.uk are on, and therefore they are the defacto owners (posession is 9/10ths of the law?) of parliment.uk.

    Nonetheless, an interesting situation.

    1. Re:Several options to solve this problem... by mocktor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      its a shame that certificates can't be reliably delegated in the same way as DNS - securing the internet would be a much less painful process if the owner of the domain could announce their chosen cert authority as part of their domain's DNS record, then bodies like thawte could be left out of the loop altogether.

      [just my daft ruminations though, feel free to explain why this wouldn't work]

    2. Re:Several options to solve this problem... by jaoswald · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Parliament does not have to go through any externally imposed process to get anyone else to *legally* recognize them; under the British constitution, Parliament can legislate whatever it wants---it is completely and utterly sovereign.

      The only problem is to get Thawte (or, rather, their British representative) to *technically* recognize them, so they can instruct their machines to approve the certificates. The obstacle is not a legal one, but rather a policy of Thawte itself. Thawte's policy is presumably strict so that its other clients can trust that spoofing won't be likely to happen.

    3. Re:Several options to solve this problem... by mgrant · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Your argument is an interesting one, but the problem is that DNS itself is insecure. That's the whole reason projects like DNSSEC exist. If we ever reach the point when we can guarantee that DNS queries are secure, then your proposal would be completely valid. Let's hope we get there someday :)

  2. Hah by fateswarm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Interesting story. It's sounds so strange having all these second level org.uk, ac.uk, police.uk etc. and non an official .uk operator.

    It's the same thing that makes me wonder why is that the case.

    How can all these second level domain operators exist but not an operator of the 1st level?

    Why don't they give it to the sum of the second level operators to decide?

    If the matter is really on the air, that's the most sane solution I can think of

  3. no, somebody else owns it. duh. by jdkane · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Doesn't anybody stop to think that the UK parliament might *implicitly* own the domain www.parliament.uk because they've been using it since before 1996? If they haven't registered it then nobody else has either, so nobody else is more apt to acquire it. And I'm sure somebody else wants it. I don't have a receipt for that pair of boots I bought in 1998. Maybe somebody else owns them even though I've been wearing them for the past 5 years. Come to think about it, I'm going out to buy a new pair of boots. Come on, give us some good articles to talk about.

    1. Re:no, somebody else owns it. duh. by AndrewM1 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      That's a good point. I have no proof that I own this computer that I'm typing on. I have no receipt for it. But I have been using it for a year. So you might think I own it.

  4. .co.uk by Newtonian_p · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I always wondered why I always see .co.uk and (almost) never just .uk.

    I know that co stands for commercial but why doesn't Nominet allow plain .uk to be registered anymore?

    --

    There are 2 kinds of people in this world: Those who write in decimal and those who don't

    1. Re:.co.uk by netsharc · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Interesting point, which makes me remember, that .de domain names are usually just that, plain .de . For example earlier today we had this, ther's also this site. The same thing goes for .ch - for example the URL this famous site - and probably a few more countries.

      Wonder what the regulations really are.

      The DNS system is pretty much full of inconsistencies anyway (.tv, .cx, hmm what else?). I once had an idea how they can be arranged to be more logical, but change would just confuse oh-the-so-numerous websurfing grandmothers of the world.

      --
      What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
  5. Re:.co.uk - GB not UK by abardsley · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Of course, the question should be why doesn't the UK use its *real* ISO country code GB instead of UK.

  6. Possession by _fuzz_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They say that possession is 9/10 of the law. I think the fact that they've had the domain for 9 years should be proof enough that they own it.

    --
    47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.