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uk.co Domains Knocked Offline By Registrar Dispute
An anonymous reader writes "The .uk.co domain was wiped off the face of the Internet this morning with no notice, leaving more than 8,000 livid individuals and businesses - including Amazon and Priceline - with no Web presence or email.
I saw this on nvnews.net, which originally came from the register, but since the domain is wiped out, you can no longer reach the article." Actually, you can read the story fine on theregister.co.uk. ;)
As The Reg article says, it was used by these two companies, for example, to catch people who typed http://www.amazon.uk.co by accident. Both these two still have their co.uk versions working successfully.
These domains are just a revisit of deceptive sites that uses common misspellings. Like amason.com
Help fight continental drift.
For those that don't know, "sub judice" means that Mr. Fox doesn't want the media to do something that would influence the judge.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
What's with all these top-level domains disappearing? First .name, now .uk.co...
I'm just glad I still have my trusty old .cx domain name.
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
Read the article on el Reg, it's got the goods.
Personally, I believe people that do this ( like the .au.com people ) deserve what they get.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Anyone using a .uk.co domain deserves to be knocked off line. They were 99.99999% chance a complete scam anyway. Geez. Are we crying for the internet crooks now?
Err, because if every domain was a .com, we may as well drop the .com suffix and go to arbitrary names. Which would defeat the purpose of the domain name system altogether --- we would lose easy distribution of the workload, and just put more pressure on a few servers.
Heirarchies are a Good Thing, as any geek should know.
[and, besides, often you want to distinguish yourself as belonging to a specific region...]
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
There were only 8,000 domains in "uk.co", and they were mostly slimeballs anyway, trolling for people who don't know they should be typing "co.uk". No big loss.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because there are few good .com addresses left? I wanted flarg.com, not flarg.org, but flarg.com was taken a few months before I registered mine...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Cast a .co.uk domain to an idiot, and you get Colombia...
It's not that big of a deal.
Maybe because there are so many .com's that it's hard to come up with anything meaningful because pretty much everything obvious has been registered already?
So, by wiping out this domain we avoid the typical web user playing through the following scenario:
1) Web user thinks: "I need to order a book, let's go to Amazon"
2) Web user types: "amazon.uk.co"
3) Web user sees 15,000 porn sites pop up
4) Web user starts to sweat, looks around office, hopes no one walks by
5) Web user clicks furiously, but fails to keep up with the rush of pop-ups, pop-unders, and installation prompts
6) Web user co-worker walks by, see's web user sweating, moaning softly and clicking so fast his/her hand is a blur
7) Web user hits reset button on PC, loses all work, but manages to stem the tide of porn
8) Web user sees co-worker next in cafeteria next day sitting with several other people, all are looking at web user and snickering...
It's happened to all of us, admit it! Getting rid of "spam" domains is a good thing!
Now, if they could could just get rid of whitehouse.com, I'd have a lot more respect for the American government!
wha? That's a very us-centric and limited view of the world you have there.
.uk.co and it's brothas are "STANDARD" too.
Just like it would be good riddance if the .au.com domains dropped off the internet. These scammers register a single .com domain for $15/year or whatever and then try so sell as many ".au.com" domains as they can, all pure profit, to suckers who couldn't get the .com.au domain they wanted.
I've heard some talk of other countries, across the ocean, I don't believe it myself though.
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How do I get all this sand out of my eyes?
I bet IAmAPastyWhiteLoserGeek.com is still available- why don't you grab that one?
How many nubies do you think key in uk.co instead of co.uk... ;-)
Having amazon.uk.co and amazon.co.uk saves some grandmother with slight dementia from seeing hardcore russian schoolgirls instead of being able to look at book-reviews written by some phoney posing as Prince Charles (different story altogether google for it
Did you know that ICANN requires you to have a physical address in your registrar record? Someone tried take one of my ".net" domains on a technicality because I had a P.O. Box listed. More info here.
...why the FUCK are UK companies registering COLUMBIAN domains? I have absolutely no fucking sympathy for them over this. They have reaped what they have sowed.
SO maybe Amazon thought of this one already...
waht is a 'pising match"??????// pls explain, thx
ADVthxANCE
How could this be modded to informative? What a bunch of useless tripe. First of all, it's not Columbia, it's ColOmbia, there is no u. Colombia is the country in South America that controls the .co domain, and I don't believe the National University of Colombia owns it- almost all Colombian newspapers and media are using the .co domain. Columbia is the name of various cities, counties, rivers, etc. in the United States- notice the 'u', and is not to be confused with Colombia the country.
When did Columbia change from a (banana?) Republic to a Dominion? I must have missed that!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
...leaving more than 8,000 livid individuals and businesses - including Amazon and Priceline - with no Web presence or email
Somehow I doubt that amazon's web and email presence was severely limited by the lack of an amazon.uk.co domain.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Bye bye to Castle Technologies, Linux kernel pirates*. Why you couldn't just use castle.co.uk in the first place, we may never know.
*: ALLEGEDLY
Does my bum look big in this?
From www.uk.co:
....
.co top level domain names by no later than 31 December 2003.
.uk.co people nearly two months to find new domains. It's not like they just swept the rug out from underneath their feet as the reg's article seems to imply (though the article does mention that this was mandated last July).
Since December 2002, we had offered to enter into a new arrangement with Net Registrar in order to safeguard your uk.co registrations with them for a short period of time to allow you sufficient time to transition to alternative domain names.
A Council of State decision in Colombia dated 12 July 2002 ordered the Minister of Communications in Colombia to take over the administration of
They had been planning this since July, and while they were supposed to have done it on the 31st of December, they actually seem to have given all the
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
And that's good enough for me! Sorry again about the spelling though!
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Because I'm not pasty...
Remember Castle Software from the GPL violation articles on /.? You know, the guys who (supposedly) ripped off GPLed kernel code for RISC OS. Yup, they were www.castle.uk.co. Not anymore. The vengeful spirit of RMS is seeking revenge on these bastards by knocking out the whole uk.co faux-domain.
Yup, but you also mixed up "the Univ. of Columbia" (which is in NY), with the University of the Andes, which happens to be in Colombia. There is no "University of Colombia".
They were honest mistakes, but certainly your post isn't informative. In fact it helps to spread misinformation.
It turns out that mail.com had sold engineer.com to somebody, and that was that. I don't know how many freemailer's lost their email address because of that, but it must have been more than a few. Heck, engineer.com is still probably getting spam from all those online sweepstakes sites that I signed up with way back then, hehehe...
What was annoying was the absolute lack of warning. Yes, the mail.com agreement stated subject to termination without advance warning but I honestly didn't expect them to actually play that trump card. Well, live and learn.
Clickety Click
hardcore russian schoolgirls
What are those? Are you talking about Russian school girls that work hard and study a lot?
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
I think I'll stick to replying to FP's. ;-)
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
Heirarchies are a Good Thing, as any geek should know.
Only a poser geek, really (based on moderation you received, we clearly have a lot of those on /.). Hierarchies are actually a very bad thing because they obscure information. That is, in fact, what this whole story is about!
The real situation is this: we have companies in the United Kingdom that want to be found on the Internet. The problem is that there are two actual hierarchies in place that could be the root under which to file such a domain, those being .com and .uk. Then there are the "off" hierarchies that get used not because of their geographical location as intended, but because their abbreviation corresponds to some common usage (.co being the case here).
So the hierarchy adds to the confusion of both the user and the company. The company has to figure out and register domains in whatever branch of the hierarchy the user may have wandered into, and the user never learns how addressing on the Internet is supposed to work and so they continue to wander around without aim. Elimination of the hierarchy would go a long way to clearing up the confusion and getting back to the simple idea of looking for, among other things, a company in the UK.
Of course, nobody should expect that to happen any time soon. Getting rid of the hierarchy means getting rid of the need to create new top-level domains and therefore eliminates that ICANN profit center.
Yup, but you also mixed up "the Univ. of Columbia" (which is in NY), with the University of the Andes, which happens to be in Colombia. There is no "University of Colombia".
Nor is there a University of Columbia. There is, however, a Columbia University in NYC.
They were honest mistakes, but certainly your post isn't informative. In fact it helps to spread misinformation.
Right back at you
I thought whitehouse.com was for renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, and for other PAC commercial activities? :)
Ah, for a second I thought you said often you want to distinguish yourself as belonging to a specific religion.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
You're right! My mistake. (Although in my opinion a slightly smaller one). There is a University of British Columbia to make matters worse.
OK, point taken. Although I was not really criticizing the poster, but the moderators who modded him as informative.
Take my domain for example. wickeddj.com doesn't have quite the same effect as wicked.dj.
... and then there were none
A monocline grouping is essentially a two-level hierarchy; like car makes and models, brands and products, file folders and files, or menus and menu items. That's the reason (or one of 'em) that the CCTLDs that had been holding out for a complex city.region.category.tld naming system have been reluctantly converting to name.tld - a two-level hierarchy is ideal, from a UI perspective, and has many useful parallels in the real world.
Why doesn't everyone just get an IP address? This system only works if everyone gets equal share and plays fairly. But we're all a bunch of liers, cheaters and theives.
The full name is "Columbia University in the City of New York." HTH.
Every sale counts? Every dollar matters. Ok, lets explain the multimillion dolllar executive salaries. Every dollar is critical!
Ahahaha! HAHA!!!!!
>Heirarchies are a Good Thing, as any geek should know. of course they are, except for The Evil.
Parent is off-topic. Please mod down.
No offense, but nobody cares about your stupid bash prompt (which looks horrendous, by the way). Moderators, please moderate parent down as -1, Offtopic (can anybody argue that it ISN'T?)
As I've got no way to fix this in the above post, it would be better if we just buried it somewhere, like -1.
Yours,
Y.L.F.I.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
They're standards as in W3C standards, in that they are made up by a bunch of dorks nobody ever listens to.
The linux kernel development follows a clear hierarchy. I guess that means data is being obscured and that's a very bad thing, according to your logic. You really should think before you recite your leftwing dogmas. You sound like another lunatic from the "informtion wants to be" linux fringe.
Because goatse.com just doesn't have the same ring to it.
For flamebait, we have a pretty interesting discussion going on here! I have a pet peeve about people that can't spell the name of South America's oldest democracy correctly.
No worries. I was just giving you shit.
I officially dub that the nicest flamewar ever.
You might want to check my journal... Just FYI. I was wondering exactly who that it was that the stalking was actually meant for. I guess he took my link to your site in my user info page to mean it was my site. Ho hum.
:-) It's my only real claim to fame.
BTW: Handy webpage.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually, I find things like this pretty cool. Granted, they don't belong here, but you don't have to be such a jerk about it. I know, it's slashdot, and you're some 12-year-old kid weighing 180 lbs. trying to impress your 7-year-old little brother, but you're impressing no one else by trolling.
That would be quite ironic that a god would choose an atheist as his representative...
(Yes, I realize you are joking)
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
I was quite proud of my "permanent" iname.com address several years ago... till mail started to jam or be delayed for days. Then they were bought by mail.com, and it got even worse. The conditions kept deteriorating slow, bounces, no POP mail, and one day ALL my mail folders disappeared during an outage when no mail was delivered fpr several days. They apologised, but it was gone. By then of course I'd gotten a (slightly) more reliable primary address, but it was still galling. At least it still worked well enough for me to set up an auto responder to tell people to telephone me instead (I wasn't going to give my new address to spammers). So I use Yahoo, and then they upped the charge (for POP) to $20/year....
I'd like to introduce you to this wonderfull little thing called punctuation, here's something to get you started: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-10 -11&res=l.
I suggest you also investigate the "comma", see, the English language isn't so hard when you try.
The claim to "South America's oldest democracy" really isn't that impressive. I have molds in my refrigerator that have maintained a functioning government longer than any South American nation.
Off the top of my head... I would imagine that the difference between philosophy and religion is that religion dictates specific guidelines for social interaction.
Also, religions have a tendency to be (on a individual scale) mutually exclusive. ie: someone cannot be both Jewish and a Muslim -- a person claiming to be both would be neither.
Philosophies do not seem to be mutually exclusive.
I generally consider Buddhism to be a religion, but Taoism to be more of a philosophy. (If someone has a different opinion about Taoism, I'd be welcome to hear it)
— darco
that's not hierarchy and that's why you're not paid as well as some of your peers.
Well I had a opition to get a .com yahoo address but since yahoo is part of .ca which is Canada I got that.
For web site hosting you have your opitions also .org.ca.com. and now some address has change to .tv.
http://www.freewebs.com/welcome_to_my_store
> I've heard some talk of other countries, across
> the ocean, I don't believe it myself though.
You mean the USA is just a myth??! Whoa, why didn't someone tell me.
Heh. You've obviously never done tech support. Or, for that matter, dealt with the general public as part of your job.
We've managed to prove that human stupidity isn't infinite by the sheer fact that we haven't yet left the planet for the cockroaches, but I assure you that value is very, very large indeed.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Another reason why people might get mixed up and use .uk.co domains is due to the JANET addressing scheme.
JANET (Joint Academic Network) is a UK network, and it used (uses??) a reverse domain names, i.e. you would mail someone@uk.ac.* (Well the Brits always does things backwards...)
Just google for JANET and co.uk or co.ac and you will see enough references for that.
Heh, you think a simple uk.co backwardnocity is bad, at I'll explain very slowly and clearly that "It is very important to make sure the long end of your gun is pointed toward you at all times. If you have the short end, the only one with the hole in it pointed toward you you will be shooting yourself and i will point and laugh." Then I get to watch as the people don't notice that they are shooting themself in the face with their laser the entire 7 minutes of the game.
Some times I wish we had paintball instead of laser tag.
Off-topic?!? ummm what was the topic again?
--- As to make my comment seem, by comparison, more intelegent... doodie doodie doodie poop poop poop!
One problem with this: it doesn't scale all that well to hundreds of thousands of entries. Guess how many virtual hosts there are...?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
It's called logical hierarchy. Rather than lump everything together in one monolithic mass it's broken down into logically related topics. In much the same way as the top-level has com, org and net the UK cc domain has:
- co, ltd, plc for companies
- org for non-profit and other roganisations
- mod for the military
- police for the police
- gov for the government
- me for people
and probably some others.(\/)atthew
Well, they do have a top-level domain registered, but noone much seems to use it. I guess they're just some backward third world country that hasn't discovered the internet yet.
And at the very end of the film there was a text screen saying "oh, and after this he converted to buddhism and became a nice guy." Argh!
Sure they can, they are quite similar religions.
no sig.
Also presumably it lets you make some good gags about "shaking Djibouti."
Sergio Garcia (Colombian, and former student of universidad de los andes)
"Agree with them now, it will save so much time."
Ha ha. Colombia has been a democracy since the early 19th century. And while it has it problems now, the government has been continuous since the beginning, which is more than can be said for its neighbors. So maybe its not impressive due to a lack of knowledge on the part of ./ readers, or better yet, the American public in general.
By the way, the terror to drug link in Afghanistan? 80% of your coke and heroin is coming from Colombia. Betcha didn't know that either.
It's amazing how an ignorant writer can fail to inform
.uk.co was wiped, which in turn has 8000+ holders of *.uk.co 3rd LEVEL SUBDOMAINS hanging dry. How can the registrar be held responsible for a domain registrant's sale of such 8000 subdomains ? More importantly, why did they care in the first place ?
m ode=nes ted&order=1
He need to know the difference between a DOMAIN (.co) and a SUBDOMAIN (.uk.co).
The SUBDOMAIN
This has been going on for several years, those interested may babelfish it here:
http://www.colext.org/article.php?sid=316&
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
Well I am glad the Internet architects were poser geeks or IP routers would have lookup tables with 2 billion entries.
You're looking at my comments the wrong way. Hierarchies often make things easier for computers, and that was necessary when a lot of the technology (networking and otherwise) was new. It's the same way a file hierarchy made sense for simple storage, but a database is usually a better choice when you want to deal with the actual properties of the data rather than their path. So the properties a domain might have are entity="commercial" and location="United Kingdom". Those could be abbreviated to co and uk respectively, and discarding the hierarchy would actually reduce the size of lookup tables because register.co.uk and register.uk.co (to say nothing of all the other combinations) would resolve to the same entry. The only tricky part is doing discovery without a hierarchy in place, but that could be addressed by associating a priority with a property.
Now that is informative. By the way, I also graduated from Los Andes. :-)
I thought the whole idea of the domain name system was that it was supposed to be simple. If you need to register extra addresses to catch typo's or use weird combinations of other country's tld's then the system doesnt work. Also the fact is people like the ".com" tld, its become a fashon label, this also goes against the system. Maybe we need a new way of naming - (obviously one thats open and free)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Heh. You've obviously never done tech support. Or, for that matter, dealt with the general public as part of your job.
Well, actually, I have... I spent at least three years doing tech support in New Zealand, and not once did I encounter someone doing something that stupid.
However, since you obviously have, you must tell me what country you work in, so I can avoid taking support jobs in that country. I thought the people I had to deal with were fuck-knuckles, but they were geniuses compared with whoever you have to deal with.
You have my deepest condolences!
The Internet started out in the US, so when the TLDs were made up, all the Internet hosts were mostly in the US, so they saw no need to give their domains a CC. They gave other countries CCs so as not to confuse them with their own systems. As the US invented the Internet, they got to make this up. It's a bit like with England inventing postage-stamps. English stamps are the only country's stamps that do not say which country they're from. All other country's postage-stamps print the country's name on them, so if there's no country's name on a stamp, it's English.