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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.
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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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
...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
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.
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.
I thought whitehouse.com was for renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, and for other PAC commercial activities? :)
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.
Because goatse.com just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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
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