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Loophole found in Internet Domain Naming
kyndig writes "Just what is the 'spirit of internet naming?' ICANN can tell you, as they are the naming experts. In a recent CNN article, ICANN states EnCirca Domain Register is violating the spirit of internet naming by reselling .pro names.
The report states that in early 2000, ICANN allowed 3rd level domains (foo.bar.pro) to be sold. Later, ICANN allowed 2nd level domains (foo.pro) to be sold for .pro as well. The restriction to this selling was that a user must have the 3rd level domain first. There are no reseller checks or usage enforcement other than the request to own a 3rd level domain from ICANN. EnCirca president plans to continue reselling 2nd level .pro domains, unless ICANN places a restriction on doing so."
Am I the only one who's never seen a .pro domain? .pro domain.
There's one cool thing about this TLD. You have to provide proof of your profession to buy such a domain. Now that's probably the reason why I've never seen a spam advertising a
Underholdning.info
I think that the point is, they wanted the 2nd level to be a generic description of what type of professional service the business provides.
*shrug*
does it really matter?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Basically, no. All levels are handled by DNS. You can use a wildcard, but you could also send, eg, foo.bar.pro to one IP and bar.bar.pro to another. You can also delegate subdomains to different nameservers - so you could delegate foo.bar.pro to your friends nameserver and they would handle all requests for *.foo.bar.pro. That, in effect is how registrars handle second-level domain requests - you query the registrars nameserver for foo.bar and it delegates the request to your nameservers.
This removes a single point of failure from the domain name system - every single root domain server can fail, and most people will only notice when they enter a TLD which doesn't exist (at which point they will get a DNS failure instead of an nonexistend domain error). Similarly, if the .com servers failed, then you would still be able to access .org domains (for example).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Let's say you've got two individuals named John Dow. One's an IP lawyer, and one's a brain surgeon. Both of them have accrued enough fame in their circles that if you were to ask a lawyer and a brain surgeon who Jon Dow was, they'd both immediately have answers, but those answers were different.
However, only one of them could get "johndow.com", leaving the other out in the cold in terms of easy-to-remember domain names. If one were to have "johndow.md.pro" and the other were to have "johndow.law.pro", it would be fairly clear which site was for who, and the domains would be easy to remember.
I guess it simply never caught on.
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Routers don't automatically send it unless the DNS records specify a wildcard for the domain. Slashdot seem to do this (try foo.slashdot.org)
It can also be specified explicitly, when you do that bar.foo.org can point to a completely different server. I do it this way since I have my hosting for various things all spread out. I could still use a wildcard but I don't really see the need.
The Anti-Blog
DNS is a hierarchy of names:
.com, .org, .edu, etc .com DNS servers (there are many) know the IP addresses of the DNS servers for google.com, yahoo.com, citibank.com, etc.
.org, etc), the responsibility of running the DNS servers is in the hands of the domain owner. So Google (the google.com owner) provides IP addresses of its DNS servers to the .com servers, and sets up DNS servers on those IP addresses on its own. In the case of smaller domains, most hosting companies will provide DNS as a part of the hosting package.
- The root DNS servers know the IP addresses of the DNS servers for
- The
- The google.com DNS server knows the IP addresses for the hostnames "www.google.com", "news.google.com", etc.
IF there are any third-level domains under google.com (like corporate.google.com, yomama.google.com, etc) then there are two possibilities:
- the google.com DNS servers know the IP addresses of DNS servers for the subdomains (each subdomain has its own DNS servers), OR
- the google.com DNS server itself also acts as a DNS server for the subdomains, and knows the IP addresses of the hostnames in the subdomains.
Unless you have shitloads of third-level subdomains, and tons of hostnames in those subdomains, it's not generally necessary to run DNS servers for the third-level domains. You could do it, but why make the effort of setting up and maintaining seperate servers for them unless it's necessary to handle a load of traffic?
In theory, you can continue the hierarchy down through as many level of subdomains as you want. I've never personally seen/heard of an independent server for anthing beyond the third level, but they could certainly exist somewhere.
Once you get past the first-level DNS servers (.com,
Ok, the way I understood the article was that you had to own foo.bar.pro before you could get foo.pro. This is operating under the assumption that the type of professional is "bar" and the user is "foo", hence foo.bar.pro. bar.pro is owned by the registrar and can't be bought by an individual, as it is the "class" of profession.
'Course, I could be totally of track. Most of what the ICANN does is so confusing and nonsensical that I'm surprised they even understand it (and I've yet to see proof that they do, so that's open to debate).
When you type http://foo.bar.pro/sucks.html into your browser, firefox connects to foo.bar.pro, requests /sucks.html, and sends another header which says the full url requested is foo.bar.pro/sucks.html.
/etc/hosts if your search order is files before bind. That's how a lot of people block the servers where ad banners are stored.
/web/foo.bar.pro, and add 127.0.0.1 foo-test to /etc/hosts, then you can go to foo-test in your browser and you'll get the foo.bar.pro test site hosted locally.
/etc/hosts and sometimes my server's DNS is having problems but I'm more focused on altering a few webpages on a vhost of mine before fixing the DNS (I know, backward priorities, but still)
You can override hostnames from DNS in
If you run a local apache and specify virtual hostnames like foo-test that point to the disk tre
Hope that answers your question.
I would like to play with vhost within firefox, though, just because I don't like modifying
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Had to read the link myself to understand it, the article summary is less than clear.
Basically, the idea was you could initially only buy third level domains such as IAAL.law.pro, but you had to provide credentials to establish your professional status to buy them.
ICANN then allowed second level domains to be sold - e.g. IAAL.pro - but you had to own a third level domain first and hence have gone through the credential-establishing process.
EnCirca are selling second level domains to be sold without having a third level domain first, thus skipping the credential-establishing bit entirely, and this is bad.
That's as far as I understand it anyway. Does that make sense?
Actually, it is quite simple for them to fight. Unless they keep a record of the company attempting to launch the new tld, barring getting everyone to manually modify their DNSs, the TLD won't be visible or will only be visible to a small number of people.
I can't be bothered to dig up the story, but awhile back there was a company selling a "driver" for a new TLD that basically redirected your primary DNS lookup to their servers and, voila, *.whatever worked. People bought domains under it only to realize that the rest of the world couldn't get to their sites. It lasted about twenty seconds.
What gets me about these perennial arguments is that there is NOTHING stopping someone from setting up an alternate root server system. Honestly. Say you could pitch AOL and, say, Verizon that *.SomeTLD was the hottest property. They'd have to add ONE FSCKING LINE to their root server hints. Okay, you'd probably want to be as redundant as the current root server system, so it would take 13 lines. THAT'S IT! You'd have something insane like 75% of the US market connected from making two phone calls.
No, really, it IS that simple. The fact that no one has convinced any of the major providers to do just that is evidence that ICANN, like it or not, is something people want--and by "people" I mean people who have the ability to replace ICANN overnight, but choose not to.
In short, get over it, folks...
It would be like Verisign taking control of all *.com domain names.... wait, never mind ;)
Actually, I think I know what they are trying to say but it did take me a while to parse it...
.pro. Now they allow you to own 2nd level names that match your 3rd level name.
Originally you could only buy 3rd level names under
So, if you own JohnDoe.lawyer.pro you can also buy JohnDoe.pro. But you still can't buy lawyer.pro since that is a profession name and is controlled by the registrar.
Well, personally I'm tri-lingual (English, Dutch, French), but if I want Google in French, I go to google.com and then click "French". What I will never do is visit google.fr.
.co.uk page and get English, and pay in UKP. Stupid, stupid.
.be or .fr site, for crying out loud!
I dislike and boycott sites that force a language choice on me - e.g. hotels.com, which since I'm in Belgium, forces me to choose either Dutch or French. So I go to the
Country domains are fine in countries with one non-English language. But that's a subset of the world. And it's far better to use the browser settings to choose the language for a user. If my desktop language is French, probably I want to surf in French too. But not because I go to a
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