ICANN Considers Single Letter Domains

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "...as the Internet's key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names. In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will chart a course for single-letter Web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those names could start to appear next year."

Comments

these are simple, just like unix!

[yagu]

Single letter domains? That seems way too simplistic, obscure, and obfuscated! Hmmmm, sounds very unix-like, which got me to wondering if and how many unix commands had been snarfed... a casual off-the-top-of-my-head whatifs:

• grep: "grep.com" 207.234.133.85
• ls: "ls.com" 69.25.142.3
• ping: "ping.com" 198.65.117.133
• awk: "awk.com" 212.227.57.121
• cd: "cd.com" 65.61.146.199
• lpr: "lpr.com" unknown host lpr.com
• ...

Cool! I'm guessing almost all, or all (belatedly discovered not all, see above), are taken.

Reminds me of my attempt way back to get "command.com" which would have been very cool, but alas, a Canadian company of all things already had it, and did not respond to my overtures to get the domain. Sigh

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[Anonymous Coward]

lpr: "lpr.com" unknown host lpr.com
...liar!

Domain Name: LPR.COM

Record expires on 31-May-2006.
Record created on 30-May-1997.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[waif69]

However, lp: "lp.com" 207.155.248.122

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try device names.

fd0.com ?
hda.com ?
tty.com ?
ttys0.com ?

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[handsome b]

alas, a Canadian company of all things already had it

What's that supposed to mean, eh? We don't use computers?

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[the31337z3r0]

I thought Canadians spoke English & French, not German... http://command.com/

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[hackstraw]

I hate to be pedantic, but 'cd' is not a command. Its a shell builtin.

It was hilarious when a coworker tried to do 'sudo cd some_directory_with_strong_permissions', and was asking me why it wasn't working. What's scarier, is that she had sudo access. What's even more scary, is that she eventually took my job after I left.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[maxwell demon]

And why is a shell builtin not a command?
For me, a command is something which I can type in a shell. It may execute a shell builtin, a shell function, an alias, or an executable found in the path, but in any case it's a command.

See e.g. the bash man page:

Simple Commands
              A simple command is a sequence of optional variable assignments fol-
              lowed by blank-separated words and redirections, and terminated by a
              control operator. The first word specifies the command to be executed,
              and is passed as argument zero. The remaining words are passed as
              arguments to the invoked command.

See, no mention that a command has to correspond to an executable.
It also has a section named "SHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS".

The fact that you cannot use sudo to issue a cd command is completely unrelated to that nomenclature (as is the fact that a csh may not be able to execute a bash builtin command). Note that even if sudo successfully executed the cd command (say, by executing it in a root subshell), the intended effect will not happen (because the directory change would only happen in the subshell - which immediatly terminates afterwards -, and the original shell's current directory will not be affected).

So before being pedantic, better first check you are right.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[hackstraw]

So before being pedantic, better first check you are right.

I'm always right and I never lie!

Note that even if sudo successfully executed the cd command (say, by executing it in a root subshell), the intended effect will not happen (because the directory change would only happen in the subshell - which immediatly terminates afterwards -, and the original shell's current directory will not be affected).

Yup. That is why I thought it was funny. 'cd' has to either be a builtin for a shell or something you do inside of another program, chdir() is the usual case. Plus bash is not the sanest of shells for interactive use (ouch, I feel the downwards moderation already). Read the INVOCATION section if you don't believe me. Its not entirely bash's fault because it has tons of legacy junk left over from /bin/sh. Anyway, my shell, zsh, has a manpage called zshbuiltins, and cd is listed there. Its under the builtins section of the csh shell's manpage.

For me, a command is something which I can type in a shell. It may execute a shell builtin, a shell function, an alias, or an executable found in the path, but in any case it's a command.

Fine. TZ=zulu is a command? Type 'which TZ' if your shell has a builtin for which.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[Pxtl]

You guys seriously think there are any .com domain names under 6 chars that are unclaimed? How cute. /used to have Pxtl.org a long time ago.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[petermgreen]

i entered 5 garbage letters (sdfgd) on enom.com and although the particular combination i came up with was unavailible i got a number of 5 and 4 character suggestions.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[jleq]

jleq.com, bitchezzzzzzzzzz

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine. TZ=zulu is a command?

Why wouldn't it be? Sure, it's not an executable program, but it certainly is a command.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[Oopsz]

just change your registration country of choice.. /plur.ca

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[trentblase]

Please, a command is anything you tell the computer to do. If you're typing it into a command line interface, it's probably a command. Also see the definition at whatis.com or here:

http://searchwin2000.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0, 290660,sid1_gci211818,00.html

So who gets them? Sesame street?

[plover]

This posting brought to you by the domains "F" and "U".

But they already exist

[slavemowgli]

But these already exist, don't they? Or have I been imagining websites like http://www.x.org/ all along?

Re:But they already exist

[gvc]

x.org has four letters and five characters.

Re:But they already exist

[6*7]

[mod redudant here]

You didn't RTFA, did you?

Re:But they already exist

[mysqlrocks]

FTA:

Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.

Re:But they already exist

[yootje]

"Single-letter names under ".com," ".net" and ".org" were set aside in 1993 as engineers grew concerned about their ability to meet the expected explosion in demand for domain names. They weren't sure then whether a single database of names could hold millions -- more than 40 million in the case of ".com" today. Six single-letter names already claimed at the time -- "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" -- were allowed to keep their names for the time being." source

Re:But they already exist

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. The URL is four letters and five characters. The TLD is three letters. The domain is one letter.

So unless we're all missing something here, ICANN already do allow single letter domains. Wether they allow single letter TLDs is totally different discussion.

Re:But they already exist

[slavemowgli]

Strange question, considering that this is Slashdot. :)

Re:But they already exist

[David Hume]

But these already exist, don't they? Or have I been imagining websites like http://www.x.org/ all along?

x.org has four letters and five characters.

I'm not sure that the latter distinction gets what is, or will be, new -- whatever that is. From the article:

Meanwhile, a handful of companies have asked ICANN to free up the single characters. Overstock.com Inc., for instance, prefers a single-letter brand of "o.com" because its newer businesses no longer fit its original mission of providing discounts on excess inventory.

How is "o.com" different than "x.org"? I just typed x.org into my browswer windown and it resolved or redirected to http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ and I got the website with the title "X.Org - Home"

Re:But they already exist

[Ulven]

RTFA:

"Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being."

Re:But they already exist

[Pxtl]

How long does it take to make a transaction with icann? (26*3-6)*time = how long it will take for this situation to resolve after they release the 1 char domains.

So when do they do the opposite? Make a "general" TLD? Just require that the "general" domains be 4 or more chars. Then send any request involving a TLD with more than 3 chars to the new "general" TLD's domains. Ditch the whole "com/net/org" argument by just letting them name their domain whatever, as long as it's over 3 characters.

Re:But they already exist

[Articuno]

You are new here, aren't you ? :-)

Re:But they already exist

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

q.net is broken.

Re:But they already exist

[Gordonjcp]

Imagine having just a single character as the whole domain name though - no TLD, just a single letter!

That would open up *thousands* of new possiblilies for domain names...

Re:But they already exist

[ShortSpecialBus]

perhaps my counting is wrong, but I'm pretty sure it would only open up 26...

Re:But they already exist

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

X.org was a special exception. The general rule prohibits single-letter domains.

Single "Letter" Domains

[Nightreaver]

So MX on these domains won't be very useful?

Re:Single "Letter" Domains

[Anonymous Coward]

No mod points, so I'll just say it.
Good show!

Now Taco is mocking us

[Anonymous Coward]

He's going to post all Beatles Beatles stories to spite us.

Re:Now Taco is mocking us

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the Overlord steps in to dismiss the conspiracy theories....

Re:Now Taco is mocking us

[Omega697]

Now the stories aren't even "well summarized". The entire thing is just a quote from the article.

Re:Now Taco is mocking us

[AltGrendel]

At least they aren't using Roland Piquepaille anymore.
God, what a silly name.

Only 26

[mysqlrocks]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Re:Only 26

[ZachPruckowski]

no, there are 26 letters, times the major .whatevers There's .com, .net, .org, .info, then the ones that go by country, like .co.uk or .de That makes for a lot more than 26 possibilities, but you are correct that relative to the internet as a whole, it's not a lot of domains.

Re:Only 26

[gasmonso]

So what if they are available to the wealthy only. It's not likes it food or some other necessity like healthcare. It's just a damn URL. And it's only 26 domain names. The other trillion billion are available to the poor. Good to see the Slashdot crowd worried about the little people though.

gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Only 26

[InvalidError]

If they do letters, they will probably do numbers as well. That's 10 more options for each TLD.

Re:Only 26

[Spy der Mann]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy.

3. Profit!!!

It all makes sense now.

Re:Only 26

[Rakishi]

So are large diamonds and top of the line cars, your point being?

Re:Only 26

[keithmoore]

So let's see...ICANN is devoting valuable energy to deciding whether it should free up a tiny number of new domains. The domains will inevitably cost a lot of money. The only question is who gets it. If they released the domains under the normal first-come first-first serve policy they would be snapped up in microseconds by speculators and auctioned off, and the speculators would get the money. OTOH if ICANN tries to make the money itself, or split it with registries, then they subject themselves to charges of inappropriately lining their pockets and favoring wealthy commercial interests.

This will not do a thing for the net as a whole and will only make more trouble for ICANN.

Re:Only 26

[mysqlrocks]

My point is that if they were going to make these domain names available they should have done it from the very beginning or not at all. It's as if (as the article points out) Central Park suddenly became available for land development. Granted only the wealthy can afford to live near Central Park as it is but that market has developed over time - not suddenly been opened up. Where are the profits from the sale of these domain names going? One could argue that the Internet (like Central Park) belongs to the public. Is the "public" going to benefit from the sale of these domain names or are a few people going to get rich off of it?

Re:Only 26

[chris_eineke]

Consider http://k.de/ :P

Re:Only 26

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's less than you might think....

gTLDs - .com .edu .gov .int .mil .net and .org

Of those, only the .com, .net and .org are 'open' for registration so that gives you 3 x 26 = 78

Then you've got the new TLDs; .biz .info .name .pro .aero .coop and .museum

Of those 3 are sponsored (.aero .coop and .museum) so the policies regarding registration are at the discretion of the sponsor. That leaves 4 more TLDs under the control of ICANN as far as policies go. We're up to 7 x 26 = 182

Then there are the ccTLDs; .ac .ad .ae .af .ag. .ai .al .an ......... .za .zm .zw

But the ccTLDs are under the control of a delegated agent in the country involved and the policies are once again at the discretion of the delegated agent. You've just lost the 240 x 26 which would have really bulked out those numbers.

Oh, and then you have to take away the 6 existing one letter domain names which leaves us with a grand total of new 'approved by ICANN' one letter domains of;

(7 x 26) - 6 = 176

So it's not that many....

Re:Only 26

[m50d]

OTOH if ICANN tries to make the money itself, or split it with registries, then they subject themselves to charges of inappropriately lining their pockets and favoring wealthy commercial interests.

I think they've already shown they're not overly concerned about such charges.

Re:Only 26

[way2trivial]

get the odd's , then sell third level domain rights to a number of radio stations

got 5.com? get 100.5 FM KY bidding against 100.5 fm NY

Re:Only 26

[Anonymous Coward]

By auctioning the single letter domains on a yearly basis, ICANN could probably make enough to cover their entire budget.

Next year, increase the price by whatever ICANN's budget goes up by, give the winner the option of keeping it.

Re:Only 26

[StupidHelpDeskGuy]

Some of them are already in place.

Check out http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/11/29/single .letter.domains.ap/index.html/

Sounds like they're expecting 6 to 7 figures for each domain name.

Check out the status of six single-letter names registered before restrictions were in place:

q.com: Jumps to Qwest Communications International Inc.'s "qwest.com."

x.com: Goes to eBay Inc.'s PayPal site. X.com Corp. is PayPal's former name.

z.com: Reaches Web page for Nissan North America's Z sports cars.

i.net: Used by I.NET, a domain name registration company.

q.net: Registered to "Q Networks," though Web site appears inactive. The Internet Archive last recorded activity atthe domain in 1997.

x.org: Home page for X.Org Foundation, which maintains graphical interface technology for Linux and Unix computers.

Re:Only 26

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you have the .com, .org, ect, but that will just launch a bunch of lawsuites between all the companies who are registering them becase a.com is just too similar to a.net.

The owners of a.com would argue that their potential costomers are getting confused because of a.net's simlilar product offering.

Owners of a.com have more money than a.net and eventually a.com that they have the legal right to a.net and so on.

Re:Only 26

[monkeydo]

What would the "public" be giving up? Do these domains have some intrinsic value that is currently vested in the "public"?

Re:Only 26

[mysqlrocks]

You are pointing out where the "Central Park" analogy breaks down. Central Park has intrinsic value to the "public" and single letter domain names do not. However, why should one organization benefit so mightily from something that belongs to the "public" even if that something has no intrinsic value yet? Now, if ICANN has some plans to use this money for the good of the Internet (or "public") then that's a different story.

Re:Only 26

[drasfr]

They are concerned... because as one of the previous poster above said, there are probably about 126 domains to be available.

Now if you read the article and that most domains will go in the 6figures, and most like with the crazyness around these days, over a million $$. It is a LOT of money for Icann.

Even in the case of the .com only, minus the few already registered. The ones left can easily make over $100K each... consider that usually one domain name is if I recall right $3 to the registrar. Those are the equivalent of AT LEAST 33.000 domains. EACH. Not bad! Especially if ICANN introduce a mandate that says they receive all or a part of the fee...

so, I would believe it is about money... Yup.

Re:Only 26

[eneville]

DENIC look after .de, not ICANN.

Re:Only 26

[david duncan scott]

It always amazes me how many radio stations, given a nicely unique set of call letters like our local WIYY instead go with "98rock.com" and such. (Actually, now that I look, WIYY is at 98online.com, because some other "98 Rock" has 98rock.com. They've registered wiyy.com, but they don't seem to use it.)

Re:Only 26

[legirons]

Consider http://k.de/

or http://x.org/

Re:Only 26

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because most people connect a radio station with the number they put on the dial to tune it in. The station identification breaks first identify themselves by frequency and then add the call letters. The listeners may or may not even know that their favorite radio station is WXRK or WZZO.

I wish we could make better use of the .us domain. Then 98 Rock in NY could be 98rock.ny.us and 98 Rock in LA could be 98rock.ca.us. But then, nobody asked me.

Re:Only 26

[70Bang]

No, it's still twenty-six.

Just like when you register now: You check [x].com [x].net .... and you've got multiple TLDs covered with a single registration.


Is anyone keeping score as to how many stories Carl Fogle has posted?


The requirements for techncial jobs are becoming stiffer.

Re:Only 26

[mikrorechner]

Don't get your hopes up - .de is under jurisdiction of DENIC, not ICANN.

And DENIC doesn't even allow 2-digit domains. There are a few exceptions (like ix.de) that were registered before DENIC adoptef this policy.

Re:Only 26

[urlgrey]

Personally, I don't see why there's all the kerfuffle. You're spot on: there are only ~200 these domains available and most of those don't even matter.

So you've got s.pro

Great. Um. Name.

With the billions of people on the globe and ~200--indeed fewer than 100 if you count only the .net/.com/.org--this seems to be not even worth discussing. Further, I'd venture that the majority of them with end up being parked domains anyway, so it's an even smaller issue still.

Re:Only 26

[Anonymous Coward]

Only twenty six in English...
What about all the other unicode possibilities:
* Accented characters (French, German, Spanish, etc)
* Katakana
* Chinese

Re:Only 26

[damiam]

I would gain a lot of respect for ICANN if they auctioned them off and gave the money to charity. But will they? Almost certainly not.

Re:Only 26

[damiam]

You don't do that when these domains are likely to cost thousands of dollars each (at the very least).

Re:Only 26

[Rakishi]

ICANN needs money to operate. Any money it gains from this will be money it does not need to get from other sources. As such we all benefit as ICANN's oeprations are generally quite invovled with the function of the internet.

Single letter domains either need to cost a lot or be given out to pre-selected institutions/individuals. Otherwise, it'd be a madhouse and they'd cost a lot anyway except the public wouldn't get any benefit from the high cost.

Re:Only 26

[zerofret]

Wouldn't you get a lot more than 26 single character names when you throw in non-US centric characters? I can imagine someone in the banking industry would love to get €.com.

slashdot.o ?

[saskboy]

how.r.u ?

This could .b confusing, .a?

Re:slashdot.o ?

[MikeFM]

f.u!

Can I register that?

Re:slashdot.o ?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

I was thinking more along the lines of "/.org". ;o)

A shame that'll never be possible.

Re:slashdot.o ?

[Anonymous Coward]

r.t.f.a.com! shmuck.

Re:slashdot.o ?

[Young Master Ploppy]

I already fear the inevitable : a.s.l

tinyurl?

[circletimessquare]

does this put tinyurl out of business?

Re:tinyurl?

[Anonymous Coward]

does this put tinyurl out of business?

No, but it would open the door for "reallytinyurl"

Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Slime-dogg]

For some strange reason, I want to read the comments on every story that this dude posts... just to see the AC post that "* * Beatles Beatles is a spammeR!!!"

Anyways... soon, I can get my domain of a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i.j.k.l.m.n.o.p.q.r.s.t.u.v.w.x.y. z!

Single-letter domains

[tomhudson]

Hey, ICANN - This post brought to you by the web sites "f" and "u"

Sheesh, anything for a buck. If I had known that to make it big on the net, all you had to do was act like a cheap hooker ...

tt

3...2...1...

[AkaXakA]

....Gone before mere mortals can say click!

Re:3...2...1...

[XxtraLarGe]

Apparently, they are already gone. I just did a search on Register.com for x.com, and it is already taken. It is just a redirect. click here to see the registration info.

Re:3...2...1...

[p0rnking]

Certain letters such as x (x.org), y are already taken, which is mentioned in the article

I just don't see why single letter domain names ar

[putko]

I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.

Nor do I see why they had to get held back (mostly -- just check the list) until now.

Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?

I would guess that at some point you won't have domains, but some sort of searching facility -- e.g. a bunch of tags. At that point, the name won't really matter, and you probably won't want to remember most of them.

E.g. your microwave will have the IP: 123.223.3.123.43....
But you'll look it up on your keychain device, or do a search for "Me" "microwave" to get the magic number.

And your living rooms light switches address will be ...
and so on -- everything will have an IP, but you won't be able to name all that stuff anyway.

LMAO

[porkThreeWays]

Is this a big joke? Is Beatles Beatles some sort of fictious character they came up with to post stories they find on their own? Stop the madness! He IS mocking us~!!

Re:LMAO

[ptomblin]

We'll know it's really Taco in disguise once he starts posting duplicates.

Answered in the article

[aepervius]

Quote from the middle : "Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being. One idea was to create a mechanism for splitting a single database into ....". Bold is from me.

x.org

[GC]

http://x.org

Enough said...

Re:x.org

[LiquidCoooled]

FTA:

Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.

What about international characters?

[under_score]

Would the single letter domains allow for international characters? This would be a cool way of reducing the contention for the English/Roman single letters. The article didn't mention this, but it seems to me like it may be possible already given the IDN standards.

Re:What about international characters?

[keyslammer]

AFAIK, the standard for representing international characters in a hostname is via IDNA encoding (see RFC3490) which maps international characters to ascii characters. It looks like name components in this spec have to begin with ascii "xn--", so a single international character domain name would be at least a 5 character ascii domain name which may already be allowed.

That said, I'm really not too familiar with this subject at all (I just looked up the RFC) so please someone correct me if I'm wrong...

Re:What about international characters?

[Evil Grinn]

It looks like name components in this spec have to begin with ascii "xn--", so a single international character domain name would be at least a 5 character ascii domain name which may already be allowed.

In Firefox, if you enter http://â.com into the address bar, it automatically changes to http://xn--2ca.com/, so I think you're correct.. they are already allowed and apparently already for sale.

It's amazing...

[LithiumX]

I actually take the time to read a side-dispute over a submitter's reasons for submitting, then blow it off as something that doesn't really interest me.

Then suddenly it seems like he's popping up left and right. It's like something out of a low-grade horror movie. To make matters worse, someone nearby keeps blasting Beatles tunes from their cubicle - not even the good ones. I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.

Re:It's amazing...

[Dirtside]

I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.

Let's see... uh, no, you're next Tuesday, tonight George is scheduled to terrify a pensioner in Bristol. Sorry about the mix-up.

Re:It's amazing...

[Anonymous Coward]

To make matters worse, someone nearby keeps blasting Beatles tunes from their cubicle - not even the good ones.

Maybe he doesn't have either of those.

Re:It's amazing...

[jimicus]

Say, I live in Bristol. If it's my next door neighbour, would you mind letting me know so I can warn her?

The poor old dear will get the fright of her life otherwise...

www.w.us

[digitaldc]

The wuss domain was already claimed by an unknown US government official with a speech impediment and delusions of grandeur.

FTFA

[bsd4me]

FTFA:

Single-letter names under ".com," ".net" and ".org" were set aside in 1993 ... Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.

OMG Vancouver!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I live hundreds of miles/km from there!

Re:slashdot.o ? Not TLD oops

[saskboy]

I thought they meant single letter Top Level Domains. This is much worse, they only have 26 letters to sell unless they throw in Greek or other characters.

I call dibs on i.com , which I can then sell to Apple for millions. MUHAHAHAHA!

are they mad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh god! This is what happens when yu put cretins without or cs or math degrees in charge
of something like ICANN. Cant they just give all these marketing spazzys who don't have a basic grasp of discrete maths or logic and put them to work in a supermarket stacking shelves or something?

1) s.i.n.g.l.e.l.e.t.t.e.r domains are inefficient (reading/parsing/translating/whatever)

2) each field only has 26 elements! THerefore each sub will be snafflerd by 12 O clock on the day they make them available.

3) There is a reason why dot separated triplets are used, do some basic fucking research ICANN!

Words escape me to express my contempt for these peoples stupidity.

from the people that brought you ".museum"

[rebug]

Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[MikeFM]

Did anyone ever respect them? I never did. Ever tried to get them to resolve the issue of a register forcibly stealing your domain? Hahaha good luck. User's of eNom know what I'm talking about.

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[m50d]

And you wonder why people think the US shouldn't be in control of DNS.

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[alexhs]

> Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?

From past Slashdot discussions, I would say they're getting more respect than the U.N., at least in the U.S.A. ... ;)

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[Orrin Bloquy]

My brother works with Esther Dyson. She's as big an idiot as her brother (hint, the vacuum cleaner is powered by their father spinning in his grave). She makes her money giving useless seminars in Sedona Arizona on how to maximize your marketing.

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[jrcamp]

Right, because we all know how well that UN thing has turned out.

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[squiggleslash]

Depends on whether the discussion revolves around what ICANN does, or whether an unaccountable US corporation should have this power instead of, say, the ITU.

If the former, then yeah, the cries are usually of "They're useless! Get rid of them!"

If the latter, then it's suddenly "How dare they attack a great American institution! This is clearly a communist plot! I've been on hte intraweb now for 60 years, and I've never heard anyone suggest ICANN does anything but an excellent job!"

Disclaimer: I think ICANN's removal of the "At Large" constituent put the final nail in its coffin as far as legitimacy and legality goes. It's wrong. It should have been disbanded a long time ago. I really don't give a crap whether it thinks someone should be able to register "a.com".

So wrong ...

[Kope]

The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want.

Now, I will grant that with the advent of search engines, this is far less of an issue than it was 20 years ago.

Still, the domain name conventions are NOT about corporations "extending their branding." It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments. Single letter domain names do nothing to further that purpose.

It's a bad idea not because of any technical limitations but merely because it is bowing to corporate pressures in the governance of the last arena in the world where people have more power than the companies.

Re:So wrong ...

[PMuse]

The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want. . . . It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments.

All due respect to our founding coders, but the notion that we could classify all human endeavor according to a taxomonmy based on the categories educational, government, military, commercial, network, organization, or country was naive and arrogant in the extreme. As has been demonstrated, large numbers of people don't care about those categories and many of those who do care don't like them.

Of course, classifying things according to the branding whims of corporations with money will be much, much worse, but let's not pretend that the old taxonomy has any special legitimacy. It's nothing more than "the way we used to do it".

Re:So wrong ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with the hierarchy, that stays the same. It just opens up the set of domain names {a.com, a.net, b.com, b.net ... }. You don't get foo.a or foo.b , you get s.com! READ MORE!

Re:So wrong ...

[shawn(at)fsu]

Am I alone is thinking so what. I could not care less that I will be able to go to www.a.com. I'm actually surprised that they didn't always allow single letter domain names. Besides we already have 6 of them one of them being X.org. According to the CNN Article the only reason we haven't had access to the remainder where some outdated fears. Please tell me why this should bother me. Please tell me why I should be upset. Right now I can't think of anyway this should get me upset.

Re:So wrong ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that those were supposed to be only the original top-level hierarchical roots. The system was supposed to add others as needed. What has failed isn't the vision of the original techies who envisioned a system where everything was properly classified. What's failed is the system of governance (a.k.a. ICANN) which abandoned its purpose to satisfy those with a vested financial interest in subverting the original theory.

Managed correctly, almost no one would have a .com, .net, .org or any of the other tlds (except the country codes, .edu and .mil...those work well since they apply to entities that pretty much already maintain a unique name for each entity). The rest would have tlds more appropriate to their purpose.

Re:So wrong ...

[PMuse]

What has failed isn't the vision of the original techies who envisioned a system where everything was properly classified.

I'm beginning to think that the goal of classifying is exactly what is failing.

Contrast domain names with IP addresses, phone numbers, postal codes, or (to a lesser extent) street addresses. Those other types of addresses don't attempt to classify the thing they represent. For the most part, those addresses convey only location, not description.

People love to classify others, but they don't like others to classify them. They feel that being classify limits them to being just one thing, or worse, misdescribes them entirely. I'm not at all surprised that they're resisting any heirarchy. Frankly, it's a credit that the early schema held up as long as it did. There are plenty of foes who don't see a distinction between, e.g., education and commerce.

I've always thought the original categories of the schema were a useful and clean taxonomy, but if we had asked the interested parties (i.e., the non-technical people) back in the day, they never would have signed on for that scheme.

A new record?

[Tim C]

Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

Re:A new record?

[henni16]

Actually, I see three "journalistic power house" stories on the front page at the moment:
this one, "Microsoft Receives Open Source VIP Blessing" and "Introverts Have More Brain Activity?"

Re:A new record?

[BarryNorton]

This is the second time today two of his were on the front page, and earlier wasn't the first time either. I suggest we all visit his George Harrison tribute site, there's lots of material there that would take literally seconds to collect on the rest of the web, and lots of useful links to boot...

Re:A new record?

[Dachannien]

(Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

I think you mean, assuming Slashdot isn't already on his payroll.

Re:A new record?

[hackstraw]

Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

Actually, its 3 in 24 hours. Take a looke here: http://slashdot.org/~*%20*%20Beatles-Beatles

Its also nuts that this guy has already gotten his karma bumped up. I don't know how much accepted stories raises your karma, but this guy is brand new and has only posted a handful of comments.

Plus the George Harrison site that he is pumping really looks like it sucks. I've heard that he is a search engine optimizer or something. Don't really know what is going on here.

Re:A new record?

[KingEomer]

Interestingly enough, if you look at his comment from the story about MIT wireless, he's talking about extroverts... And then he goes and posts an article about introverts/extroverts. Coincidence? No idea. Does it really mean anything if it's not? Probably not, but odd, nonetheless.

Re:A new record?

[MemeRot]

I checked all the stories submitted by him, and didn't see the link in his name ever change from the George Harrison site. The original side discussion was about those links changing every time he submits a story, I don't see any sign of that.

Re:A new record?

[hackstraw]

I checked all the stories submitted by him, and didn't see the link in his name ever change from the George Harrison site.

All of the .sigs and email addresses, URLs, etc are dynamic and updated immediately unless you are reading the .shtml file or a stale cached version.

Re:A new record?

[MemeRot]

Can you explain please? How is he entering a dynamic sig or dynamic url in slashdot? That works from an archived discussion? I just clicked on the Preferences link, and in the URL I see only an option to enter a URL. The sig is 120 chars - not enough room for javascript even if it wasn't stripped out.

Re:A new record?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to bump your karma is to get a story submitted. It is something like 1 story per level of karma.

Re:A new record?

[mooingyak]

It's dynamic because of the way slashdot renders it.

If you change your sig right now, and then look at the comment I'm responding to, it will have your new sig at the bottom.

Re:A new record?

[HTL2001]

he changes it... then every link to his name changes when he does that. the link is generated when you load the page, so if he changes his homepage, it changes when you reload the page

look at some comments from the first of the 3 stories:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169603 &cid=14134774 (his phone number from DNS)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169603 &cid=14134826 (one of the links he had in his homepage at one point I remember)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169603 &cid=14134875 (google of his info, he's an SEO)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169603 &cid=14134939 (more info)

Domain name uselessness

[dada21]

Domain names, on the whole, seem particularly useless. Sure, I understand it is easier to go to google.com than to 100.100.100.1 based on your memory, but how many people are entering dozens of domain names even in a year of web use? The reason google and yahoo and other sites are so popular is, in large part, their search engine. Search engines can (and will) easily work around a lack of domain names.

In the long haul, money is better spent on SEO than it is getting a.com. Just like the yellow pages lists "AAA Plumbing" first (the yellow pages is a search engine of sorts), accessing the top 10 list on your favorite search engines will take more and more priority.

Don't believe it? As domain names continue to be bought up, people will get more and more confused if the site they want is thomasengineering.com or thomas-engineers.com or thomasenginc.org or who knows what. Instead they'll google Thomas Engineering, Manitoba, CA and likely find what they're looking for.

I'm sick of DNS. I recently built a PC for use at home that doesn't use DNS at all. So far, I have been able to access the majority of my MAIN sites fairly easily by creating my own hosts file. Is it pretty? Not really, but I am working against the tide. I can see google toolbar or some other toolbar (in a future domain-name-less world) saying "Add this website to your favorites?" and adding it to your online favorite list via its IP address and a memory name you pick.

Will it happen? Probably not. But it is good proof that governments and major corporations of the world seem to have no understanding of the future -- they're chasing control of what is basically a 1990s commodity that, over time, will be found to be worthless in the Internet of tomorrow.

This is for certain. If you go to google to find my blog, and type dadasays as the only search string, you'll find me instantly. Sure, a competitor can go to google and get SEO so dadasays goes to jonkatzsays.blogspot.com, but you can also go to the yellow pages under plumbers and find the competition as well. This is not that different.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Anonymous Coward]

Your hosts file is an (albeit small) DNS, you fool.

How do you handle dynamic IPs?

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Xarius]

Your idea is absolutely terrible from the perspective of people who run websites. What if I want to link to a particular document at a particular site? Do I like to a google search query and just hope that it's the first result?

Search engines are better than nothing, but by and large they are not great.

This defeats the entire point of hypertext, and you are taking the power away from the people and placing it squarely in the hands of the corporations (like Yahoo and Google).

I admit DNS is not that great, but it's so much better than what you're suggesting.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[dada21]

A hosts file is not necessarily equivalent to DNS because it doesn't share the data with others nor does it accept power of another PC over my judgement call.

I accept that we need something in place of direct IP addresses, but I also don't want to have to listen to ICANN or whoever is in charge of the system. It isn't really necessary, in my opinion. The majority of sites that I access are not dynamic IPs, and in the event of IPv6 actually going live for 100% of the network, dynamic IPs will be useless.

What about domain names and subs that use the same IP? My own blog uses a shared IP. For now, I'm not 100% using a hosts system, but my test PC is offering me a lot of insight into the upside and downside of the current DNS structure we're using. It also opened my eyes to the need for SEO and proper treatment beyond just buying a domain name.

I've been debating with some others I met here and elsewhere on how an open standard style DNS system could work. From what I can tell, there would need to be many changes necessary, but I think there is hope for it in the long haul.

As our freedoms online are more and more restricted, we'll see more and more reason to abandon ICANN and whatever other power corporations (read: government) control the transfer of information. The web will be very different from what we're using today, especially as we find ourselves limited to what we can say. The fact that blogs will continue to be pushed into extremely limited speech by the US election-speech regulators will be a big help to gaining momentum in dissolving ICANN as a power, or even a need.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[TheRaven64]

And what happens when this guy gets search engine results? Sure, you get to Google with a small hosts file, but every link from the Google search page will have a host name, not an IP address associated with it.

I'm guessing he just uses that machine for Slashdot, and doesn't ever RTFA.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but what if I didn't know your name, but had heard about you? Googling for "ancap" shows up hundreds of organizations using that name, and even googling for anarcho-capitalist blog gets plenty of hits but not you.

Hostnames and URLs remain the single best way to uniquely identify the location of information on the internet. I can give someone a hostname to your blog and have 99.999% faith that if they enter it correctly, they will reach the intended location. Relying on search engines to do the work might work for the top 3 sites in any subject, but after that, there's probably a 50% chance that no phrase exists that will give you the site you want in the first page of hits, and telling someone to search for "editing video on linux" and going to the third page and hitting the 5th link will probably be valid for another month or so, or whenever the given engine re-indexes.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[dada21]

You're correct. I'm not saying dump DNS and rely completely on search engines.

There have been a few distributed DNS solutions that have come up over the years, and many of them have merit but aren't fully ready for prime time. For now, DNS isn't a huge problem, but I do see it getting into the twilight years of its life.

As time goes on, though, it will show its age. I don't have the replacement solution, and if I did it would either be ahead of its time or I'd be a billionaire. I will, however, keep looking at options and theories and debate the subject here and elsewhere. I feel DNS is not a good solution. I just don't have a replacement solution, yet. I don't think that precludes me from not liking what we have.

The funny thing is, many /. readers are pro-F/OSS and all that. I'm surprised more aren't pro F/OSS DNS solutions (not just the software but the underlying mechanisms).

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Liam Slider]

but how many people are entering dozens of domain names even in a year of web use?

You know, some people do use more than Google for their internet experience. I enter domain names into my web browser all the fucking time. Just for regular everyday type of stuff.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Pope]

Right, AAA Plumbing is listed first, and they'd be the last people I'd call, since they're so clearly desperate to be listed highly, I assume their services suck.

Also, your DNS ranting is just bizarre. It works fine for what it does. It's the proliferation of retarded TLDs like .museum and .biz that are the real problem.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[dada21]

Also, your DNS ranting is just bizarre. It works fine for what it does. It's the proliferation of retarded TLDs like .museum and .biz that are the real problem.

Really? Bizarre?

You must like the fact that the top two authoritarian political parties in the U.S. are pushing very hard to make it impossible for anyone else to speak against them or for others. Our FEC is one of the most tyrannical groups within our government, and most people actually think they're doing a good job by limiting our basic right to speak freely with our words and our dollars.

You must like the fact that a fairly small minority of our population in the U.S. (called the voters on the winning side of an issue) have the ability to restrict what you can say.

You must like the fact that the organization in charge of holdin the Internet together as we know it (ICANN) is a pseudo-government agency with an incredible amount of power. Giving that power to the U.N. or any other pseudo-government authority is not a good idea.

You must like the fact that when you own a domain name such as burgers.com, you're basically given a monopoly on that word even though it is a basic word in one of the most popular languages in the world. Even a specific word such as McDonalds is currently available to the McDonalds food corporation and not Tim McDonald web development. How many times have domain names (MikeRowesoft) been stolen from a minority and given to another minority with a little bit more power or money?

I don't like DNS. I want to find a distributed DNS solution, but I don't have the best way to describe what is in my head. I'm no nihilist -- I like order and I believe order comes from disorder through the decision consumers make in a free market. DNS currently is no free market, it is becoming heavily burdened with various laws of various coercive organizations known as government. Soon those coercive organizations will be able to turn off a site because it violated something that would normally be protected free speech, but as time goes on, will not be.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, browsing the www isn't the only use of domain names. What about emails--should we all go back to joe@100.100.0.1? Or are you suggesting a search engine strategy for that too: "just type in joe blow into google and hope my name comes up near the top..."

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Anonymous Coward]

A large portion of websites (not the most popular ones) use a shared ip address.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[gfreeman]

You must like the fact that when you own a domain name such as burgers.com, you're basically given a monopoly on that word even though it is a basic word in one of the most popular languages in the world

Have you been to that domain? I am sure that CarlsJr has no such monopoly on the burger world. Your argument has completely fallen flat.

How many times have domain names (MikeRowesoft) been stolen from a minority and given to another minority with a little bit more power or money?

Mike Rowe gave up his domain in exchange for an X-Box and some other goodies. No stealing involved.

Wrong language

[finelinebob]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Damn ... I knew I should have picked up Chinese as my second language....

Re:Wrong language

[ncc74656]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Damn ... I knew I should have picked up Chinese as my second language

Only the 26 letters of the English alphabet are usable in domain names AFAIK. Letters from foreign alphabets (and ideographs from languages that use those, such as Chinese) are invalid characters.

Re:Wrong language

[handslikesnakes]

Some browsers support IRIs, basically Unicode in ASCII. So the actual URI is still ASCII but any program aware of IRIs will present them as Unicode.

Re:Wrong language

[ncc74656]

Some browsers support IRIs, basically Unicode in ASCII. So the actual URI is still ASCII but any program aware of IRIs will present them as Unicode.

That may work for the part of the URL that follows the domain name, but the domain name contained within the URL is ASCII-only because DNS doesn't respond too well to non-ASCII names.

Re:Wrong language

[6*7]

You must have missed the IDN debacle earlier this year. RFC 3490 allows unicode domain/host names to be translated to the current DNS system with it ASCII limitation.

Re:Wrong language

[handslikesnakes]

...hence Punycode.

For those that didn't bother to read the article..

[SecureTheNet]

...this does not open up top level domains, like .a or .b This is a proposal to open up something like a.com or b.com.

Yes, I realize there are a few out there, www.X.org comes to mind. Most of the single letter domains are registered to:

[whois.iana.org]

IANA Whois Service
Domain: c.com
Name: IANA_RESERVED

The article also states that IANA started reserving these in 1993, but the whois record for x.org shows it was created in 1997.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Lumpy]

what get's me is that people think that ICANN is all knowing and cant be easily undseated.

These bozo's can be made ignorable overnight with the establishment of a second DNS system. it blows my mind that it has not happened already. and no it would not cause instand caos as some would like you to believe.

ICANN dns and Dave's DNS duplicates would simply resolve to two addresses. have the web browser pop up both and let the user choose.

Having a single DNS system is not a law.

Finally, we can get a .m TLD

[spyrral]

When they started pushing .mobi as the mobile TLD, I thought they were joking. Type MORE letters on my phone? A .m TLD (and really, any of the other single letter TLDs) is a much better choice.

Re:Finally, we can get a .m TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

Program your mobile so that when you type .m it understand .mobi . That way you don't have to type more letters on your phone, and other people who otherwise would have no clue what a .m url is will now at least think that it could be Mobi Dick.

Re:Finally, we can get a .m TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you idiot, RTFA.

Ya, I'm a Flaming Troll, the trick is figuring out which to mod me =)

Re:Finally, we can get a .m TLD

[Anonymous Coward]

THEY'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT TLDs YOU DUMB FUCK.

 
 

Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Nom du Keyboard]

If you think, "Hey, take a chance in the lottery and sell it for six figures aftewards," forget it now. The big companies are beating out the small guy and the Internet ideal of First Come, First Served -- FIFO in Geek terms -- of rewarding the agile thinker doesn't exist any more. Corporate sluggishness and immense political contributions have squashed it.

How have they beaten you to the punch? For example, Yahoo has already trademarked "Y.COM". Even if you get www.y.com, they simply take it away for you for free as the "trademark owner," and brand you as a criminal cyber-squatter in the process.

Oh, and btw, have a nice day!

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[SlothB77]

since they have already trademarked y.com, isn' that FIFO?

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Nom du Keyboard]

since they have already trademarked y.com, isn' that FIFO?

Not it's not, and I'd like to think you'd know better. Applying for a trademark is not applying for a web domain name. It's more like pre-emptive Foo.

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[RGRistroph]

Is yahoo actually doing any trade under the mark y.com ?

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Anonymous Coward]

Roses are red, Violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.

Schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personality disorder. Your .sig is perpetuating this common misconception.

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Cl1mh4224rd]

[...] rewarding the agile thinker doesn't exist any more. Corporate sluggishness ... have squashed it.

Hmm. I guess "slow and steady" still wins the race, despite our desire for the good guys to be the hare.

Unfortunate, really.

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Whafro]

Their trademark application was filed under "intent to use," in which case they have about three years to use the mark in commerce somewhere before they would have to reapply. Upon using it (and they don't even need the domain to use it), they will instantly* be given a registration number, and the rights to the mark as of their original ITU filing date.

In the meantime, no one else can register that mark, even if they are using it...

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Anonymous Coward]

This Chirstmas I am going to make A-B-C style wood block toys with all the 26 single-letter domains on them, and sell them on ebay. My business plan is not to make money from the toys, but from the google ads on my site when I get slashdotted, after I get the cease-and-desist letters.

Who's gonna have them

[4D6963]

Uh, who's gonna have them? I mean, there's only 26 of them! (for .com at least) How can someone get one of these? I mean, it's probably gonna be a real war to get on, imagine that, i'd be damn glad to have x.com, and i'm sure i'm not the only one. Are some people gonna pay some crazy price for these or something?

Is 'B' distinctive? Is dot (TM)?

[fuzzy12345]

Intellectual property is created by fiat. I'd say in this case it should be ruled that single letters aren't distinctive enough to be used as the 'net equivalent of a trademark.

Besides, if these clowns say single characters ARE appropriate, and then some trademark office somewhere lest some company trademark the dot (as in "The Dot in Dot Com," anyone?) we'd all be POOCHED.

Re:Is 'B' distinctive? Is dot (TM)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Sun Microsystem in the hay days had TV commericals that say "We the the dot in .com"?

Re:Is 'B' distinctive? Is dot (TM)?

[Anonymous Coward]

no

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[TubeSteak]

I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail:

Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.

It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).

Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).

In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.

My followup:

if you care so much why don't you give Carl a call @ (718) 996-7672.

If you have a GSM phone, dial #31# before the number and it'll show up as "private" or "protected" on the recipient's caller ID. Everyone else, use *67

"Hello, please leave a message after the tone"
BEEP

Googling for his phone number brings up a lot of information. Apparently he's in the search engine optimization business and has been spamming for a long time.

His website: hxxp://search-engines-web.com
Another website: hxxp://5url.com/
More website: hxxp://google-yahoo.com/
Old e-mail address: aa1a@yahoo.com
His Guestbook: http://server.scripthost.com/guestbook?harrison
Google Phonebook: C Aab
stwnewspress.com: Contact Name = A. Seo*
5url.subportal.com: Contact Name = A. Aab

Feel free to send him e-mail url55@hotmail.com

*A. Seo = A Search Engine Optimizer
very fucking clever

Next in the news - Single Digit

[tomhudson]

First dupe post fromt he future -

November 29th, 2006

Today ICANN announced that they will free up single-digit domains. They expect to make millions off the sale of the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
<p>When asked for comment about ICANN's new single-digit policy, one slashdotter said "Let them sit on THIS single digit and rotate!"

Of course, 1 is going to go for big bucks - "We're #1".
7 also - "Lucky us".
Avis will buy #2 - "We're #2 - we try harder"
3 will be bought out as a business portal - "3's company"
4 will be some scam - "trust us - we work 4 u" - or some golf site - "fore!"
9 will be sold to some kraut anti-drug campaign - "just say 9/nein"
8 will go to weight-watchers or slimfast - "8 too much?"
5 will go to whoever looses the bid for 1 - they''ll then say "5 - we're the quintiscential site" or some other loser shit
6 will go to an online redneck pharmacy - "when you'se feeling six as a dawg, order your meds from 6.com"
0, of course, will be the big one. The BIGGEST sex portal - "come to 0.com - because you can't get any lower than us"

Remember - watch for it next year

tt

Re:Next in the news - Single Digit

[EChris]

This is the funniest post I've seen in days. SOMEONE MOD THIS ONE UP!!!!

Still snickering about "8 too much?"....

Chris

Re:Next in the news - Single Digit

[Mathness]

i.com would likely be a sex site.

I wonder who would get b.org first. A Star trek fan, a MS basher or a geek?

Re:Next in the news - Single Digit

[Anonymous Coward]

what's with the "or"?

i'm doing it too

[MooseTick]

Since everyone else is quoting that part of the article, I don't want to be the only one who isn't...

"Six single-letter names already claimed at the time [1993] -- "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" -- were allowed to keep their names for the time being."

nevermind

[4D6963]

nevermind, I should have checked before posting, PayPal pwns x.com.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[KiloByte]

Well... I've used to have an account on my friend's server, i.pl -- and it was really, really sweet. It was helluva easier to get to than any search engine can even attempt.

Instead of using a separate service, and using several words, you can have four characters. Why would you want more? Heck... even typing in the IP is a lot faster than doing that search for "me microwave" you mentioned.

Domain names are an essential requirement

[alienmole]

Your points all have merit, but people and companies still want something to put in their email, on business cards, and in commercials, which uniquely identifies them and is hopefully memorable and comprehensible. Saying "just type Sony into Google" doesn't really cut it for that purpose.

Re:Domain names are an essential requirement

[dada21]

Yet the Internet (initially) really gained ground when people heard "Use AOL keyword SONY!"

Of course, AOL keywords were a private form of DNS, but they worked well. Sure, corporations with money could own the most powerful keywords, but that is true of domain names as well.

I think, as time goes on, we will see more need for SEO over DNS. Right now I know of at least 20% of my customer base that spends 100 times more on SEO than they ever will on getting a good domain name. If that isn't proof of the limited need for DNS, I don't know what is.

Re:Domain names are an essential requirement

[alienmole]

As you say, AOL keywords were a private form of DNS, so that example demonstrates the importance of name registries.

Also, what your customers spend on SEO has no real bearing on the importance of DNS: although search engines and SEO have an overlapping purpose, they don't have the same purpose. If anything, the need to spend money on SEO demonstrates the need for a more reliable and persistent means of addressing, i.e. as I said, what to put on a business card and in commercials.

It could certainly be argued that there's a "limited" need for DNS, but there's a limited need for most things. That doesn't take away from their importance.

In general, I think you're confusing searching for a name with the name itself. Do you think search engines eliminate the need for URLs entirely, so that every web resource will just have e.g. a numeric GUID, and no other name? There's a need for the name of a resource to have semantic content that's meaningful to humans. Domain names are an important part of that.

Domains can't begin with numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's still the case that domain names can't start with numbers. Single character number domain names would and likely won't be avialable for that reason.

Re:Domains can't begin with numbers

[bhtooefr]

Last I checked, 8 was a number.

How many domain names start with 8?

Re:Domains can't begin with numbers

[sp3tt]

You are wrong.

Re:Domains can't begin with numbers

[elemental23]

Don't tell 3com that.

Re:Domains can't begin with numbers

[ceejayoz]

1800flowers.com must be sad to have wasted all that advertising money.

If only they'd TRIED getting to their website, they'd have saved all that lost money on an invalid domain!

Oh, wait.

(who are the two dumbass moderators who modded the parent up?)

Re:Domains can't begin with numbers

[InvalidError]

I'm lazier than you are, I would have given 3M as an example instead.

Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough about these new root domains and single letter domains.

Who gives a d*mn about them?

I still don't even see anyone using a .biz address seriously.

why?

[Tom]

Well, I guess the real question is: How much did 3.com pay them?

Re:I can't wait for

[Anonymous Coward]

They'd finally be able to drop the "c". Always looked out of place, that.

Re:Please don't bother

[confusedwiseman]

If it really bothers you that badly, why don't you do a websearch (ie: google) for the article in reference. This way you can be in the know and not give Beatles-Beatles the link credit.

* put the logic down and place your hands on top of your head.

Re:Please don't bother

[bhtooefr]

Umm... yes, we do.

FWIW, it's not just ScuttleMonkey - note that this is CmdrTaco that did this.

Beatles

[LlamaGui]

I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail: Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them. It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly). Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page). In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.

Re:Beatles

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's my first reaction to this:

Step 1) Everyone on Slashdot searches for "George Harrison Info" on Google
Step 2) Everyone clicks on the Sponsored Link that goes to "george-harrison.info" right there at the top
Step 3) Loss!!!

Ok, I know it will only cost him one day's worth of AdWords revenue, and he's only paying $.10 per click, but at least it would provide some natural consequences for his sleaziness.

Thank god!

[merc]

By the time I get to the 'o' in c-o-m, my fingers are about plumbt-tuckered out!

Shotgun registering www.x.xxx !!!

[Chaffar]

I can see it now...

THE most hardore site on the Internet, Literally!

I just need to find a few heroine addicts willing to do the things required to honor the XXXX name...

Re:Shotgun registering www.x.xxx !!!

[jimicus]

ITYM "heroin addicts"

Heroine addicts just can't get enough of the plucky female who wins the day.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Immercenary_2000]

From my understanding of how pagerank works (and I could be way off on this one) is that when a page links to another page it gets so many "points" in googles search engine. The page with the links only has so many points to dish out (determined by it's own pagerank) so each additional link reduces the number of points going to any one page. If this guy is really getting on your nerves why not post a couple links to other sites, To do it most effectively perhaps post other beatles related sites which are above his in google. Also he seems to be targeting the keywords "George Harrison" instead of "beatles". Just search google and link to some pages above his and you've effectively nullified his attempt at SEO.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Tom]

Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters

Seconded

(or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).

Won't work, it's trivial to solve that daily or so.

Obviously the news filters do

[Rooked_One]

so deal with the fact your stories are getting rejected and his aren't. I'm really sick of people beating down on someone becuase they find news the moderators will post. Its nothing but offtopic drivel, and whoever made the parent insightful should be stripped of any rights to hand out points.

Also, I care enough so that i'm posting this knowing that i'll get modded OT.

New Dating Sites

[Flwyd]

I'm betting the domains x.y and x.x will be highly sought after in the lucrative gay dating site market.

Re:New Dating Sites

[catalyst]

i'm betting you're 50% wrong.

Re:New Dating Sites

[LocalH]

Yeah, really, because it would be y.y and x.x, not x.y and x.x

One option...

[lpangelrob]

I suppose the largest companies could register these in reference to their stock symbol, and put all their financial information on it. See Citicorp (NYSE: C). They could register http://www.c.com./ Other notables are Ford (NYSE: F) and Kellogg (NYSE: K).

But yeah. That's all I could come up with.

Re:One option...

[dago]

Don't forget SBC (NYSE: T)

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[bhtooefr]

I would want it (in fact, I'd also want a two letter TLD) if I were trying to create a TinyURL competitor.

tinyurl.com is 11 characters.
u.cc is four.

In places like, oh, SLASHDOT SIGS, that'd help a lot.

Up Next, ICANN considers:

[Anonymous Coward]

Case-sensitive domain names...

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[MullerMn]

I saw this in a previous story, and initially I thought it was a problem. Now I'm starting to wonder if it really matters?

Whatever his motivations this guy has supplied most of the interesting stories recently. If he's using it to gain a little pagerank increase, does it really matter that much?

Letters, numbers and symbols! Oh my!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, now that the bandwagon has passed. What was all that hoopla about giving DNS over to the UN?

Because we all know, this kind of stuff is only going to help make the innarweb more easy to understand. After the a-z.com we can start with numbers and symbols!

?.com
!.com
@.com
$.com

Remeber ICANN is doing that for the benefit of the innarweb, and not their pockets, just like the UN trying to get into Halloween with their bloody obnoxius and greedy UNICEF boxes.

Ah Memories

[nurb432]

"ya i can remember when domain names made sence, and you could easily find a company or a library.. And could identify off the bat if it was a not for profit entity.."

what is next, random characters of random length?

How to Advertise on Slashdot

[nagora]

Beatles-Beatles, AKA Carl Fogle, is using /. to boost his search-engine jigging company. By hosting gerorge-harrison.info and then getting /. to link to it, and therefore lots of other sites to mirror that link, he is boosting that domain's search ranking (he's up to #10 on Google for "George Harrison"). He can then point his prospective clients to this success when pitching to them for their business.

TWW

heh

[chipster]

fuh.q

my site is

[jlebrech]

my site is a single letter domain of .nt.ro .nt.ro is reserved for internet technology sites, and that what im trying to do :D i.nt.ro i liked .ro ever since john rome.ro's website had it.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Fusen]

How many times in adverts do you see a company repeat their site? In adverts in the UK, there is an average of 2-3 times for ones which actually verbally say their domain instead of just writing it at the bottom. So for companies a domain which is only 1 character long is like the holy grail. What better advertisement can you get then a domain name that is only one letter. Joe - "Whats your site again?", James - "Why, it's a.com" Joe - "What!? How did you manage to get that?!" etc etc same happens with any sort of system where you need to register, look at /. ID's.

Stock Symbols

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see website shortcuts based on Nasdaq/NYSE letters.

Subvert the system

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that for a little while, when I submit stories, I'm going to put "* * Beatles-Beatles" as my name, and link it to some unrelated website. If we get a few people doing this, and even a handful of the stories wind up getting accepted, we can easily counteract any benefits this guy is reaping.

Case Sensitive?

[xoip]

Now...who can really Capitalize on single letter domains?[/sarcasim]

Re:Case Sensitive?

[Korexz]

PHISHERS! That's who would benefit... and the security companies that lie and say they can protect you, your data, and your computer for 49.99 a month.

You think phishing attacks are bad now? JUST WAIT...

THIS will be the downfall of the web.

WORST IDEA EVER!

Re:Case Sensitive?

[Korexz]

Meh.. I can't read apparently... its not the suffix... its the domain... ok.. so WHO CARES?

But then again they're so few

[Pac]

Unless they go for Unicode, 26 letters plus 10 digits ("1.com") times 14 top-level domains (com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org, .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum) gives you only 504 unique possiblities. 540 if they include .xxx when the US stops being a Christian Fundamentalist Republic.

If you multiply that by the number of country codes (248) you still get only 133920 unique addresses.

Regardless their misguided motivation, it will be funny to see Microsoft, McDonald's and Motorola expending millions of dollars and years of Court time to decide who's the rightful owner of "m.com".

Re:But then again they're so few

[tverbeek]

if they include .xxx when the US stops being a Christian Fundamentalist Republic.

Much of the opposition to .xxx comes from people not being drooling morons who don't understand either logic or human nature. Only a little, noisy pocket of resisistance is motivated by Christian Fundamentalism.

Re:But then again they're so few

[MindStalker]

Hu? .xxx pros
1) It makes porn easier to find
2) It makes porn easier to filter
3) It makes porn easier to index .xxx cons
1) see pros 1 and 3 from the anti porn prospective
2) it can EASILY be worked around.
3) no porn industry is willing to give up their .com address

None of these cons make .xxx a BAD thing, it just makes it partially useless, but so what..

Now if you want it partially useful, allow porn sites to keep their .com but legally require them to redirect everything to their .xxx so that filters can reliably work. Of course nothing stops one from using ip addressing though direct ip addressing is possible on the server side if the server requires a proper domain reference.

Legislating this and expecting it to be followed on the other hand is another ball of wax.

Re:But then again they're so few

[tverbeek]

Legislating this and expecting it to be followed on the other hand is another ball of wax.

Which is what makes every bit of "pro" argument you listed a waste of your typing skills.

Re:But then again they're so few

[MindStalker]

Not nessesarly there is a good chance that given simply the ability to have all their domains on .xxx with the encouragement of making the .com a forward, you would find that a large percent of porn sites would adopt this on thier own. Make it a law and they would fight it of course.

Reasons it would be self adopted.
1) They could say "Hey we are self regulating.. You don't need to censor us!"
2) It helps search engines find them.

Cons (from the porn industry point of view)
1) Buisnesses would block .xxx entirly meaning no more surfing porn from work.

And believe it or not the parental blocking would not bother most respectible porn sites as they prefer not to encounter such problems as blocked pay from credit card companies when mommy finds you stole her visa.

Re:But then again they're so few

[MindStalker]

On a side note personal story.

I once had my credit information stolen, person bought a lot of porn online as well as paying for some web hosting and some long distance calls.
Had absolutly no problems with the porn or web hosting sites all of which reversed the charges with a simple call. the long distance company on the other hand after dozens of calls I eventually had to file a claim against the charge to visa to get it removed.. Shows who is the more responsible company hu?

Some ccTLDs have had these for a while

[Stephen Williams]

The boss of a friend of mine is the proud owner of the domain "k.gg".

-Stephen

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

About says it all....

First complete domain name listing

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to commit to building the first complete list of single letter domains. It will be a daunting task but I will use technology and creativity to pull it off.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know, before you go ahead and attack the guy, is whats happening with his link scam really more important than the admittedly interesting stories he has on occasion posted?

I mean, this isn't like Roland who linked to the story on his ad supported blog rather than directly to the article. At least this guy has the common curtesy link directly.

And people have said that he changes his homepage a lot, I've just seen the George Harrison one, can someone please post some evidence to the contrary?

I mean, I love a good old-fashioned pitchfork and torch rally on Slashdot as good as the next guy, but I'm wondering if this guy is the right target for it.

Awesome!!

[fury88]

Now if they only pass .xxx we can have xxx.x.xxx.. talk about PORN!!!

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[theSpaceCow]

I don't know if anyone else has commented on this yet, but apparently single letters are VERY important to the branding of at least some entertainers/corporations... Does anyone remember when (IIRC) Warren G sued Garth Brooks, because both used a single lowercase "g" as their icon while on tour? Then, a few years later, Garth sued Geri Hallwell for the exact same thing, only her "g" had little devil horns on it. Apparently, there are people who could be so confused by a lowercase G that they wouldn't know whether they were at a Geri Hallwell or Warren G concert.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[shutdown -p now]

What you achieved by this post is more people clicking on that link in his username, if only to verify your claims...

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Lord_Dweomer]

As I was looking at the comments about this guy in his previous MS related story today, someone made the claim that his webpage is full of ads and simply is trying to spam. What follows is my copy/paste response which I'm sure people who haven't dared check out his site yet will be interested in reading:

"Please mod parent down...he asserts that the linked website in question is devoid of original content and full of adverts when in fact IT IS NOT!

I know many of you will not want to verify to increase his traffic...but for god sakes...the guy doesn't even have any banner ads on his site. Hell, he doesn't even have any Google Ad Words!!!

Its actually quite an informative site (even though it looks like it was coded in the early 90's), with just about zero advertising (in a quick scan of the page I could not find ANY ads whatsoever). As for original content....its a biography site...what kind of original content were you looking for there exactly?"

I think the whole point of this...

[Gadgetfreak]

was that someone, once and for all, wanted to get rid of the C in the goatse URL.

Is He Serious?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

OK, I'm not really sure whether you're being sarcastic or just doing a Dvorak on the whole current DNS debate.

You're suggesting we all dump DNS and just use search engines for everything. Let me ask you this. When everyone has done this, How the hell will search engines work?!

Consider Google pagerank. It searches you page, finds links to other pages.... but wait! These links are now not direct links. They are search engine terms which may or may not return the desired site, and by clicking on the link, you change its value on the search engines rank.

You'd turn the whole internet in some kind of quantum mechanical system where you're never quite sure where a link points to until you click on it, and once you've done so you've changed the state of the link. I'm sure we'll all get around just fine.

Not to mention the increased bandwidth and overhead. The net would quickly become primarily a system of passing around search engine queries rather than actual end user data.

Your idea sucks. Turn back on your DNS and svae the world some extra bandwidth.

Re:Is He Serious?

[dada21]

I don't have an "idea" really. All I have is the knowledge that there is an ever-growing amount of information online, and that most information is currently not finding its target well. Is this to blame on DNS? Not really.

Yet in the future, as governing regimes continue to get their way and are allowed to censor and limit speech, we'll need a better way to control the flow of information. I don't see the web in 10 years anywhere near what we have today. Web pages that used to be composed mostly of one document are quickly becoming a combination of many different sources and destinations. DNS currently helps this, but it can also be a very easy to control single-source for censorship.

We had Napster for transfering (legal and "illegal") data. Napster was easily toppled as it had a single-source for operation: their server. Today we're heading in new directions that make it very hard to stop that information. Am I a fan of "illegal" files? Sure, I don't believe in copyright as it is today. In fact, illegal information tends to create many avenues for information travel that is considered legal or at least moral. Look at how much porn does for information flow, and in how many areas of the world porn is illegal.

What is free speech today may not be free speech tomorrow. Control of DNS by a pseudo-government organization is not my idea of a safe solution to keeping one of my most important basic human rights. Will I figure out the right solution to what I know will be a problem 5 or 10 or 20 years from now? Not likely. But I can continue to keep people thinking, and if 1 out of 10,000,000 readers of my comments figures out the solution, I at least did my part.

Re:Is He Serious?

[MemeRot]

Wow. Turning the whole internet into a quantum mechanical system in a constant state of flux. I'm sure it would suck in real life, but it sounds pretty cool to me.

Re:Is He Serious?

[dada21]

I'm not sure that chaos would happen for very long, really.

ISPs need to make sure their customers can get where they need to get. If ICANN disappeared today, not much would change as ISPs would probably band together to form a new organization, or some government body to take over again.

But I look at information connection points over the years, and I continue to see information becoming either more censored, or more underground.

Consider the phone. Almost everyone has just numbers (my 800 number is a memorable word, so I do have a monopoly on something), and we've done just fine with phone books and contact managers. There are more IP addresses than phone numbers, surely.

I remember Fidonet. It was name@numbers, and it worked very decently, considering it was not real-time at all. There were far fewer Fidonet addresses than IP addresses, of course.

I bet there are many more domain names than IP addresses (I didn't look up the ratio though). Domain names do make life easier, and I think they'll continue to do so.

My only fear is that those who control DNS will continue to build incredible power that they could use at any point in the future, and I don't want to see that happen. Hell, the Deborah Davis incident is part of the reason I've always been against IDs, and for years I was ridiculed for fearing what would never happen (but did).

I watch the FEC regulations very closely, and I see how close we are getting to having all our online speech moderated by those in power. I don't want to see this, and I see ICANN as a really big control mechanism of those in power. I'm just requesting others to contemplate how we could use our beloved Internet without government having any control on any mechanism.

Re:I can't wait for

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever marked the parent redundant probably stretches his anus!

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[TheRaven64]

Slashdot puts rel="nofollow" into links in comments, which makes the Googlebot ignore them. It only follows the links outside the comment section, including the article submitter. It is not possible to do anything from the comments section.

Yea, that's wise decision.

[Ekevu]

US are great network administrators. That's what I say.

Get them while they last

[dtfinch]

Only 26 remaining. $9.95/yr. Be the first cybersquatter to own them all.

Re:slashdot.o ? Not TLD oops

[Anonymous Coward]

too late, someone else had the idea.

i.net

Re:For those that didn't bother to read the articl

[MrNougat]

They must have had to renew their four year registration on x.org with NetSol.

Here is another idea

[chris_eineke]

Two actually. Two heretic ideas:

(1) Reverse the DNS order (e.g. http://aol.www/)
(2) Get rid of TLDs, make everything up for grabs, and force at least two domain combinations

this makes stuff like

http://microsoft.msdn/
http://gnu.linux/
http://debian.sarge/
http://gentoo.linux/

possible. Imagine the possibilities!

In a world where...

[Cl1mh4224rd]

...companies can "buy" legislation, is this really a surprise?

I'm sure the corporations see this as nothing more than the Internet "finally catching up" to the real world.

And, I agree, that's disturbing as hell...

x.org

[3770]

Been there done that

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[BarryNorton]

What follows is my copy/paste response which I'm sure people who haven't dared check out his site yet will be interested in reading

Rather than cut-and-paste my response (that none of the content is original, all scraped), I'd expand on it - Rolling Stone, Top 100 Beauty Sites, Geocities, CGISpy, IconoSearch etc. etc.... not full of adverts, huh?

Hmm ...

[hattig]

Right, someone give Google g.com, or better still, .g!

Then I steal myself a gmail account username like gb (my initials) and then I can be gb@g.com or better, gb@g. g@g would be the ultimate however.

Not that it really matters. I'd be in favour of dropping .net and then enforcing .org for organisations only and .com for corporations only instead of creating more endings and forcing companies to 'protect' themselves in more namespaces.

Now selling ringside seats...

[geobeck]

...for the battle for http://m.com/ between Microsoft and McDonalds.

But when I can I use numbers!

[Stupendoussteve]

Come, everyone wants 127.0.0.1.org

Re:But when I can I use numbers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Omniture web tracking company has a domain like that - 127.0.0.1.2o7.net or something. Our proxy server puked when it hit that - it thought it was an internal address because of a bad regex in the proxy file.

Made testing our new Omniture web-bugs a real PITA until we figured that one out.

My appliances are already addressed

[Tmack]

And your living rooms light switches address will be ...

Actually... my living room lightswitch address is b6. The bedroom one is b5 and my fishtank is on b4. Thermostat is 192.168.1.145 and security cameras are c2 through c6... not that anyone really cares.

For those that dont get it, yes, those are x10 addresses, all controlled via computer through a pc-x10 interface, except the termostat, which really is an IP thermostat. In my own x10 network, they already have single letter (+number) addresses. The ap that controls the stuff does allow aliases to allow "naming" the devices , but Im too lazy to use it, and the scripts I have dont really care if the name is "LivingRoom" or b6.

tm

Re:My appliances are already addressed

[jjhall]

Are you using Misterhouse to control everything or do you use something different? I only ask as I have a bunch of X10 modules and have been contemplating setting up something similar to your scenario.

Jeremy

Domain names are becoming pointless as keywords

[borawjm]

I don't really see the difference in denying or allowing single letter domain names.

Domain names are becomming less and less important with search engines like google, msn and yahoo out there. I mean, if I'm looking for a car or house these days, the first thing that I do is go to a search engine, like google, and do a search for "cars" or, more specifically, "ford pintos". I don't type out www.house.com or www.cars.com in my address bar because, chances are, I'll get some adsense spam site.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever his motivations this guy has supplied most of the interesting stories recently.

What you don't realize is that the problem may be that this guy is stealing stories. The fact that many **Beatles-Beatles' stories are accepted by /. editor Scuttlemonkey (not this one though which was accepted by CmdrTaco) is really strange. Scuttlemonkey, as a /. editor, get to see and accept/reject submitted stories. So maybe what is happening is that when he sees an interesting story, he tells **Beatles-Beatles to submit it, and then Scuttlemonkey accepts it. Or maybe, just maybe, **Beatles-Beatles and Scuttlemonkey is in fact one person using 2 identities...

Think about it.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[CynicalGuy]

or a phishing site, like paypal.co.m

BURN ALL TLD's

[Wellspring]

Blech!

Personally, I think we don't need TLD's anymore. The idea that an independent system should be vetting the .org-ness of an institution (especially in places or countries where the divisions of non-profits, government, and corporate are either non-existent or irrelevant) is to me unnecessary. The internet isn't about "defending the people" or picking winners and losers, it's about an open, largely unregulated system for connecting networks. The moment you go down the road of choosing policies and standards based on protecting or fostering one group over another, you'll never stop.

Ultimately, I think that if I could alter the domain name system, I'd burn all TLD's. Most groups register the .com / .org / .net equivalents anyway. Is slashdot a .org or a .com? Just for example. Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?

However, I can see the logic of reserving 2 letter codes for countries. After all, they have the guns and decide the laws. I don't know what 1 letter domains could be used for, but I'd prefer that they not be allocated yet either (for future use, perhaps). Selling 26*n (where n == number of TLDs at any moment) domain names isn't really worth the headache of changing the rules, and they could come in handy later.

Of course, then the job of the registrar becomes much more administrative. So odds of ICANN actually doing this are slim --> none.

Re:BURN ALL TLD's

[gfreeman]

Why not go to http://cocacola/ and be done with it?

Because it would be confusing if you wanted to tell someone to go to that site, e.g.

You: "Go to aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash cocacola"
Them: "Sorry, I fell asleep halfway through that. Hmm?"

as opposed to current usage,

You: "Go to cocacola dot com"

It's the "dot com" bit that tells everyone that you are talking about a website, because no-one I know uses the redundant "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash" bit in normal chat. Of course you could say "visit our website, it's cocacola" but you'd have to do that everytime you refer to the cocacola website rather than the soft drink. Imagine business meetings in the soft drink industry.

Q: "Have you seen cocacola recently?"
A: "What, the website or the company?"

Something needs to distinguish the brand from the domain, because until now, the context has been quite clear whether you are referring to a name, a brand, a site, or the product. Drop the "dot com" and it starts to get confusing.

Re:BURN ALL TLD's

[Kayamon]

The weird thing is, that link actually works already when I click it.

Maybe .com is gone already?

Re:BURN ALL TLD's

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think a flat namespace scales to the size of the Internet? If that was possible, why aren't we all using WINS for our Internet name resolution?

Idiot.

Re:BURN ALL TLD's

[zakharin]

OpenOffice.Org does not seem to have this problem

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[izomiac]

Well, if you owned e.com then you could sell/give out subdomains like www.websit.e.com or www.googl.e.com for less than the normal cost of a domain name.

Trademark nightmare

[davidwr]

The dot-coms like Overstock.com will face a trademark nightmare.

For most letters there are probably many companies that have long-established local trademarks and a few of those might even be registered. If Overstock.com wants "o" and some long-established restaurant named "O" also wants it, who gets it? If the restaurant registered its trademark first, Overstock might be out of luck.

Hmm, maybe they should hold an auction. But who gets the profits?

OB /. content:

1. Hoard something that has zero cash value today but that you think will become valuable later.
2. Wait.
3. ???
4. PROFIT.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[tverbeek]

These bozo's can be made ignorable overnight with the establishment of a second DNS system. it blows my mind that it has not happened already.

That's usually a pretty good sign that there's something really obvious that you don't understand. Like the concept of inertia.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[bhtooefr]

*sigh*

How 'bout you RTFA? That'd tell you that they aren't doing single-letter TLDs, just single letter domains within the existing TLDs.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[dorkygeek]

People here complain about spam all the time, and then, when a known spammer uses /. to spread his stuff, we should suddenly look away?? Come on!!

For more info on peetles-peetles, have a look at http://forum.statcounter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php? t=5114&highlight=&.

Re:Please don't bother

[jimicus]

Doing that doesn't prevent **-Beatles-Beatles (no I won't link it) from linking to georgeharrison.info, and thus going up in Google's PageRank.

z.com

[ziegast]

Back in the early nineties I managed domain registrations at a relatively small ISP. This was back when people filled out registration forms using a text editor and emailed them in. I'd do about 10 a day, and since they were free, I thought I'd slip another one in to see if it'd work - "z.com". I thought, "Well, they've registered x.org already, so why not?" To my surprise, I got it. I also took a stab at registering a one-letter UUCP name - "z". I got that too. So you could email me at eric@z.com or even z!z (shortest email address). Joy!

Someone had this idea that serving the com/net/org domains was going to be too large for any single nameserver to handle and that we should perhaps start hashing domains. If a resolver was going to lookup domain.com, it would look it up first at domain.d.com, and they'd distribute the letters out to multiple servers. Moore's law and load balancers proved that you could create some beefy root-server clusters, and the idea never materialized. Besides x.com, q.com, z.com, x.org were already in use (and I think one other), and I'm sure no one wanted to give them back.

When domain prospecting came along, I had many offers for real money to buy my domain. I turned down many of them, but one day someone made me a good enough offer. My elite-ness was gone, but I used the proceeds as a down-payment on my first house.

Portals were all the rage, and my buyers tried to turn z.com into one. The best part about this one-letter domain at the time was that if you simply entered the letter "z" in Mozilla or Explorer, you'd go straight to the z.com page. The project didn't seem to go anywhere, though. Those people sold it to some people from IdeaLab (founders of Goto.com). I don't think they ever thought of anything to do with it, so the domain stayed in limbo for a while. One day at the movies, I saw an ad/trailer for the new Nissan 350Z sports sedan. For more information, you had to go to "z.com". Surely, I suspect those guys at Idealab got alot more money than me, but at least the domain was being used for something useful now.

A single-letter domain without good branding and advertising isn't worth much, and perhaps the people at ICANN are seeing that they're now on the falling side of the value curve. Can anyone thing of a reason why new domains would be released, aside from money? I could only hope that ICANN, a non-profit organization, would use the proceeds to help fund IETF (ietf.org) and DNS infrastructure research, but they'll probably go to fund more "meetings" in far-off places.

-ez

Don't bother trying to fight it.

[EtherGnat]

Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.

This message brought to you by b.org

The truth about * *Beatles-Beatles

[dorkygeek]

Ok, let's have a look at his george-harrison.info website. Aha, maybe the links at the bottom of the page? Yes, I see: http://george-harrison.info/reciprocal-links.html.

Sooo, what may be on that page? Quoting:

Our reciprocal links page. These links are useful for website promotion, link trades, and generating traffic to your site. There are many sites with useful products, services, programs, business opportunities, information, and free stuff.

All reciprocal links have been manually screened before getting on this page. Webmasters that post links on this page, also promote this Links Page on their site too. If you want to add your link and become a member of this reciprocal links page, just click on the top link for details. It's free to join.

Looking at the link list (just a small excerpt):

Guaranteed Dropship Wholesalers business directory source

Good Vibrations for Singles - Free Dating, Love, Romance, and Friendship

Collection Agency - Williams, Cohen & Gray

Trade Links - Link Swap Page

Personals Dating Affiliate Program - Instant Sign-Up

ProfitsRup2U For Successful Internet Marketing

Trade links page - reciprocal links page

HTH!

Re:The truth about * *Beatles-Beatles

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting to see this... the guy tried gaming the ODP for a while, and gave up on that when it didn't work. Try browsing the relevant threads over at the ODP's own public forum sometime...

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[petermgreen]

there are many alternative dns systems but none of them get much support and any that did take a stand against icann rather than just adding thier own tlds would almost certainly lose most of thier existing users.

managing the top level of a unique nameing system is a natural monopoly.

It's been tried

[MemeRot]

Alternic tried this, their main selling point being that they sold .xxx names. They went out of business. People who bought domain names from them had nowhere to turn after that. The big problem with companies running this is conflict. Think about it, there are two profit driven companies selling domain names. They both get a request to sell bob.com. They want the sale. They both make the sale. Two different people put up bob.com sites. What determines which site you get to when you type it in your browser? Whichever company happens to have formed a partnership with your ISP to recognize their domain names. Unless of course there really is a bob.com for real, in which case the ISP probably directs the traffic to the real bob.com, and not to bob.com being handled by either company.

It doesn't have to work that way of course. The problem comes when people want a common tld - everyone wants a .com or .org. So the two companies above could coexist fine, if one had .xxx and one had .yyy. Which again doesn't work.... I don't really see a good system where private enterprise can handle the apportioning of valuable tlds like .com and .xxx in a fair and consistent manner. The standard we have might not be great, but at least it's a standard.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Joe Decker]

Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?

I'd give a thou or two for "j.com"...

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[putko]

Per year you'd pay a thou or two? Or just once? If you read the article, it is like ICANN just discovered this gold mine in the cracks of their sofa. E.g. millions and millions of dollars! A giant pile of money. But I don't get you A-Z (minus the existing ones) is really worth so much. For instance, qwest, which has 'q', doesn't use it. They use "qwest" instead. So would it really be worth IBM to pay a more than a thousand a year for "i.com" -- I just don't think so. I don't think ICANN has found a goldmine in the cracks of their sofa.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Val314]

tell it the guys from www.x.org (how did they get this domain anyway?)

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[hunterx11]

Those with a karma bonus don't have a nofollow for the link under their name, however. My website is for the most part of little interest to people, yet it has a surprisingly high pagerank for a lot of terms just because I post to /. a lot.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[nicklott]

True, this guy's scum. But if he's so clever, why does he submit stories? (and he must submit a LOT to get a few through, unless he knows taco personally), why not just put his sites in his sig, or the website field? they also get shown on high PR pages. I should know, my crappy site had PR 4 until a couple of weeks ago, and the ONLY link to it is here.

pl ccTLD

[Anonymous Coward]

There are one letter domain names in .pl since I remember. There are some one letter words in Polish as well.

Certain company bought w.pl ("w" (pronounced more like 'v') means "in") and z.pl ("z" means "from"). They provided (and still do) free e-mail alias and www redirection service - so that one could register [site].w.pl or [name]@z.pl. They were quite popular then.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Joe Decker]

Maybe $1K/year, it'd be worth that much in extra traffic and domain recognition. But I'm a fairly small-time nature photographer. It's not hard for me to believe that there's some company out there that could make j.com worth $10-50K/yr. Some'd probably do better (a.com!), some worse (q.org), but I wouldn't be surprised by that as an estimate, which would net a few million, at least.

I'm less suprrised that Qwest hasn't used it, they don't sell a lot based on their brand, unlike a lot of arists, consumer products companies, and so on.

Wouldn't surprise me they could net millions off of carefully thought out auctions of those--what, 75 or so domains? (org, biz, com).

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[TheRaven64]

Interesting. I guess the thing to do is create a load of users with 'Beatles' in their name, get them excellent karma, and make them all post in every articles submitted by Beatles Beatles. Sounds like a lot of effort, however...

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[putko]

Yeah. They could sell those subdomains for money. You could maybe make a $100K per year, per TLD.

But Qwest is run by dummies, and they don't want that money. And even then, it isn't millions.

And if the money involved is only thousands or small millions, it won't really matter to ICANN -- they'll waste it on trips to Antarctica or other boondoggles.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Joe Decker]

they'll waste it on trips to Antarctica or other boondoggles.

Clearly they should send me in their place, I'd take better pics. (I'm planning an arctic expedition next September.)

Incorrect Focus

[Killer Eye]

This will serve to proliferate the obsession with the marketing value of domain names, when their very exposure to the average user is really an Internet usability problem that should be fixed.

Already, there are plenty of companies that can't have simply "yourcompanyname.com", and the only reason this "matters" is because users are apparently unable to find a company's web site otherwise.

Similarly, because people screw up the name anyway, there's a whole group of web scum that register "slightly mispelled" domain names. I would predict that someone will buy "b.com" and convince the owner of "d.com" that they must have both for the sake of the dyslexic (I mean no disrespect to those with dyslexia, but this is exactly the kind of crap that will happen).

The domain name simply shouldn't matter. We are now at a point in web history where we should do better. Google is about the best for a more generic kind of "look up by name and not by domain", but I'm thinking of something that probably extends into the smarts of the web browser itself.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[SEE]

Got the domain before the policy was established, were grandfathered in.

Paypal and x.com

[mr.smart]

Paypal already has http://x.com/ , im not sure how, but theyve had it for years....

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[legirons]

I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.

Imagine you're ICANN. (playing a world-conquering strategy game at the easy level may help you here)

You know that the price of something increases with lack of supply, and increases with demand.

Now imagine selling a domain name where supply is restricted to 26 items, and demand is opened to every company in the world.

mmmm... money!

DNS is so low level, so 1980's...

[4of12]

Everyone knows that you look up company names and addresses using Google instead of DNS.

In the same way that DNS superseded host tables and host numbers, Google is making DNS into an underlying layer that only machines care about, not people.

Dibs!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been wanting b.org for years.

All I'd do with it is a redirect to Microsoft, but still.. it would be teh funniez!!!1!

Dial P for pr0n?

[PhYrE2k2]

Need I say more: Dial P for pr0n?

I realize that's not what the article means, but hey!

Yawn

[jrumney]

How Web 2.0 of ICANN. Now we can have URLs like d.e.l.i.c.i.o.us, m.a.g.n.o.l.ia, and grandfather of all Web 2.0 tossers, g.o.a.t.s.e.cx

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[MegaFur]

But, unless I'm misunderstanding, there's only going to be *twenty-six* of the things. They'll go to whoever pays the most money for them. I very much doubt you'll be able to get one.

Email addresses directly on ccTLDs were cool

[billstewart]

So back in the Dark Ages, when the Internet hadn't really spread everywhere, and in many places it was still a volunteer-run system, the ccTLD server for the island of Anguilla actually resided in a friend's bedroom in Berkeley, which had a much more reliable connection than Anguilla did. There were a bunch of cryptographers who hung out down there, because US export laws made it difficult to do work or talk to foreigners inside the US, and it was a Caribbean island where they could have conferences in winter and hang out on the beach, and one of them ran one of the first ISPs down there as part of his computer consulting business.

Running a ccTLD lets you do cool things, like assign email addresses directly under the ccTLD, like " x@ai " or even " $@ai ". Can't get any shorter than that, unless you're running an alternate root server and can somehow get email addresses under the dot. It's syntactically correct, though some mail clients or non-pedantically-correctly configured mail servers didn't like those addresses and would reject them. Anguilla was a small enough country, with about 10,000 people, that they could have also done email forwarding for everybody in the country, e.g. JohnDoe@ai, though I don't think that ever happened. It looks like the TLD server no longer accepts email directly.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Repton]

Nor do I see why they had to get held back

It was in TFA, although the wording was unclear.

Engineers back in the day worried that database technology wouldn't be able to handle millions of domains all hanging off .com. So the plan was to use single character subdomains to split it up: rather than google.com and microsoft.com, we would only have google.g.com and microsoft.m.com. Instead of one big database, we could have 26 smaller ones.

But they've decided that that's not going to be necessary any more, so the single-character domains can be released to the hoards...

Ok, paypa.l.com then

[billstewart]

You could also do paypal.c.om, but this isn't about Oman, it's about ICANN.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[msi]

Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?

It is the square root of -1. It could be worth big bucks if it exists

Sorry I cant help myself.

The point of the domain name hierarchy

[meta]

The names of domains identify organizations, not categories of information. The domain name hierarchy was never envisioned as a system for classifying information by category. It was created to solve a technical problem.

The explosive growth of the Internet strained the scheme for distributing host name to address mappings. Mappings were maintained in a single file and distributed to all hosts. Two key drawbacks of this scheme were:

1. The network bandwidth required to distribute the file was proportional to the square of the number of hosts in the network; and,
2. local organizations had to wait for a central administrator to make their name changes visible to the network.

The domain name system was designed to eliminate bandwidth and administration bottlenecks without sacrificing consistency. The hierarchical structure of domain names made it easy to subdivide the mappings into zones. Each local organization could then maintain and distribute its own zone, instead of depending on a central administrator. The ability to query a remote zone file was added, along with a caching strategy. These greatly reduced the network bandwidth required to distribute and query the mappings.

The reason single-letter domains were reserved until now was also apparently technical. Engineers worried that the system might develop bottlenecks around top level domain names. One day it might need to be reorganized by initial letter (archive.org becomes archive.a.org, slashdot.org becomes slashdot.s.org, and so on). To keep this option open, single-letter domains were reserved. The conclusion seems to be that this is unnecessary. The problem then becomes how to manage the crowd of would-be registrants of single-letter domains.

Much of this information comes from the authoritative documentation on the domain name system. See: RFC 1034, DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS AND FACILITIES.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[colmore]

Agreed agreed agreed.

It reminds me of the 90s when it seemed like everyone was jumping on silly clever domains. (It's been a bit of fun watching the empty business plans sitting at www.com over the years, and cnet still has com.com)

Lame gTLDs were a Good Thing! .Museum's better

[billstewart]

ICANN has done a bunch of stupid things over the years, but this is not one of them. They'll only get to sell .sex and .inc and .ltd once, and they needed to learn how to deal with selling new gTLDs on names that nobody's really all that worried about, like .coop or .aero. They did miss a lot of the market window by dithering about it for so long - they've had enough experience by now to figure out where the money is and shake down the customers for all they could get (ICANN's primary purpose is spreading WIPO-like Intellectual Property rules around, but their secondary goal in life is to find ways to fund themselves.)

But .Museum wasn't just another lame domain name - they're about the only one that actively experimented with naming structure beyond saying "We're only selling .foo domain names to genuine Foo customers." Go read about.museum/naming. They'll sell 2LDs for very specific names, like sanfrancisco-modern-art.museum, but they mainly have generic 2LDs maintained by the gTLD, and want to sell 3LDs like sfmoma.art.museum or moma.sanfrancisco.museum, so it's easy to find given types of museums.

There are technical innovations as well - if you look for a nonexistent name, like nonexistent.museum, you'll get an A record for the gTLD's web server. (It doesn't seem to be implemented consistently - there's an A record for nonexistent 2LDs, but nonexistent.art.museum doesn't get one, which is a bit strange.) This wildcarding does break a few assumptions about domain names - a common anti-spam technique is to make sure a domain name exists before accepting mail from it, to cut down on stuff like spammer@dffsdfdsafdsfdsafdsaf.com, but you forge send mail from spammer@spammer12345.museum and the spam-filter's DNS query will get a valid record for the domain. This isn't a big problem when it's only .museum and a few minor ccTLDs, but Verisign's Sitefinder scam did this for .com in ways that broke a lot of things (e.g. "telnet missspelled-example.com" is supposed to get a DNS failure, not get stuck trying to connect to the telnet port at sitefinder.verisign.com.)

A proposal

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

www.cocacola ?

Re:A proposal

[gfreeman]

www.cocacola ?

If you're going down that route, then web.cocacola is much better.

Pr0n Spammer

[Anonymous Coward]

Beautiful...

Now I get to make another $100,000 from viagra spam

1. Pressure icaan into sltld's

2. Twiddle thumbs while icaan dorks think (a tough process)

    a. Sweeten as necessary

3. Register p.r.0.n

4. While! av, a-spam and firewall dudes catch up

    a. $$$

QED

Did you forget the city?

[tepples]

I wish we could make better use of the .us domain. Then 98 Rock in NY could be 98rock.ny.us

Actually, the format for locality based names in .us is domain.city.state.us.

My sweet lord...

[tepples]

I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.

Would it have something to do with revenge for the "My Sweet Lord" case that got "subconscious copying" written into the law books, making it impossible for somebody without a huge legal fund to lawfully write music? Read it and weep.

Ethnocentric Of Course

[Anonymous Coward]

QWERTY Keyboard, US English and all that.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Use: ref="nofollow" ? Won't work. It is supposed to be: rel="nofollow"