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New ICANN TLDs May Cause Internet Land Rush
wiryd writes "A new ICANN proposal would allow applications for almost any TLD. From the article: 'Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly. A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop. "Whatever is open to the imagination can be applied for," says Paul Levins, ICANN's vice president of corporate affairs. "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history."'"
.xxx
"Tourists probably won't find information about the Liberty Bell at a site ending in .philly just like they don't, for example, find anything useful at sites ending in .info."
If you see a company snap up a new TLD at the recommendation of their marketing department, it's time to sell their stock. Unless somebody comes up with a novel technical use for an entire TLD, this is going to be a massive flop.
My dad still gets confused when an address ends in something besides, ".com".
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
like www.slashdot.idle?
Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly.
Or maybe .pa or maybe even .penn or maybe even .hist or maybe even .bells or maybe even .revwar? Or maybe tourists will have to check all of those since they're all valid categories? And maybe the site www.ushistory.org/libertybell/ will have to register in all of those categories?
A rapper might apply for a Web address ending in .hiphop.
Or maybe .music or maybe .ryhme or maybe .lyric or maybe .album or maybe .songs or maybe .r for "Rapper" or maybe .rap? Or maybe I want to target fans of said rapper and register his name dot whatever on one of those and post it all over message boards. On the site would be a link saying "click here for the latest album free!" where they enter their address and name? Then I Google bomb said rappers name on forums and boards with my site so that it shows up as number one in Google. If I get sued for it, just give it up and dream up another TLD that could dupe a fan. Let's not even get started on my vast collection of www.google.cmo, www.google.ocm, www.google.moc, etc.
... what exactly is the point of this again? An ICANN get rich quick scam?
I'm just going to throw out the idea that TLDs were never intended to be a complete ontology of all things. And you're making a whole lot of problems (security and logistical) for people so that you can make clever domain names. Is this really necessary?
The article makes them sound ridiculously expensive
My work here is dung.
What a business it is. And you never really can "own" a domain, you simply lease it. Miss a payment and a squatter owns your traffic.
This would give a whole new level of cyber squatting.
Ima get Slashdot.sex
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
of horrible urls. How will people still be able to understand URLs if the are horribly malformed? Soon, people will not be able to distinguish between a TLD and a domain and people will fall to cleverly constructed scams.
Also, no domain is safe. Everybody can now claim google.philly or google.hiphop and companies can do nothing about it(or start countless lawsuits). This is a bad idea and implementing this will cause the www to be more confusing than it is now.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"It could translate into one of the largest clusterfucks in history."
FTFY
".slashdot" . . . or "./.", as well . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Remember when Pandora opened that cute little box?
Typical plebeianism of our modern era...ignore technical conventions for some shitty attempt at aesthetic appeal at the expense of both.
The biggest cash grab ever.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
ICANN is now going to allow people to purchase their own gTLDs (for a price, of course). And when you own the TLD, you are the one who gets to set the rules for registration of domains underneath said TLD. As if WHOIS records aren't already bad enough; now companies can buy up their own TLDs and set their own rules for contact information for customers who purchase domains under said TLD.
.net, .org, and a few others). If they sell a domain like ".pillz" to your favorite spammer, he can setup an unlimited number of second level domains under that for his spamming enterprise, and will have no obligation to have any contact information (valid or not) for those domains. From which will rise the eternally-registered spamvertising domains, over which nobody will have jurisdiction because there will be no record of where the owner (or his business) resides.
Currently, if you receive a spam email selling you (insert favorite spamming product here), you can look up the domain name that is being spamvertised, and generally figure out who is responsible for the operation. With that information you can contact the registrar and the hosting company regarding the activity that is going on. And currently, if the registrar does not react accordingly, you have some (though very limited) choice of action through ICANN if the registrar is blatantly in violation of their obligations to maintain accurate records.
However, ICANN's obligations end with the most common TLDs (.com,
This will open the floodgates in a way we have not seen before. I discussed this a while ago when they first brought up this horrendous idea. But they will keep with it, because it will make some fast money. The rest of us can all go to hell with our email.
Forget the land rush. This will cause a spam rush that could potentially make sub-prime mortgages look like a good idea.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One of the biggest reasons to have a specific domain name is because it's memorable enough and relevant enough so people will use it in lieu of a search engine.
(EG. If I don't know the URL for McDonalds restaurants, am I going to Google for it, or would I just try www.mcdonalds.com first?)
When you make the TLD an "anything goes" deal, vs. a distinct few possibilities - you make it MUCH harder for people to find you that way. (Initially, people will keep trying .com, knowing that's the "standard" ... and as time goes on, all the people registering random, new TLDs will cause those .com based searches to be increasingly worthless. They'll go back to doing searches for you, vs. taking random stabs as to what TLD you might be under.)
I really wish that instead of arbitrary TLDs, that from the beginning, domain names would have been a free form string. Say, 64 characters, barring special characters like spaces and so forth. It's not like people use the existing TLDs consistently. Cool things about such an approach: really creative, fun names would crop up. No more domain squatting nonsense; you'd have much more freedom in naming your site.
... anybody who has $185,000 for the fee, that is.
Before everyone loses their minds, note that squatting will not be a viable business model with these domains. From TFA:
The currently proposed application fee is $185,000, says Levins, plus an annual "continuance" fee of $25,000. If more than one company wants a suffix, there could be a bidding war.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
"It could translate into one of the largest money grab opportunities in history."'"
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
andnothingofvaluewasmade
Who will be the first to register rick.roll?
What's this all about? I surf the internet using IP addresses.
My favorite site is 216.34.181.48
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
ICANN cheezburger joke. Gah!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The only thing which might work are value added TLDs, where the registrar does more then run a website. A TLD which you can only get hold of if you are a government recognised charity for example. And even then... Somebody is just going to buy ".corn" and use it to do some phishing. This is the worst idea ever.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Forget about those old blah street names and numbers! Now you can request a NEW EXCITING address that would really mean something to your friends and family!
Instead of:
1122 A St.
North Somewhere, NY 99999
You can now purchase:
Hey, I'm here and you can find me at the end of the road on the left side right past the dog that always barks at you and only has three legs unless his owner has him chained up in the back so in that case you'd have to look for the broken tricycle that I left by the front door. Oh and I'm somewhere on the top of the map in a really heavy population state!
Act Now!
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Where do we sign up to have this not happen?
If some of these comments look familiar, it's because this is not new, it was just delayed
Dibs on clownpenis.fart!
I mean, I know we all like to have things appropriately-nerdily categorized and sub-categorized, but the current situation is that everything gets stuffed into .com (or your country's equivalent) unless that's not available, and then they might get some .net or .org domain instead -- regardless of whether that's appropriate in any way.
It's effectively like we *have no TLDs*. There's a competition to stuff everything into the .com namespace, and the others act as backups. That's silly -- clearly the original intent is long gone in the real world.
So why not just allow whatever people like? If anything, the upcoming plan sets the bar way too high. You should be able to go to pairnic or godaddy or wherever and register "[anything].[anything]", and if the tld isn't in use yet it'd be created on the fly.
The scaling problem is no worse than whatever currently piles-on .com. The trademark worries are likewise ridiculous -- if Microsoft wants to register microsoft-[everywordinthedictionary].com, okay, fine, it's their money. If they want to do the same with microsoft.[everywordinthedictionary], equally fine.
Perhaps it's time we revolt and set up a new Internet with a non-commerical clause so we can get back to using the Internet for what it was intended for, making us smarter rather then selling us shit...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
a novel technical use for an entire TLD
There already is one, its called spam. Whoever buys a TLD gets to set the rules for selling domains within said TLD, and manage those sales. Just wait till domains like .pillz, .softwarez, and the like are sold. That will be the death of meaningful WHOIS data and spam will go through the roof in volume.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Anybody who says "It could translate into one of the largest marketing and branding opportunities in history." as though it is a good thing needs to have their face introduced to the cluebat. Followed by the truthbat and the justicebat. Then the cluebat again, just to be safe.
Google.com -> google.search -> google.cmo -> pwned
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I can't wait to register .con - and I can have great sites like .con, mail.google.con, etc. Or maybe it would look better .c0m, .cem, .COM? The possibilities on my keyboard alone are vast, let alone if there ends up being unicode look-a-likes.
Calendar check... 8 April... WTF ICANN...
So will I be able to register .blake? And can I sue to get control if some other doofus registers it before I do?
ICANN might see this as a way to satisfy the demand for intuitive, unique names, but it is also their model to sell registrations, and they will sell millions.
I expect the .blake domain to sell in minutes. Your last name will go quicker. You will deal with squatters/enterprising individuals/scammers to get into it, and they will mark it up, as is their goal and right...
Pus. A pox on all their houses. Just a money grab by ICANN.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When you give people power, and they abuse you in response, it's time for a new approach. All DNS does is key/value mapping. The look-ups are distributed among the nodes in a hierarchy which puts control at the top, managed by ICANN.
What we need is a completely decentralized key/value lookup system that scales and is trustworthy. No entity should be vested with so much control over essential infrastructure services.
star.slashdot.org
Thank you for not being a dick :) Not taking chances, I looked to my old friends "whois -a" and "dig -x" ;)
Here's what I'll do. I'll just get the O'Reilly book and set up DNS on my trusty dual opteron and that can be the ultimate root of all the internet. If anyone wants to register a domain, its $15. No bulk registrations, but, every transfer has a tax of 10%, payable, to well me...
seriously... I think the more ICANN becomes a bunch of tools, the more likely it is that we will wind up with more than one ultimate top level domain administrator.
For that reason, having a gold rush for TLDs is just a bad idea, because, you could in the future use the TLD to distinguish between ICANN and .com, .net, .org, etc... versus, another party's .net2, .org2, and so on.
This is my sig.
and who will be the first to try to register the proverbial "clownpenis.fart" ? (I think that machine name was from a Dave Barry joke.)
This will make DNS completely useless, but I suppose Google has pretty much made DNS irrelevant anyway.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
thought it was an SNL skit, a brokerage that didn't get a website until after all the good names had been taken.
Honest question. I have always wondered why we even have top level domains. Why require .com, .net, .info, etc? It's just a name. If my name happens to have .'s in it then great, if not so what. Surely databases can easily handle all the variants that people can throw at it.
Why not just:
http://joe/
http://linux/
http://mysite.whatever/
Or is it just a matter of control? Someone feels that they need to be in charge of their segment of the name space.
How about fixing the DNS/Email system so as to defeat the virus/spam/phishing epidemic?
davecb5620@gmail.com
paypal.comm
gmail.mial
amazon.buuy
Without at least some stable TLDs, the ones you can check "under" (see if it really ends with "ebay.com"), spam will will be augmented with new and novel phishing schemes to boggle the mind.
If you use the right font, "conn" will look alsmot like "com", and that's a very *primitive* method.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
2 problems. First, it will cost $185,000 or more to apply for your own gTLD. Second, a spammer would be stupid to get their own gTLD, because the easiest way to then block said spammer is to block the entire domain.
You kidding? That's like a spam-filtering dream. If I can automatically know that anything related to your spammer friend's .pillz domain is untrustworthy, I can very happily have my e-mail client completely disregard it.
And since setting up a new tld is apparently going to be non-trivial, it's not like the guy can just go and get a different one tomorrow.
Now CmdrTaco can get that .dot TLD he's been longing for all these years.
As long as DNS providers are not obligated to honor every TLD, it will only be truly awful, not terribly, terribly, shitty.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yes please, and this should hopefully make surfing more secure and anonymous. Let's setup an "encryption always on" internet to help with that, just so we can bring back the reason the internet was made: any information from anywhere. No censorship. If the site cannot be accessed, then try a peer node/proxy node that will help forward this encrypted information...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Why would I use:
www.microsoft.com
www.coke.com
www.amazon.com
when you *could* just type in:
microsoft
coke
amazon
Yes! You can actually visit top level domains! Shocking but true!!
Stand back and watch the fireworks.
The age of the domain name is over in my opinion. People find information by going through search engines, I would guess a very small population still types www.whatiwant.com when surfing. They would have learned their lesson a long time ago that that's not a smart idea.
I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle. It's almost like they're a one-man DNS server converting what you want into a site name. I think we'd be better served to pare things down a tad so there weren't so many damned TLDs, rather than just give up. If we did give up, why not eliminate names altogether?
But honestly, the problem's not that dire, domain names are still usable. Let's say I want info on the Obama administration, for instance. I type in "whitehouse.com" and find a great deal of valuable information, some interesting images, and end up feeling a lot better about the direction this country is headed.
'Tourists might find information about the Liberty Bell, for example, at a site ending in .philly.'
Provided the tourist already knows where the Liberty Bell is, and that "philly" is both a TLD and an abreviation for Philadelphia. Otherwise, they would just google it. This reminds me of the question "Why is the word 'dictionary' in the dictionary?" If you know how to find it, you already know the definition!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
.bs .... and .bullshit and .yesbearsdoshitinthewoods
The more TLDs there are, the more likely people will realize that the TLD is an important part of the domain. It will no longer automatically be .com when you're in the US, no longer automatically .de in Germany, etc.
It is important that the TLDs are not used like second level domains for the wealthy. Nobody who becomes a registry for a new TLD should have any services under that domain, except those needed for registry purposes. Access to registration must be non-discriminatory and TLDs should be granted under the condition that there must be at least 10000 separate and independent subdomain owners after at most one year.
what you're talking about. Could you be more specific?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
it will cost $185,000 or more to apply for your own gTLD
Spammers deal with a lot more money than that.
because the easiest way to then block said spammer is to block the entire domain
Two problems with that statemnet.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Didn't we see this already when the country Tuvalu and Verisign got together to sell *.tv domain names?
There was a pile of hype at the time but not much came of it.
Do neither of you know how to google, or did you think your half-formed memories were more reliable than a search engine, or what?
'nuff said.
What about .us? Seems like you're making a connection between the United States and mp3 or something.
People may find info about Paul Levins at .nobhead
A minority of lobbying organisations want this, anbody else with even the most vague knowledge of DNS thinks it's retarded. You can find my reservations via the .intranet or other widely used private tld's.
That's like a spam-filtering dream. If I can automatically know that anything related to your spammer friend's .pillz domain is untrustworthy, I can very happily have my e-mail client completely disregard it
So you're going to set your filter to read every email for obfuscated links going to .pillz domains? The spam will, in all likelihood, show up as the same bogus "Canadian Pharmacy" spam that we've all seen hundreds of times, but the obfuscated link will in some way point to a .pillz domain instead of the usual "superhappyfunpoodlegoblin.cn" domain. The spam itself will still come from a compromised windows box owned by some unlucky senior citizen in Florida with a DSL connection that they never turn off.
setting up a new tld is apparently going to be non-trivial
$185k is pretty trivial for spammers.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
...so we got stuck with clownpenis.fart
I can grab clownpenis.fart!
I can't remember the last time I forgot anything.
of course these domains would be easy to block at the firewall
at first just deny access to every TLD that is NOT .com, .org, .edu, .mil, .{insert commonly used domain here}
I'm beginning to think that ICANN is just an incredibly clever plan to move us away from domain names altogether. While making fat bags of loot, of course.
To what, I have no idea. Googling a well-known company is fine, but as a startup it would be tough. It seems like it may bring the problem with domain names (your name needs not just be locally unique or even nationally unique, but increasingly globally unique). You want to say "to learn more, visit our website, somenewcompany.com" in your voice/tv ads and in print. The more domain names you get, the more likely they're just going to land on a squatter or porn (or porn squatter) site and never wind up at your site.
You don't want to say "to learn more, just google somenewcompany", as it's too unspecific. For example, try googling "supply depot." What we may wind up with is every company having a name as "unique" as XKCD.
I'm beginning to long for sites to be separated purely by geography, the only TLDs being country codes. Sure, it's a crappy system, but at least then you're less likely to be in the same naming pool with a small Romanian auto repair shop, a Japanese anime and an Australian outback excursion tour company.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
It would be incredibly easy to block that spam using "allow only" filters for .com, .org, etc.
.ICANT
I've said something along those lines before also. There's no technical reason that the DNS has to use TLDs. Why not just have websites use something like http://mcdonalds/ instead of http://mcdonalds.com/, essentially being their own TLD?
TLDs like .es are good because they can narrow down to a specific geographic location and routing is quicker, but it's somewhat useless with TLDs like .com since the servers can be anywhere.
No existe.
hint: what does .com stand for?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Keep it under your hats, but a friend told me about this awesome site that doesn't even have a domain name it's so secret. They have some of the most fucked up porn there. Not sure how they stay legal sometimes. My only complaint is that they recycle their material a lot so I often find a lot of repeats. I usually just check back every few months to see the newer stuff. I don't want to doom the site so I'll try to keep all the extra idiot slashdot users out and post it in a form only us hackers will likely realize - 7F000001.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
It would be incredibly easy to block that spam using "allow only" filters for .com, .org, etc.
I very truly hope that you mean block spam based on where the link inside the message refers to, and not where it came from. Because if you are blocking spam based on the domain it came from, there are hardly even words available in the English language to describe that level of stupidity.
The problem I pointed out lies in the spamvertised, not the spamvertising domain. The difference being that the former is the one that the spam is asking you to visit, while the latter is the one that actually sent you the spam. If you have paid attention to the spam you receive, you would know they are almost never the same. The ability to purchase and regulate new gTLDs offers a fantastic new opportunity for spammers; even more so an opportunity for those who pay for their services.
Just wait, and we will soon see a new flood of spamvertised domains that are located under the new gTLDs. And they will use the same content obfuscation techniques that they already employ so that your precious filters will not detect that they are advertising for a domain under ".pills"; your filter will think it is yet another ".com" instead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While TLDs aren't strictly necessary, free form strings aren't going to work. DNS has hierarchical names because DNS is a scheme for delegating authority for resolving the mapping between the symbolic names and the IP addresses. For this to work, smaller subparts of the fully qualified name need to correspond to DNS servers that can tell you where to ask for the larger subparts.
Or to put it differently, if domain names were free form strings, then a database of all of the mappings would need to exist in one place, and maintained by one entitity. Hierarchical names avoid that problem.
Are you adequate?
Gee gosh, I guess it's time to shut it all down and start from scratch. This would certainly be the end or very close to it. Internet v2 (or v3, or v4, whatever).
ICANN does not have the best interests of the public in mind with this. This is a recipe for disaster.
God, I'm actually starting to miss Lynx and searching using Veronica ...
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Stop it. No user benefits. They regularly try to lobby these.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
http://slashdot.dot
Users either stick a .com or google for whatever they are looking for. Selling free-form TLDs is a money grabbing move by ICANN. Ridiculous.
If anything, the only meaningful separation in the Internet is language and country. The Germans saw this and realized only .de was necessary. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible for all countries to revert to such scheme :(
This is a terrible idea from a usability standpoint. Most regular people already don't understand the difference between .com and .net anyway, which is why we should be moving to one TLD, not an infinite number.
Also, the whole topic is becoming moot with the increasing use of search engines. Who cares what the URL is? All that matters is where you rank on Google.
Any email I host will only accept mail from the current TLD's. Not that big of a deal.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Spammers deal with a lot more money than that.
Yes, they do. But that $185,000 is per gTLD. Why would they spend $185k per domain when the current system works just fine at literally thousandths of that price? They are out to make money, not piss it down ICANN's drain. Furthermore, having their own gTLD makes them more easily targeted and controlled. If a spammer registers .spam and it gets spamvertised, how long do you really think it would be before .spam is listed as a whole on every major URIBL?
Second, I was referring to the spamvertised domain, not the domain that the email came from. The money is in the domain being spamvertised, not the domain that is relaying the mail.
Spammers using their own gTLDs will have a much larger problem with URIBLs. The way spammers get around a URIBL listing is by simply using throwaway domains. If your entire top-level domain just got URIBL'd, you'll seriously reconsider dropping another $185k on a new one.
That's what you get when you let americans take care of a common good. All they care is about making money out of it. And the worst thing is that ICANN is actually a non-profit corporation. WTF? They're being assholes just out of habit?
I hope that with this scam the rest of the word finally gets their act together and remove the control of the Internet from the hands of the USA. They have repeatedly proven that they are too incompetent to do this immensely important job. And the Internet is international, for fuck's sake. It's the UN that should take care of it.
Darn, they couldn't even house the root serves in the US due to the laws allowing wiretapping foreign traffic.
entropy happens
I long for the days of fully qualified URL's; 'http://www.domain.com'. I personally still type out the fully qualified domain names to half the websites I view each day (I typically only use bookmarks for address I use rarely). I also miss when the tld's meant something usefully and websites used a tld that matched their content
The internet does very little in addition to what I could already do in 1998 except now I have to deal with ads and pop-ups. I long for the days when individuals and companies setup webpages to showcase their interests or products not as revenue generators. I still run my webpages ad free and host my own servers because I want the information available.
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
So then Mr. Spammer decides to let a few legitimate pill-vendors (ambien.pillz, etc.) in at the beginning. Maybe even gives them free domains. Get the traffic going, let this become "safe" in the public eye. Now, unleash the fury after it is impossible to block the domain without taking out the very reputable cheap.pillz.
Who says we need TLDs to begin with? Before the search engines, we had to enter website addresses by hand, and typically shared "good" websites with each other. I remember buying a magazine especially for the website listing in the back.
The thing is, this could be a good business opportunity. Instead of cataloging websites by TLD, search engines like Google could catalog them in a different way. The thing is, until Yahoo, Altavista and eventually Google came along we didn't know what it was like to surf the web any other way. There is probably some entrepreneur out there who has a great idea about how to organize the web in such a TLD manner, and he will be the next Sergey or Larry.
I am personally not worried.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
No, I'm going to consider any mail with a link to any site other than a .com, .net, .org, .edu or .us spam.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
i.for.one.welcome.our.new.tld.overlords
Well, if it's like you say and a single entity has control of all domains generated off of a particular gTLD, then it will be retardedly easy to find which companies are dumb enough to sell domains to spammers on their gTLD.
For example, people are terrified of the "corn" gTLD. Every browser I use can be setup for phising detection, if the owner of corn is dumb enough to start selling domains to spammers than anything under corn can be flagged as a possibly phishing site.
Considering the cost of owning one of these gTLD's, I can't imagine a corporation wanting to compromise theirs. They may want to sell domains off of it, but they certainly wouldn't want to sell them to spammers. If anything, it makes it easier to flag spammers if they choose to use an open or compromised gTLD, and easy to indicate if a link is legit.
In banking, for example. If I use PNC bank, they may purchase the .PNC gTLD and I make sure I only do my banking if it's under .PNC gTLD.
Having major phishing filters block your gTLD on it sounds incredibly expensive.
I think your fears are overstated and the spam or risks therein would certainly be no worse than today. The "land grab", and ICANN generating a bunch of revenue, I can see though.
Time to register bhl.badtlds
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
No, I'm going to consider any mail with a link to any site other than a .com, .net, .org, .edu or .us spam.
Well, I wish you good luck with that. I will tell you right now that spammer link obfuscation will quickly make that approach obsolete. You can come back later and tell me I was right if you would like.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think the $185K application fee for uncontended TLDs, and the annual $25K renewal fee will keep a lot of jackasses out. This isn't going to be anything like domain sampling.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot slash dot
Let the spammers send their money to ICANN, what do I care which thief has the money? I can then add *.pilz to my spam list (or more likely subscribe to something like Ad-Aware for e-mail lists, which if not around already then would be 5 seconds after this happened). There's already ridiculous amounts of spam- if this makes it easier to filter some of it out then it's not all bad. I'd be more worried about the malware which will undoubtedly also be on those sites.
it will be retardedly easy to find which companies are dumb enough to sell domains to spammers on their gTLD.
That is a piece of information that most people wouldn't even know how to find, let alone what to do with it.
Every browser I use can be setup for phising detection
That's great. Though I doubt the spammers are interested in you anyways. They know that there are plenty of people still using ancient versions of netscape and even the early AOL browsers on their 10+ year old PCs that connect via dial-up. These are the people the spammers are looking to make money off of, and they'll make plenty off of them to make up the money quickly of registering in the new TLDs.
Even more so, spamvertised sites will become cheaper under the new TLDs because the registrations will never have to expire (or even have valid data). Previously registrars had an obligation to keep good WHOIS data, but that all goes out the window now for the registrars involved in selling under the new gTLDs.
I can't imagine a corporation wanting to compromise theirs
Do you know any major corporations involved in spamming? Neither do I.
.pillz or whatever other new gTLD they want. Then they have a permanent registration base.
However, for the spamming big shots, $185,000 isn't much money at all. They can easily funnel it to one of their unscrupulous registrar friends to buy
Having major phishing filters block your gTLD on it sounds incredibly expensive
Again, you are assuming that the spammers and phishers care about the technologically savvy. That is not their target market anyways. They will quickly make up their costs off of people who don't know better, and the rest of us will see a new deluge of spam as a direct consequence.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The only reason we have products and orgnizations like Twitter, Joomla, Dimim, Hulu, etc. are because online businesses have been naming themselves or their products after available domain names. Remove the artificial barrier of a limited set of TLDs, and organizations can find a domain that fits their name, instead of the other way around. Of course, it will take a generation or so before the perceived authenticity of a .com or .net domain disappears from our society.
I see thousands of new domains appearing like these:
-http://www.paypal.com.secure/safe/234325
-http://www.paypal.cÃm/
-http://www.PAYPAL.C0M/
-http://www.paypal/
Actually, the more I think about it, most people would even be duped by
-http://www.paypal.secure/
We can look at these domains and see why they are bad immediately. But imagine when *valid* sites start using domains like
-http://secure.banking/
then even those of us who would have been able to spot a phony URL instantly are going to be confused.
I figure I can conservatively classify about 95% of all current and future sites as potentially falling into that TLD. I'm going to be rich, rich I tell you!
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
What do you mean by "check" them? If the top results in their search engine are libertybell.philly and libertybell.penn and liberty.bell, then sure, I suppose they'll be "checking" all of them. If you're talking about people typing in a bunch of URLs in the hopes that one of them happens to result in getting what they want, well, those people were already destined to lose so this proposal changes nothing. I sure wouldn't say they "have to check" all of them (or even any of them).
You can do that right now. Googlebomb some rapper's forums and tell people to come to foo.com/~eldavajohn/index.php for the latest album free, if you want.
Honestly, Yes. But I don't see any downside to it, except for the people who are foolish enough to pay them.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Just wait, and we will soon see a new flood of spamvertised domains that are located under the new gTLDs. And they will use the same content obfuscation techniques that they already employ so that your precious filters will not detect that they are advertising for a domain under ".pills"; your filter will think it is yet another ".com" instead.
If you firewalled out everything from ".pills", it wouldn't matter how obfuscated the link was, you still couldn't load the site if it is in .pills. If all major ISPs were on-board with doing this, the idiots that actually click the links in spam in the first place would no longer be perpetuating the spam problem.
i want to go to chase.com
not
chase.cÒm
chase.cÓm
chase.cÔm
chase.cÕm
chase.cÖm
etc.
and i don't want to think about it
nor should i have to, nor should such an obvious security hole be introduced
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
just resolve the domain name to an ip address and do the whois on that. it will tell you who has the block from ARIN and work from there. i am just saying is all. It is how I would approach it
as most contact info for spammer domain names is useless to begin with right now.
I know spammers cope with really low response rates - but is there even a single person out there who's smart enough to de-obfucsate a URL, and still stupid enough to do so? If it's not clickable, what's the point? Hmm, I guess if trojans can spread in password-protected zip files, anything is possible, but this seems like a bit of a reach.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Gee gosh, I guess it's time to shut it all down and start from scratch. This would certainly be the end or very close to it. Internet v2 (or v3, or v4, whatever)."
Oh, wow, so the Internet powers that be have finally decided on an IP v4 to v6 migration strategy. Fantastic. It's about time someone did something about it.
but is there even a single person out there who's smart enough to de-obfucsate a URL, and still stupid enough to do so?
You don't read many spam emails, clearly. Otherwise you would know how this works.
The recipient doesn't have to de-obfuscate anything. Their email software will do it for them. In the message (when it is read by their filter) the domain name is obfuscated. But it will render correctly through a variety of techniques when they open the message.
To the user it is nothing special, just another advertisement for cheap (pills/software/shoes/whatever). To the filter it is nonsense that doesn't match any restricted pattern.
Or even more so, the user isn't using a filter to begin with.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And then make the whole thing a giant proxy, backwardizing all the content on the web!
Bow-ties are cool.
Yea, I can definitely see your point that people who don't update their browsers may be at higher risk.
One might also make the case that their target is already incredibly vulnerable and adding more gTLD's to the mix won't make them any more or less vulnerable.
I think an argument could be made in some cases that it would enhance security, but you're right if they are using an un-updated XP and browser and sending money to African monarchs then they could be even more at risk. I guess I just personally don't care about that crowd as they're super vulnerable to a million other things already.
That's what I type when I put my hands on the keyboard in the dark.
Remember when Pandora opened that cute little box?
When Pandora played with frenzied excitation, waiting for my strength to be undone?
I do. I feel so elated!
Bow-ties are cool.
... like selling imaginary property.
Except maybe war, but apparently lately even 2 wars at the same time are not helping.
But another dot-com bubble certainly will.
1. Invest into .bean(s), .can(s) and .shotgun(s)
2. Provide a robust and durable access to your domains in the case of a total economic and civilizational meltdown
3. Wait for bubble to burst
4. Profit!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Read the GP's post again. It didn't advocate sticking with the .com suffix. Besides, deriving the effect of a TLD from its name is just silly. There are plenty of .com sites that are not commercial in nature.
What you probably meant to say is that the intended use of the Internet was not to make us smarter. This is debatable, but ultimately not a useful argument to have. It's like debating the purpose of government. Some believe the purpose is to help people make money, and some believe it is to improve society.
A non-commercial Internet is going too far, of course. There's a good kind of commerce that often gets lost amid the pop-ups, banners, flash ads, sponsored links, spam, scams, and squatters. The ideal Internet would have the good commerce alongside the "communist" sites like Wikipedia.
What's wrong with www.google?
One might also make the case that their target is already incredibly vulnerable and adding more gTLD's to the mix won't make them any more or less vulnerable.
I disagree with you on this because of how the new gTLDs change registration.
Under the existing TLDs, registrars are expected to maintain some level of accuracy in their registration records, or they can lose their accreditation status. This is how many spamvertised domains were shut down before, they would have bogus registration data and the owners would allow them to be shut down rather than share correct data (the registrars were generally in on it, too; they would sell hundreds or thousands of domains at a time to a spammer and shut them down on demand).
However, under the new gTLDs, the TLD owner sets the rules for registration. Which means now a domain could potentially be registered forever with bad information under a new gTLD. Which means that the spam sent out next week would refer to a website that will still be up in 5 years (generally most spamvertised domains now live on the order of a few weeks to a few months before they get shut down).
Hence this system enhances the number of customers that a spammer could possibly bring in, as the old spams will still have valid links. It also increases their margin as they won't need to register anywhere near as many domains, and they won't have to worry about their registrar ever losing accreditation.
I guess I just personally don't care about that crowd
You probably should rethink that position. The people in "that crowd" are a big part of why spam exists. And we can never solve this problem with filters only. Spam exists because it is profitable. If you really want to end spam you need to do something about the profit, not just about the email that goes to your own address.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
of the gp
commerce exists
the only job for you to do is accept that it exists. no big deal
but certain people with a lot of book reading but no real world common sense believe commerce is some sort of bogeyman in this world
fact: all historical attempts at excising commerce from a substantial segment of any human society only results in a set of evils worse than any set of evils you can point to emmanating from commerce
we accept commerce. not because we love it. but because there is no better way to organize human beings into productive and happy units
yes, i said happy. relatively speaking. all happiness is relative. as if alternative schemes to commerce make people happier
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Layer a new P2P style onion routed obfuscated and encrypted protocol over the existing TCP network. Don't even bother using DNS: re-implement DNS using some kind of voting scheme/web of trust.
Let's put an end to all this leasing and snooping garbage once and for all!
Wow, do people really not use common email client processing before sending email text to filters? I'm guessing gmail does, because I **haven't* spent any time looking at spam email in the past few years.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I can get clownpenis.fart
The turf war could be endless, says Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers trade group of big marketers. "Think about some of the companies out there. Some have hundreds, maybe thousands of brands. ... It's really open-ended."
It really, really makes me cringe to say this, but maybe the crappy concept of AOL keywords makes more sense than the potentially endless multiplication of TLDs and domains. If "the Google" and other S.E.s guaranteed search precedence to corporate trademark holders, owning all the permutations of products, brands, slogans, etc. wouldn't be necessary. We could dumb down the browser for the normals and hide the URLs (always there for advanced users). Bulletproof phishing protection would be critical, of course.
Ask me about my sig!
About freaking time. What's the Internet running anyway, DOS 1.0?
Though I think it's an open question whether .bat will be taken by old-school script file hackers or Christian Bale.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
does type his emails like that.
Arrgh! I've said it before, but we really need to eliminate the TLDs, not make more of them. Get rid of every TLD other than country codes. Each country can subdivide its namespace as it chooses. If you want an online presence in a country, you deal with that country's registrar and play by its rules. Any disputes are handled within the jurisdiction of that country.
There. Done. Simple, fair, and effective.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Yes, it should have been done differently from the start. NCSA should have removed the address bar from the Mosaic 1.0 release. End users were never supposed to be exposed to URLs, that was a way for programmers to have a internet-standard equivalent to a pointer. Would you release a program that required an end user to type in the name of a pointer to access the value stored? It's unthinkable.
URLs were supposed to be hidden. That the first graphical browser left in a developer's tool - the address bar - is the cause of this.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Why break it into 3 words like it in now. Go oldschool and use keywords.
google -> 74.125.45.100 instead of
www.google.com -> 74.125.45.100
If tlds can be anything and subdomains are also free reign.... Whats the point? Maybe if they were manually given out or some had different rules but that's not happening so. I don't get it.
ICANN is now going to allow people to purchase their own gTLDs (for a price, of course). And when you own the TLD, you are the one who gets to set the rules for registration of domains underneath said TLD. As if WHOIS records aren't already bad enough; now companies can buy up their own TLDs and set their own rules for contact information for customers who purchase domains under said TLD.
And I can setup my own rules, too.
vi /etc/mail/access ... :qw! /etc/mail/access /etc/mail/access
From:com OK
From:net OK
From:org OK
From:info OK
From:ac OK
From:ad OK
From:zm OK
From:zw OK
From:* ERROR:4.2.1:"421 Cannot continue with stupid ass custom TLD"
makemap hash
SMTP code 421 causes sendmail to abort the socket, too.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Whoever has .car could be just one car company and not let any other companies have a domain on it, thereby locking out competitors.
> Owning .ass is only profitable if you also own .tits. After all, we all know that what sells is .tits and .ass.
Yeah, but just getting all the yellow properties isn't enough. You need to build some hotels on them to really rake in the money. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact...
The presence of a spammer TLD in an email would certainly provide strong, useful information for filters, but there really isn't any reason for DNS to bother resolving scam.pillz, it can just pop up a not found. So it creates yet another stupid hassle to deal with, but the entire $185,000 TLD is rendered completely impotent simply by dropping .pillz from your DNS.
Some level of forgiveness makes sense, but a TLD that is only used for scams is a lot less poisonous than giving a shady registrar rights to sell on a TLD with other legitimate users (like the current situation with .com, .cn, and so on).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
OOGA OOGA
I am extremely annoyed that I went to that site, and it wasn't Goatse. That is all.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Or maybe .pa or maybe even .penn or maybe even .hist or maybe even .bells or maybe even .revwar?
I really hate the Yellow Pages because of this.
What was the intended alternative? Would it have worked better as the web scaled to the size it is today?
I believe this will only increase the value of the .com TLD.
Confusion only helps the established "brand" and in this case ".com" is the established brand. I had thought that perhaps (this was when .info/.biz etc were approved) that one or both of them might be a positive TLD, but for the large majority that has not been the case and having spam type sites in the TLD only hurts the other sites in it. Increasing the number of TLDs available to an arbitrary number will only hurt the less established TLDs.
Who is going to remember something like: ham.food or something like that?
(One good .biz site is http://www.nightbeforechristmas.biz/ -- not affiliated with it, but it gets hurt by junk sites in the .biz TLD).
You just passed up an awesome opportunity to send everyone straight to goatse. Hand in your internet card on the way out.
/.../
or other fun ones would be:
newegg.oldegg
myspace.liespace
flickr.quickr
facebook.assbook
senate.crooks
linux.torvalds
sun.cloudy
microsoft.sucks (and all the other -sucks websites)
icann is trying hard to prove that it is worthless and control of dns should be handed in to un instead. at least some order can be restored then...
thank you, icann!
One reason: DNS suffix search.
In my workplace, I put intranet in the address bar and hit enter, and although it doesn't find a DNS match on intranet, it knows to look for intranet.[my domain] or whatever (these default search domains are pushed out via DHCP or automatically assumed based on own domain name). Same applies to mail, ftp, proxy, etc, etc.
It's sort of a way to do private addressing for hostnames - if I see an unqualified name, it's always assumed to be in the same domain that I'm in or something fairly local. This can be a very handy shortcut, and is very widely used in private networks. I think it makes a lot of sense, but obviously this wouldn't work if intranet was a valid FQDN in its own right.
Fear not, I have a solution for the interwebs!
.isgay is not in the users list of approved gtdls, only .com, .net and .org.
3. slashdot.com, .net , and .org gets checked.
4. There is already slashdots for all these tdl's, so the plugin renames the site to www.slashdot.url (so you know its a url created by the plugin).
5. This is all more of a convenience thing so when you type paypal.corn , it will actually be paypal.tag an obvious difference. If this was a browser setting by default (something like consolidate gTDL feature), then taging logic would remain consistent across users with the feature enabled and users would then end up with the same .url domain names for an entered non matched gtdl. By default you can have the .url links auto enable this feature, or something, so sharing the links is easy. Of course a dns type solution is better and perhaps its time to redo dns anyways, but I'm just thinking of quickest possible fix for long gtdls, phising scams, etc.
I call it auto web tagging 2.0! It will be implemented via web plugins for all major browsers.
When ever your browser hits a gTDL it will automatically crossreference the mid portion of the domain with a list of "approved" tdls/gtdls. If there is an existing entity for the gtdl mid section, it will automatically give the gtdl a default exclusive suffix like (.url) then you can use that henceforth.
So basically, the plugin would do the following:
1. User enters www.slashdot.isgay 2.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Obligatory wiki link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two .com is sort of invisible and nowadays expected, which is why it is valuable.
google - 6 ebay - 4 amazon - 6.
The
Basically people in the mass do not readily recall things over 9 characters long, but can recall information that is 'chunked'
So flibberty.gibbet will probably be remembered but flibbertygibbet.org probably will not.
Another good analogy is that there are only so many sensible first names and so the chances are that someone else on your office / class has the same first name, but it is unlikely that someone else nearby has the same first/lastname combination.
So, on balance I think this is a potentially good thing
Consider
domino.pizza and domino.ibm and domino.games - you know it makes sense
Domain names are vitally important for search engine optimization, as search engines stand today. Owning my-kewords.com works better than having a site full of my-keywords and hundreds of inbound links. This is why companies go nuts for internet "real estate."
YMMV.
I.never.thought.real.life.vhost.is.possible
we can get back to using the Internet for what it was intended for, making us smarter rather then selling us shit...
Yeah!
I'm sure I wouldn't mind printing out an order form for XKCD T-shirts, filling it out by hand and sending it via snail-mail to the XKCD store.
I'm sure I wouldn't mind losing the ability to buy wii games cheaper than in my local shopping mall. I wouldn't mind having to go price-comparing by foot (or bike).
I sure hate the fact that I could buy my laptops on the internet. Such a bitch not having to walk around to several stores.
Down with internet commerce!
</sarcasm>
I think we can agree that some ungodly deeds are done in the name of profit. That doesn't make all deeds done in the name of profit ungodly.
Sorry for the self-reply. My post was meant as a reply to http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1192603&cid=27507499
Nothing to see here, move along.
I wish that they would have had just started with the countries. That way each country could enforce their own rules. "But what about e.g. debian.org?" I hear you say. Well, if you look at the whois adress, you notice that they are in the US, so that would have been initially been debian.us.
Now if they so desire, they could also register debian.be or debian.co.uk or ... if those would allow it.
And in hindsight something completely different would have been even better.
url://us for TLD and url://us/domain/ which would then lead to something like
url://us/debian/ftp/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-cd/debian-500-i386-CD-1.iso for the download of the ISO.
url could still be changed for the protocol (e.g. http:/// ftp:// nfs:// ssh:// ...)
Unfortunatly hindsight and this won't happen, unless it would be implemented somehow in IPv6 and enforced to be used like that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually I read once a Costa Rican address that involved the location of several nearby shops.
And I heard that Tokyo adresses are quite complex.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I don't mind the idea of an open floodgate for new TLD's. Good ones will rise to the top, bad ones will die, the artificial scarcity of domain names will vanish.
I hate the idea that anyone can own a TLD. This just recreates the .com domain name land rush and artificial scarcity on a new and more damaging level.
As far as protecting trademarks, perhaps allow trademark holders to block a TLD, but not own or control it. Either the TLD is there and open to all or Blocked and not allowed to be created.
Georgia summer camps
Cool. My blog listing all my complaints about work will be publishable now.
http://whereismy.freeboozefountainandpoledancers.robbed/
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Minor Childers
Isn't this the dude on the goatse site? I swear it is the same asshole.
Liliana Gil, director of global marketing services with Johnson & Johnson, doesn't see the common suffixes being overtaken but believes, "This could be a fun new way to communicate a message digitally. ...You could have tylenol.children, tylenol.pm."
Why is it when marketing people see something as a "Fun new way!" our lives are filled with more shit.
I have begun to hate marketing people more than lawyers. This is sad...
By the way Liliana I think you need to use some of that Johnson&Johnson vaginal spray. Your breath stinks.
And how much squatting is this going to generate? People buying up "google.search" and whatnot?
Sounds like the Bad Idea of the year to me.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I sort of do the same thing in that I have here as a hostname for 127.0.0.1 (no domain).
And technically FQDNs should have a trailing dot, but I suppose that is a valid point.
No existe.
Intended alternative? There was none. It was, in hindsight, a mistake to expose end users to URLs. At best, you Ctrl-U or something to bring up a dialog to type or paste in an address, if that's the only info you have. Most of the time, you'd simply use a search engine, or whatever else was developed later on (RSS feeds, social network sites, etc) to access new websites. That was the W3C idea anyway. That's how people got links to new gopher sites. They used aggregators and search engines like WAIS, and Archie and Veronica.
Edith Keeler Must Die