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4 Millionth Domain Name
cswiii writes "This Quicken.com news brief states that Network Solutions, the "world leader in domain name registration" (guffaw) has reached the four-million domain milestone. You do the math.
" The internet is really huge (todays wacky understatement)
26 alpha, 10 digits, some random punctuation.
Wonder how long before we run out? We got IPV6, how about
DNSv6. Can I have the .dot TLD?
Actually, if you read InterNIC's news page, it was the 3 millionth registration, not the 4th (for .com, .net and .org anyways).
You don't need a customized named to set up a
TLD. Anyone can set one up if they know what they're doing and get enough people to point to it...
Though the first task is merely a technical issue, the latter is not that easily solvable, if at all...
IANA controls the root servers, IP address allocation, etc. I've yet to hear anything from them about their future plans since Jon Postel passed away. Without Jon, who truly did things for the good of the 'net, I fear IANA may turn into another commercialized internet devilspawn like NSI.
If you create a .dot TLD, I'll add it to my name server...
with over 40 unique characters, the equation for all possible domain names is actally 40! (factorial) which ends up being 8.15915E+47, or0 00,000,000,000,000,000. (almost half a google)
81,591,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
Thats not happening any time soon. (at the current rate, not for zillions of years)
>Yes, but who really wants to own something like "kj387fh3m4fha9123.com"???
I don't know. I might want shitpissfuckcuntmotherfuckercocksuckertits.com. Maybe not. Too long. And besides, Carlin'd probably sue me.
so I was off by a few trillion, close enough.
Your charts are off, you show there are 2 letter domains left, using your perl script we see there are none.
Hmm. I wonder if dotslash.org is taken?
:)
% whois dotslash.org
Registrant:
TEK Interactive Group, Inc. (DOTSLASH8-DOM)
PO Box 8368
Fort Wayne, IN 46898
US
Domain Name: DOTSLASH.ORG
[...]
Aw nuts. Hey Rob, Ya gonna sue?
Me confuzzled, as usual.
I always thought that all domain names were translated into IP's (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) by DNS servers which would mean 255^4. What am I missing? Obviously, I'm still pretty new to all this and am still fumbling around for info.
Thanx.
It's true that you are limited to that many IP addresses. But an IP address can serve more than one domain name. There's many ways to do this, including proxies, forwarding, etc.
I don't know where you got the idea of us having ipv6... it's still at least two years or so away. IPv6 won't get rid of internic either.
not that this is productive, but you are still wrong. you have only considered domains which are 25 characters in length. you forget shorter ones. if 25 is an upper bound, then the number of words in a 40 character alphabet is
sum(40^i, i=1..25)
which is larger than your answer, but on the same (enormous) order of magnitude. this is one of those "more than the number of elementary particles on the planet" numbers. we won't run out..
- pal (cannot find password)
Who's spent the most money hoarding domain names? Any opinions? I guess it would likely be either a retailer, adult, or spam/scam company.
wow... this is REAL bad math... let's say there are 40 unique chars, and a domain name can't be longer than 25 chars... The total number of combinations for 25-char domain names is 40^25, the total number of combinations for 24-char domain names is 40^24, etc. So that's about 4.619E41 if you count 'em all... Which is LESS then 40!... And that's also quite easy to explain : 40! is the amount of combinations of _40_ DIFFERENT chars, using 40 different chars. You probably tried to calculate the amount of combinations of different 25 chars, using 40 different chars, which is something like 40!/(40-25)!, about 6.239E35. The right result, 4.619E41, is higher, because you can use each char more than just once.
I really don't think the amount of domain names is not enough... 4E41 is quite a lot... And then the 25 / 40 limits aren't even the real ones... I don't know, but maybe a domain name of 40 chars is allowed, which brings the total number of domain names to about 5E65... Let's say there will be 6E12 people on the world/universe in one century, which is about 1000 times the current population of the earth. Then there will still be more than 6E28 domain names per person (counting with the 25 / 40 limits). The number of IPv4 addresses is a much bigger problem, because there are only (2^8)^4 possibilities, being about 4.2E9, which is actually LESS than the amount of people NOW on the world...
Final remark, 8.159E47 isn't almost a "google"... It's almost the square root of it... that's an important difference =)... 10E100 / 2 != 10E50 hehe...
Hmm... quite a lot of numbers in this comment =)
wb [WildeBeast]
You've got it all wrong -- Evil is everywhere!
Some of you guys have FAR too much time on your hands. You need to get out more!
Doesn't anyone have a job? Or anything to do?
Who in the world would waste time arguing and insulting each other over combinametrics or whatever the hell it is?
Down here in .DO, we also have other TLD type domains.
.art.do
.com.do
.org.do
etc etc etc
BUT just as internic they charge a shitload of money and have little to almost no service.
>Well, we all should switch to UNICODE anyway, along with IPv6...
Oooo, I like it. What better way to force OS makers to include real multi-lingual support in their OSes; and not just for displaying. Keyboard input too. For some reason vendors (esp. Microsoft) are insanely stubborn and unyielding about letting users buy foreign-language localized versions of their products if they don't live within that region. I don't get it. They say I (in the US) *can't* buy Japanese Win98 (but won't say why. They are secretive on this issue too.). They won't take my money. Imagine that!
But then again, how does the averge user type http://www.fXffVfhfbfg.org/ on his US keyboard? Set your browser to view Japanese text if that didn't come out right.
We have one (known) case that works! And all we have to do is to modify our root sets. So can somebody offer a solution to widespread those new entries, so others will be able to use new TLD names, not just we who traded modifications to our root sets?
Then everyone has a damned good incentive to write their programs with IPv6 support don't they? ;-) I want to see my ISP explain why they can't give me a block of IP's when we switch to IPv6 considering there will be enough to give everyone on earth thousands of them.
Simple, register the domain in each charecter set that you want. Chinese basic, Cyrilic, English, Ect.
I think that it would be just too cool to have a business card with my URL in several different charecter sets.
Not only am I a geek, but I'm an International Geek!
You have to remember that Al Gore only initiated the creation of the internet a short time ago so 4 million in such a short time is a lot! :-)
As far as I know, the best-run DNS root (well, other than the IANA one, I'll let everyone form their own conclusions about whether that one is "well run") is TINC. I've been pointing my nameserver to it for some months now without any trouble.
They count every time a spammer registers a name, knowing full well they will never pay for it. Furthermore, I just quit there and their accounting system is an MS Access database. How accurate do you think those numbers really are?
You're not being creative enough.
And the moral of the story is ????????
it was claimed by a group of BOFHs several years
ago. We even have nameservers, and a registration
procedure. Of course, I'm not going to tell you how to do it.
How does one set up (say) a linux box as an ipv4/ipv6 router? I remember looking over ipv6 a while ago and thinking it wasn't without its problems but all in all a good thing, and when I have the time I'll set up my home LAN to use it, but I have *no* clue whatsoever of how to set up a router so my ipv6 nodes can communicate with the rest of the ipv4 internet. Well, okay, maybe a *little* clue (I've already set up a gateway (essentially a router) for my home net connection which also doubles as a firewall, but I don't know how to go about setting it up to arbitrate between ipv4 and ipv6 networks.) .. is there an online resource or a book or something for helping ipv6 newbies with this sort of thing? (Actually .. hmm .. maybe I'd better check my linux box for an ipv6 HOWTO .. nope, none on RH5.2)
Ugh .. heh, reminds me of an ex-co-worker who made a lot of his low-level directories with names like "slash", "dot", "tilde", "star", etc. Was rather amusing. :-)
And it's also not the case that everyone has exactly as many IP's as they need. I, for one, bought a class-C license just before the ISP's started getting stingy, and I'm only using 10 of my 254 addresses. Lots of address space wastage in class A's and B's too. Of course people are stretching the remaining IP's a little better nowadays .. many ISP's are giving out IP's in 16-address chunks, and masq'ing is popular among small companies. Still, we need to switch to a protocol with a larger address space (which I guess is ipv6, despite its warts).
If you go here You can get a domain redirection. No monthly cost web hosting without banners and BS. Check it out.
You all have forgotten to consider the entropy of the english language!
Assuming you want domain names made up of (roughly) combinations of english words, then there are actually only about 1.3bits/character (estimated by Shannon), so the actual number of combinations is much less.
This is something people consider when designing password schemes for example -- the minimum number of characters have to be much longer to achieve a certain effective bit length.
Too late. .dot is already up and running. The name servers listed are: AARDVARK.WR.UMIST.AC.UK, NS1.OP.net, and matterhorn.nielsen.net.
The solution to domain squatting and litigation is simple. Open the door and allow anything to be used as a TLD. Continue to require registrants to register domains of the form, domain+TLD, i.e., both parts, domain + TLD are to still be required for registration. The TLD itself, however, can be registered to no one and stays free and available for all to use. This eliminates squatters by making their practice impossible (since there are now virtually unlimited domains to choose from). And it prevents litigation by same named companies in different businesses such as Apple Computer, Apple Records, Apple Employment, John Q. Apple, and your local apple grower. apple.com is taken? No problem, just use apple.records or apple.farms, etc. A nightmare to implement and administrate? When you realize that the vast majority of current domains are .com site, you can see how it's already a free for all within that TLD and yet things seem to mostly work just fine. Thoughts?
- have customized named, so it can respond as TLD DNS server, and
- convince everyone, or at least goot portion of DNS server owners, to include your server(s) into named.root
That should do the trick.Well, I do not suppose you did not know that, just a sugggestion for others to think about possibility to have our own (I would like to hear somebody's comments on that) alternative TLD.
As someone already pointed out, you don't need a customized named. There's no practical difference between a TLD, a regular domain name, and a host name as far as named is concerned.
.cin TLD (that's "nic" backwards, as well as being the TLA for my Campbell Industries Network) using a standard BIND. It's also doing the official unofficial AlterNIC TLDs.
.dot, I'll put their DNS in my root cache, provided they'll do the same for mine.
I've got one of my machines serving out a
If someone wants to set up a
Rob could create a new protocol specifically for slashdot and call it "slashdotcolon". Then it'd be "slashdotcoloncolonslashslashslashdotdotdot".
/.::///...? Looks like some kinda weird regexp...
I don't know where you got the idea that we don't have IPv6... my kernel supports it. I'm getting ready to start using it, at least partially, on my LAN. I'm still going to have to have a gateway to v4 to talk to the outside world, but...
.cin TLD, and all the TLDs AlterNIC provides, too...
Of course, my machines support the
i've seen email address @aol.com like that..
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
How do you get to be a root DNS server owner?
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Man, it's like some people never took combinatorics...
First, the question is "how long can a domain name be?". I don't know the answer, but I'm going to guess around 25. Next we ask "how many characters are available for use in a domain name". Alpha/Numeric/SomePunc gives ~40.
So we have 40 C 25 (40 choose 25). We have no stricture on uniqueness (can't I name my domain "rrrrrrrrrrrr.com"?) so this is 40^25 (40 possibilities in each of 25 locations). Now add to that the fact that we can be in one of about 10 different TLDs and we get 10*(40^25).
This is about 1.125899906843e+41.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
It's "EUNUCHS".
Posted by Akira410:
Heh, How much worse can we get?
http://slashdot.dot
ach tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot dot
Heh. Poor guy. Rofl.. Try to tell it to someone over the phone:
http:///...
eheh
Posted by Akira410:
John,
Sounds like a great idea! Would like to help me with the implementation of the new slashdotcolon protocol? I would love your assistance =)
heheheheh
*chuckle*
R.
Posted by Akira410:
Rofl, I wanted www.dot.com for a while to. Looks like its taken. Oh pooty. Or at least i think it is. Im too tired to check. heh
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
You made two errors:
1) Elementary error: Domain names can be more than alphanumeric. There's a few punctuation marks thrown in, like hyphens.
2) As noted in another comment, you forgot to include domain names that are less than 26 characters long.
Posted by Akira410:
/root. /root
Rofl, thats a pretty cool idea. =)
**frantically renames all of his directories**
One time I was talking to someone and told them to go into the `root directory' meaning
Heh they kept trying to go to / and couldnt figure why it wasnt there. So I was like no no.. cd
So they kept typing CD /
Anyways =)
EHHE
Rob
Here in Brazil, inside the .br hierarchy, there were the .com.br, .org.br, .net.br "top" level domains. Well, they decided it was not enough, and created new ones. .psi.br (it could mean "psicologos", but it actually is "provedor de servicos internet" (isp).
.art.br -> Art
.ind.br -> industries
.nom.br -> from "nome" (name) for personal pages.
and many others etc.. some are really confusing, like
The moral of the story is: If you can't make it good, don't do it..
No, it confuses Brazilians.. :)
does anyone remember back when a 2nd level domain that had even a remote resemblance to your business costed $100 and a simple form? Now you have to find the owner and start bids at $1000. We need more top level domains.
Do they win a prize?
I want to log in to h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-dot-slash
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
So when you hand someone a business card that has your URL in Russian, how are they supposed to type that into their browser when they're using a Latin keyboard?
We should be working to unify the world into some common standard ways of doing things, not trying to find ways to let each individual demographic express their *own* ways of doing the Internet. If we do, we end up fragmenting the Internet and causing much confusion and stress.
Most every computer has some way of expressing letters using the regular Latin alphabet, and since that's how the Internet is run today, it makes sense to keep things like URLs and your basic Internet framework standardized and accessible to everyone.
If you really want to be able to use your local alphabet/character set in URL's, you should convince your browser vendor to accept that character set in the URL string and do some conversions into the Latin alphabet (i.e. Greek theta -> Latin "th"). That way you can give your Russian URL out to all your russian buddies and they can type it in using the russian character sets, but it really ends up resolving to a normal ISO/latin hostname...
--
--
I hope I'm reading it right. On the top big square, a yellow square would mean that a .org domain there is open, right? But I tried 'whois cz.org' and dz.org, zy.org, etc. and they're all filled up? Is this just old data or am I reading your little square wrong? :)
36 + 36^2 + 36^3 + ... + 36^26
This comes out to approximately 2.9929 * 10^40. Of course this is only assuming there is one TLD. Since there are 5 US (com, org, net, edu, mil, gov), and numerous foreign TLDs, this number is probably 20 or 30 times to small. Considering just the 3 "open" TLDs, 4 million is only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000045491% of the possible domain names.
Don't believe me? Do it yrself.
Log
http://www.dot.com/~tidle/slash/dothtml.html
course then i realized i was poor
Log
Yes, but who really wants to own something like "kj387fh3m4fha9123.com"???
140 Million a year for terrible customer service and bad response times.. I've submitted a mod for one of my domains three times with absolutely no response. Not even the auto tracking -- so no proof I ever submitted anything.
The question is -- what sort of registry could anyone but Network Solutions run for $140 Million a year?
I already use .dot for my house's intranet's TLD. What I do if IANA up and claimed it? ;)
A related article that I stumbled across is at
1 83/item2195.asp
http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue
It's not too terribly long
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Koos (running one of the tinc rootnameservers).
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
Sometimes I can't stand these bastards. When is it that their contract runs out and other companies begin offering TLDs anyway?
If you can't make it good, don't do it
And what is bad about that? The fact that it can confuse an english speaking person? Why should they care about en english speaking person?
There was some discussion in Russia, that they should use cyrrilic letters in domain names.
I wonder if they have done it.
Well, we all should switch to UNICODE anyway, along with IPv6...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
If you check the fonts menu on your browser, you will see three(!) types of cyrrilic encoding KOI-8 (old standard), ISO and, guess what - Windows -
yes, Microsoft just had to come up with its own encoding for cyrrilic, inflicting a mess on all Russian language sites - you have to switch between all this encoding etc.
Microsoft should be outlawed in the world. Leave US to deal with it.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I've been wondering when IPV6 is going to show up.
I'd like a small block of static IP addresses for my home computer network. Without spending a huge amount of money.
What are they going to do when scarcity is no longer a valid reason to hoard IP address space?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Might take a while..... At this point, only 4 million domain names, got room for 100 times that many if there was one domain per IP. But of course, that's not the case....
I don't think we have to worry about running out- ----
any time soon. 26^10 is over 140 trillion.
-----------------------------------------------
Jamin Philip Gray
jgray@writeme.com
http://students.cec.wustl.edu/~jpg2/
Celebrate the finer things in life
Yeah,
Most people will be thrilled to have:
cgvbe349345gjgdw.net
or dfgh87nnfs.com
maybe 993245mzt.org will be good.
(ofcourse msie will mistake it for an ip)
---
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
If only it were possible. The InterNIC will only allow you to register a domain w/ 26 characters including the ".com".
Besides, they won't register any domain with the work fuck anywhere in it. It's not fair! -- whining like a little bitch now.
~PanIc~
That would be fun. When you start allowing people to register their on TLDs, you'll start seeing a lot of one word domains. For example, if I wanted to register the TLD "slashdot", then I can tell you to point your browser to http://slashdot/.
:)
heh, that would really confuse the AOLers.
~PanIc~
2) As noted in another comment, you forgot to include domain names
.com names, 36^2 for the two digit names, etc....
that are less than 26 characters long.
No, the previous poster didn't. That's where the summation (my inbuilt spell checker is outta whack, I'm pretty sure that's not correct) came from. ie. 36^1 for the 1 digit +
A short explanation of why you should worry about the World Intellectual Property Organization's proposals for adjudicating conflicts between trademarks (plus other things) and domain names can be found in my Quick Guide to Flaws in WIPO's RFC3 . The comment deadline on RFC 3 has been extended to this coming Friday, March 17, so it's not too late to be heard. .035% of the new registrations in the namespace. Yes, point zero three five percent. And less if you average over the total in existence....
In theory, the more DN's there are, the more potential for conflict. In fact, if testimony in DC last week is to be credited, there are about 80 alleged TM/DN conflicts for each case reported to NSI. This is credible since NSI policy applies only to exact string conflicts and not near-misses. But since there were 900 invocations of the NSI policy in 1998 (down from 1997), this means that the DN/TM conflicts represent about
I have a blog.
It just shifts the problems around. If people were allowed to do this, the domain squatters would become more creative. There will still be domain names that are more 'valuable' than others simply because of marketing appeal. How about a .mag TLD? Fine, but someone is going to register porno.mag and try and resell it. You like .sex? Better register all of the interesting combos. Id bet 100 bucks that some pr0n site would pay good money for the anal.sex domain. Sure there are many more variants, but only a handful will stick out in peoples minds. All the squatters have to do is figure out what these "special" domains are.
.com when I tell them to use altavista. I didnt believe it when I saw it. There must be many more lusers than slashdotters. The consistency of the TLD's is at least something that you break down into a quick explanation. People usually don't like answers like, "Well it really could be anything." They like nice little boxes to stick things into. Of course at this point the .com TLD has a lot of inertia and support from the big players. It would take awhile before fragmentation becomes a problem. I think this solution would be a lot of fun, but it won't really take care of the problem.
If you allow anything to be used as a TLD, then a whole new crop of trademark problems arise. Lets say that MS wants to have www.windows2000.microsoft. Since the TLD must stay free, then I want dontuse.microsoft, evilempire.microsoft and so on. Im sure Id see MS's cadre of thritysomething lawers breathing fire at that point.
This also could create confusion for end users. Some people I've run across are too dense to include the www and
Yes. It's something to do with a monopoly on domain name registrations.
Zagmar
with "dot" or "slash" in their names did this thread crash, do you think? I mean, I just checked out www.dot.com and www.dotslash.org (a mirror!) etc., just to see if they were there. And a lot of them existed but wouldn't load.
/. effect rides again!?!?!?
The
-"I talked to God and here's the deal/ He said to floss between each meal" -- Uninvited
Eventually, yes, all DNS host names get translated into IPs. However we are referring to the number of actual domain names possible.
.com/.net/.org etc), or 3.165E34, times the number of top level domains.
The answer you are looking for, BTW, is 37^22 (since at present domain names can be no longer than 26 characters total, so there's 22 +
-- Shawn K. Quinn
yeah, but there will probably be that many porn sites by the end of the year!
"My husband invented the internet, and I censored all the naughty stuff on it. .
it's like phone numbers--here we have to dial all ten digits for a local call.
soon ip #'s will run out and we'll have to figure out how to do an overlay or whatever!
you know the drill-remove the spam to email me
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
Yeah, let's start the /... revoloution
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
http://hesketh.com/schampeo/project s/namespace/
Was this 4 millionth domain name before
or after NSI loosing a bunch of domains
last week????
----------------------------
Dammit Jim...It's "U-N-I-X",
fsck.
Thought it looked strange. Thanks fer the
correction.
----------------------------
Dammit Jim...It's "U-N-I-X",
I don't follow your logic. Allow "any and all TLD's" and the domain name speculation problem will just skyrocket. For example, I'll go register ".con" (pun intended) and start registering "mcdonalds.con", "yahoo.con", etc, since that's probably a common mispelling of ".com".
I tend to believe there's no good reason to create *any* new TLD's, outside of country-specific ones.
I am going to use .cc domain names, they are waaay more available and stable.
Here is an interesting way to increase traffic to your web site....
Wait until sunday morning and register internic.net while NSI is 'messed' (with a capital f) up.
Check this one: (I'd think they'd be more careful with IT)
# date
Sun Mar 14 10:04:08 PST 1999
# telnet whois.internic.net 43
Trying 198.41.0.6...
Connected to rs.internic.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
internic.net
No match for "INTERNIC.NET".
The InterNIC Registration Services database contains ONLY
non-military and non-US Government Domains and contacts.
Other associated whois servers:
American Registry for Internet Numbers - whois.arin.net
European IP Address Allocations - whois.ripe.net
Asia Pacific IP Address Allocations - whois.apnic.net
US Military - whois.nic.mil
US Government - whois.nic.gov
Connection closed by foreign host.
# date
Sun Mar 14 10:04:17 PST 1999
#