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Random Domain Name Surfing
Dilbert_ writes "Since most dot com domains of the form www.[common english word].com are taken today, you could theoretically surf around using just a dictionary. Now you can search the web from a page that will will automatically generate a fresh load of links, based on a dictionnary. "
For some reason this amuses me greatly.
Heh, apparantly they don't know how to block access to a dir without removing it.
Not exactly a good way to solve the problem. They could have turned it into good publicity instead.
Url to the ISP
Funny, I wrote a stupid tool last week to randomly generate domain names for my boss, then I put it up on twisted.com. Although it doesn't grab the names from a dictionary, mine lets you use specify which words to use.
Sorry for the plug, but like I had anything else to do on a Saturday afternoon. :)
-Mike
The label length limit of 63 characters is a definite limitation of the protocol, since the length of a label is marked by a single byte, and the two high bits are used to signify a pointer to another location, leaving only six bits for defining the length.
Making the labels longer than 63 characters would require serious re-writing of the protocol.
I wrote a silly cgi script to do the same thing last year. Didn't think it worthy of being on slashdot. It's not quite as cool, but it does do .com .org and .net.
http://www.stack.portland.or.us/cgi-bin/dict
"These days, www.[adjective][noun].com can provide useful sites, as can www.[verb][noun].com . Of course if the verb is 'blow' and the noun is 'job', it's probably not that employment site for meteorologists that you were looking for, but that's a risk you've got to take.
Reminds me of something that happened at my old job once.
A girl I worked with decided to browse online for beauty tips. So she went to altavista and did a search for "facial".
She recieved some rather interesting matches, that could possibly have gotten her fired if managment had ever spotted it.
A couple of years ago, before it turned into a total waste of paper, Wired's Jargon File mentioned 'domain dipping' as the practice of typing www.[whatever].com into your favourite browser (or IE). It's a practice I've enjoyed for quite a while, but as the web takes off it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
These days, www.[adjective][noun].com can provide useful sites, as can www.[verb][noun].com . Of course if the verb is 'blow' and the noun is 'job', it's probably not that employment site for meteorologists that you were looking for, but that's a risk you've got to take.
Domain names with the word "monkey" in them.
http://www.zone8.com/monkey/list/index.html
I'm not sure whom this helps, but more power to you.
http://domainator.e-gineer.com
I would be more interested in a site that generated actual domains names that don't appear in any dictionary, such as fojar.com and grack.com - they aren't words, and they aren't combinations of words. :)
Once again, the shocking standard of american education shouts to the masses. I realise that we can't all have a gracking vocabulary, but I fojar on a regular basis; it's a perfectly cromulent activity.
So we're all in a rush to buy up every last word and phrase in the English language, for later resale to highest bidders. Gag me with snake-oil! Are we forever stuck with ASCII-ONLY DNS?
The fastest growth on the web now, finally, is non-English . Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the HTTP:// protocol works only with ASCII-ONLY URL's. When will the web outgrow ascii and into UniCode? We need URL's in Czech, Chinese, Cyrillic. etc. Anybody know of specific initiatives?
ask slashdot: are any MultiLingual URL Protocols being developed to allow us to record and browse the world in more of its many languages? Where are they?
"ever tried. ever failed. no matter. try again. fail again. fail better." - s. beckett
I've seen other people report this as a limit as well, but I don't believe it's true.
From RFC 1034:
The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less.
Then, again, we know this isn't quite right either, since we have, for instance, www.3com.com
CmdrTaco writes :
:o))
:o)
For some reason this amuses me greatly.
Hmmmm. My guess is this "reason" involves a significant amount of eSAB (extreme Saturday Afternoon Boredom).
By the way, now that DN registration goes international (with France Telecom, among others), it might be interesting to port this script over other languages.
www.BarreObliquePoint.org (French version for SlashDot - zis maighte bi véry interestinge)
www.FrischFleisch.net (German Freshmeat - no comment)
www.AltaVista.com (Spanish for High View - but this would be rather silly since there nobody would give a web site such a ridiculously vain name as "high view", would they ?)
www.Youpi.com (French for Yahoo - and the worst is, it actually exists ! Check it out, it's worth the click
Possible extension : add a speech-synthetisis program to pronounce each word - loud and with a Relic-like southern american accent. You might not see the point, but believe me this would be great fun for us little eurokids
Check out URouLette
I don't know if there is any connection between this and the URouLette that was around back when there were just a few thousand web sites out there, but it is pretty cool, and doesn't seem to be limited to what is in the dictionary, and will send you to url's that are more complex then www.foo.com.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Wouldn't it be more effective to try random numeric IP addresses? This way you would find sites without common words in them. You could just take 4 random numbers between 0 and 255 and check it for port 80. You would at least get a real IP address one out of every, say 10 times. :)
Of course, then you have to worry about paranoid system administrators reporting you for attempting to connect to port 80 on "private" boxes (??), not to mention you'd also get a bunch of non-servers. I guess if your goal is finding EVERYTHING this would work better, but slower.