It seems more like "free sub-domains" not domains.
EU.org is not endorsed to any European Union initiative.
These things are quite unstable. I've seen URL shorteners (even one from goo.gl) and URL "redirectioners" and a lot of things like that disappear. Like Geocities in the wind.
> It seems more like "free sub-domains" not domains.
Is a free subdomain free?
You make it orders of magnitude easier to do weird tracking if you use an overly specific subdomain rather than placing things "after the slash".
To give a case study:
I had an old housemate freak out when I questioned their integrity and they said "that was after the slash" -- I used to pay for the internet and collect $ for it, I didn't log anything and asked folks to not share the WPA(2?) password.
He also told me he took a special route to campus because some of the undergrads didn't close their blinds, then took umbragen I decribed him to others with the wrong adjective.
(At least when I look out my window with a pair of binoculars, it's to look for tacticool weirdos, not titties worse than what you can find for free with a simple Bing search[1])
//[1] and please forgive the wall of text, bootstrapping new social networks post COVID has been harder than expected, since the folks who were very predatory about gatekeeping the definition of espionage freak out if you point out GDPR is a European law, and I've been a permanent resident of Pennsylvania all my life.
My former student association, BEST, ran on https://best.eu.org for over two decades. They also have best-eu.org as a mitigation strategy (they unfortunately didn't manage to grab best.eu back when .eu launched). IIRC the eu.org was always reliable so it's not been a problem. They do a lot of nontrivial IT, with all kinds of internal sites of varying quality, tons of email lists on a homecoded engine, and so on, and so forth. While I was involved (over a decade ago, mind), the domain was never a source for trouble.
I think you could do worse for a free subdomain provider.
Ownership is a nebulous concept with many interpretations. I'm guessing your referring to private property (from a capitalist interpretation) as "the traditional sense", in which case domain names are fairly similar: once you acquire the domain, it's reserved for you as long as you pay your dues (just like property taxes for land). If you don't, it will be put back on the market for other people to enjoy.
To be clear, i'm not saying it's a good thing. I don't think we should be able to publish anything (read: pedonazi propaganda) and have it uncensorable, but i certainly believe DNS is not the layer where you want to apply regulation/censorship, as it's not hosting any content and disrupting a domain name can result in many other domains (from other, potentially legit users) becoming unavailable. That's why we have legal responsibility for hosts and you contact the host to get content taken down.
I'd be curious what a DNS coop would look like. I was excited about the .org coop being setup due to the sellout scandal, unfortunately the nefarious deal was canceled so the coop was buried alive. It would be great to cut the middlepersons for commercial names, as well as mutualize domains to share free delegations from such as afraid.org, eu.org, or netlib.re is doing.
> it's reserved for you as long as you pay your dues (just like property taxes for land). If you don't, it will be put back on the market for other people to enjoy.
Rent was never mentioned? They said property taxes, where, in owning a house, you must pay property tax to benefit from the the services, courts, and military defenses of the country you live in - and if you don't pay, the country still has to protect that piece of land anyways, so they take it from you for non-payment and/or deprive you of other freedoms by throwing you in jail so that someone else can own the land and pay taxes on it.
That's debatable, but in all cases domain name fees is certainly not "rent" in the traditional sense. At least most registries cannot by law/contract take your domain away from you as long as you keep paying your dues. Of course the same applies for rent depending on your local housing regulations: the difference is you cannot undergo serious modifications in an apartment you rent, but you can modify whatever you want in your domain zone. In that sense, domain names are closer to "ownership" than to "rent".
Moreover, as was previously mentioned, domain name fees were previously introduced as administrative fees, not rent. It's a very modern invention that domains should be a profitable field.
> A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or national),[2] and tax compliance refers to policy actions and individual behaviour aimed at ensuring that taxpayers are paying the right amount of tax at the right time and securing the correct tax allowances and tax reliefs.[3] The first known taxation took place in Ancient Egypt around 3000–2800 BC.[4] A failure to pay in a timely manner (non-compliance), along with evasion of or resistance to taxation, is punishable by law. Taxes consist of direct or indirect taxes and may be paid in money or as its labour equivalent.
> At least most registries cannot by law/contract take your domain away from you as long as you keep paying your dues
Any contract can be written that way and none of them are tax.
If you buy a M8 Bolt or a pair of plain black socks, you are free to do whatever you want with it, sell photos of it, make copies etc. The same can’t exactly be said about the book you purchased (in most legislations where the concept of intellectual property exist).
Intellectual property makes sense to us because it's existed for our whole lives. I think it would surprise someone who'd never heard of it. If I were told I own a pogo stick but not its "bounceright", I'd be as confused as this hypothetical person.
Well yeah, cause that would be kinda silly haha. I think a comparable thing would be if there was a concept of readright for books (I guess there is, piracy exists, but it's more focused on the copying side of things than unauthorised reading)
You still get value from reading the book. You get no value from a pogo-free pogo stick
> I grew up being pretty clear on the distinction between purchasing a book in a bookshop and borrowing a book from the school or public library.
Very good point that proves "ownership" means different things: private property under capitalism is different from a common/public property such as a book from a library. For most of history, land was not "owned" by anyone. See also "enclosure of the commons" for some reading on the topic.
Use-based "ownership" (personal belongings) is not "private property" (a religious belief that prevents people from using a resource that could benefit them such as empty dwellings), and is not "collective property" (shared resource managed by a community), and is not "public domain" (shared abundant resources such as air or water in some regions). All of these approaches can be considered forms of ownership/property, but they vary wildly in principles and applications.
Even capitalistic authors (e.g. Adam Smith) distinguish land ownership and capital ownership. So the fact that land ownership had special status in history does not say much about 'regular' private property.
There is no practical difference between personal property and private property. If i have lathe in my workshop that i use just for hobby purposes, then it is personal property. If i started business, put that lathe in that business and use it for work, then it is private property / capital. But in both cases it is the same lathe that someone has to produce, someone has to pay for it, someone has to maintain it and can be bought and sold on open market.
With traditional ownership, you can pay a lump sum of money for something up front, and then it's yours forever unless you decide to get rid of it. With domains, you have to keep paying over and over or your "ownership" gets revoked.
Ownership rights vary from culture to culture and from country to country. Even in the US you don't get to own something forever, you get to own it until someone takes it off you to build a shopping mall for example.
In most countries, leased property is often referred to as "owned", yet you have to keep paying over and over to renew that lease.
Depends on how you think about it. You could say that you 'own' it but you have obligations (lease payments) or it will be seized. The same is true for property you 'own', if you don't pay your taxes or fail to manage the property, it will be seized.
> if you don't pay your taxes, they might not take your house.
At least in the states they absolutely do. It starts off as a tax lien which is then sold to whoever wants to buy it, so that the private sector handles actually reclaiming the land and re-listing it on the stock market.
That is just how US law is structured though. They could just as easily say that they will reclaim the loss through recovery of your assets or by weight in blood.
In the UK the process is different, which just shows that they don't have to take your house to reclaim outstanding taxes.
The point is that the government has options, if the property recovery value doesn't cover the missing taxes then I'm sure they will recover through other avenues. If you lease a car and don't pay, they can really only reclaim the car.
That doesn't really change much though? It can still be taken from you for non-payment. What does it matter if some piece of paper says you "own" it if the courts will still allow someone to repossess it?
Also this depends on the state, some US states are set up where the bank owns the title until the borrower pays it off, and others have the borrower on the title from the start but with a lien on the car by the lender in case the borrower doesn't pay. https://realestatelicensewizard.com/title-theory-vs-lien-the...
Actually if I remember correctly (at least in NJ) the registration shows the name of the creditor as the owner. That was my only past experience. Mine was a vote in the "no you don't own it" direction and mine was financing not even a lease. (Not that they are fundamentally so different)
Vehicle registration rules in the UK[0] make a clear distinction between the "registered keeper" of a vehicle (the person who "keeps" it, uses it day-to-day, and who is responsible for taxing it), and a vehicle's owner.
A vehicle's registration papers show the keeper's name and details but the document states in large letters "This document is not proof of ownership".
I think our paperwork shows the registration info of the person who registred it. Like in UK this is not ownership by itself. The paperwork also has a section for any liens on the property. This can be the creditor from the beginning or a private person or a government entity can have a claim due to debts. Nowadays these are all in the system of course. The paper card does not mean anything. Everything is looked up on the spot.
Maybe not in common parlance, but if you lease a building for hundreds or thousands of years at a nominal rent, it's difficult to distinguish that from what you might call "true" ownership. Believe it or not that is how a lot of property is owned in some common law jurisdictions. A well-known example is Guinness's famous brewery in Dublin, which was leased in 1759 for 9,000 years at £45 per year.
Long-lease ownership is particularly common for apartments, where it is important that the owner of one apartment does not do anything to impair the structural integrity of other apartments or the building as a whole, and there may also be a common area that apartment owners are obliged to maintain. This means that you must impose certain covenants on the apartment owners and traditionally the only way to do that was through leasehold ownership.
Ownership is a very fuzzy concept and it is interesting to think about what are its hallmarks. There is no single correct answer, but I think a lot of lawyers tend to think of ownership as being a right "in rem" (ie, a right in respect of a thing, which is theoretically enforceable against any third party) rather than a right "in personam" (ie, a right against a particular person, which is generally not enforceable against third parties). In that regard, a leasehold is a right in rem whereas, for example, a licence to dwell on a property for a period of time would be a right in personam.
my parents lease a car. I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession.
If they will own it at the end of the payments (what we call Hire Purchase in UK) then yes, I’d regard it as their car. If they making monthly payments over certain amount of time and after that time they need to give the car back then no - they just renting it.
> I would regard it as their car, and possibly go so far as to say they own it, if I wasn't thinking too hard about it, and maybe even if I was. it's in their possession.
Thought experiment: If they were to damage their vehicle (but assuming it's still legal to drive), who gets to decide whether it should - or indeed must - be repaired? Your parents, or someone else?
(Full disclosure: I recently added some scratches to my wife's car after a concrete pillar jumped out in front of me in an underground car park. I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.)
> I don't need to involve the insurance company, I don't need to talk to any bank or finance company, I can simply go to any local independent provider and have the car repaired. Or indeed not, if I decide it's not worth it.
This is all true for a leased car as well. The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term, you may get charged by the leasing company for any damages that are currently on the car.
> The only difference is that when you turn the leased car in at the end of the term [...]
Yes, correct, and exactly what I was alluding to: the significant difference between owning and leasing!
EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something (we've only ever owned vehicles outright, never leased). Q: If you are leasing a car and you have a (let's say fairly serious) crash, are you allowed to have it repaired in the manner of your choice, even at a third-party repair shop, and not even be obliged to inform the leasing company about the accident and/or the repairs?
By this standard, nobody owns anything: as long as you pay property taxes, you're just renting from the State. I don't entirely disagree with this interpretation: as others have pointed out, whatever you "own" can be quickly expropriated by local powers to build a highway, airport, stadium...
And local powers can be dismantled, or see part of its territory being annexed by an other sovereign power. As we say, nothing lasts forever.
In that regard, ownership is more like "sizing the window in a large enough shape so that all stakeholders are convinced that it will never be required to put special attention on it again, despite ineluctable changes".
Maybe privileges, responsibilities and liability are less delusional terms for that matter.
Moreover, the state protects what you "own" from being appropriated by the person with the bigger club. "Private property" very much depends on public goodwill.
Even if they "fully owned" it, they still couldn't paint or mod it without consequences. Vehicles must abide to certain regulations or they cannot be driven on public roads. Can't paint a stop-sign on it, for example. Can't saw off the steering wheel.
Residential leasehold properties are often referred to as 'owned' in the UK [1] and Ireland [2] and can be bought with mortgages. However, the structure is quite controversial [3].
"But these buildings have an even lesser-known sibling in the world of condominiums, known as leasehold condos. In this scenario, condo owners get an actual deed and therefore own their property, even though the building is technically under lease to a larger ownership entity, to which it pays rent."
Germany. All land belongs to the state, save for some historical claims held by the Catholic church and (I think) former aristocracy.
Note that private property rights still exist on top of that but this is why the state can decide that e.g. an energy company's interest in your land is more beneficial to the people than yours. You'll still get reimbursed although legally speaking I'm not sure the state would have to do that in order to seize it. The difference is that they couldn't do this for land owned by the Catholic church for example.
As a caveat note that not all land used by the Catholic church in Germany is owned by the Catholic church, this really only applies to historical claims and contracts the state decided to uphold.
I can only assume you're somehow extrapolating this from Article 14 of the Basic Law for Germany, but the other half of your assumptions are at the same time contrary to it. Reimbursement is written directly into that law.[0]
About six years ago there was a publication summing up the current state of affairs[1]. I believe we can safely say your comment doesn't reflect it at all.
Maybe that's a technicality (at first glance it feels like an almost outlandish claim), but in the spirit of enquiry I'll put it like this: can you share a source for that?
FWIW I skimmed [0] and failed to come up with anything that comes close...
Since 2009 there have been 1647 procedures initiated in the Bundesrepublik for expropriation of landownership for road construction projects. As of August 2020, 448 of these procedures have been completed. Paragraph 19 of the Federal Funeral Street Act allows expropriations, "insofar as they are necessary for the execution of a determined or approved construction project" and are in accordance with Article 14 of the Basic Law for the benefit of the general public.
Of course, you can sue against that, and sometimes for decades (and thus prevent the project from getting ever finished, see the planned, and eventually forsaken A85 project that was meant to connect Stuttgart to Schwäbisch Hall roughly where today's B14 is [1]. They weren't able to seize two key farmer's fields and gave up - when the old farmer died in 2002, they build a nice bypass through there. Having lived in the area, a fast connection to the local capital would have made a lot of people's lives a lot better and saved millions of litres of fuel each year.
You are selling the rights of registration rather than the domain itself. So yes you are buying the domain so long as you keep paying the registration fees and comply with the rules set by the domain registry.
In many, if not most, countries, if you don't pay your property taxes, if you don't do "adequate upkeep" of the property, or if the government decides it's needed for something more important, it can be forcibly bought off and you'd be lucky if they pay you current market value and not the price you paid when you bought it. Or, in less developed places, they just confiscate it.
That's exactly how it works with land and housing. Except you have to both pay a lump sum and a yearly fee to keep your home otherwise the government comes and takes it away from you.
Na it's not really true, you don't rent it (the name), you pay for the administrative work, you still ~have the namerights, like google.com...they own that name, because they are the "creator" of it.
They're not the creator, Verisign created it. And I don't know about Google's specific agreement (they may have paid decades in advance for all we know) but in general if a company forgets to pay they lose their name, there were a few high profile cases like that already. That isn't ownership, that's rent.
They registered it, NOT created/invented it. It's like saying the Patent-office created your patent, but yeah you can loose the url, like you can loose your patent when you forgot to pay the patent-office.
Renting is just not the right word, because renting means that you never owned it, but someone else.
Government will sue you and if courts find you owing money to the government and you fail to pay up, some of your property will be seized and sold off to cover the due tax and legal fees.
That "some" might not be the property you failed to pay the tax on (eg it could be your car whereas you failed to pay property taxes on your house). There are usually protections on the property you inhabit, but otherwise they should look to seize whatever is smallest but big enough to cover the amount due.
With domains, you lose the domain that you failed to pay fees on, and no other property will be seized to pay it off.
The difference is in requiring a court system and in what way you are liable (any of your holdings can cover it).
Yes, that's a good analogy, it's pretty much the exact same situation, with the only difference that the government collects tax while DNS is in the hands of private corporations.
Imo there is a good argument for property tax if you view land as a somewhat public good. After all some wealthy family can and in some cases in the old world literally does own vast stretches of land for centuries. That's basically hereditary aristocracy, probably not the best political system we could come up with. So imposing a tax/rent on land ownership seems reasonable to me.
Anyway, I may be digressing because the point wasn't even if it's good or bad, just that it isn't ownership in the way people generally understand the term. With DNS I find it personally questionable why it's in private hands if we as a society have decided to impose a tax/rent. It used to be public afaik, it's a bit like privatizing the water supply. I think most people would be against it if they know how the internet works. They simply never noticed it even happened.
If you were truly buying a domain name, the administrative work would be one-time, indeed one might think the entire overhead of maintaining a registry would be significantly less.
Domain names were historically much cheaper and the price for acquiring one was effectively administrative fees before domain names became a highly profitable and competitive market. Some domains are still free, whether 3rd/4th level domain from eu.org, or 2nd level domain from public-service TLDs like .ml (Mali) or .ga (Gabon).
It's a shame we have to pay at all for what is essentially a text entry in a database. I'm not opposed to having commercial domains (.com) or private TLDs paying off infrastructure for all other users, but i believe it's an essential component to a free Internet that anybody can own many names for free. Many projects would have died before birth if not for friendly operators giving away names or a shell account and some storage space on a server.
Economic barriers kill innovation, especially from poorer countries where 10$/y is not cheap, or for people for whom access to banking services is not easy/guaranteed (such as homeless or indebted folks in western countries).
There are already projects like Handshake, ENS, Unstoppable domains that try to do this. Honestly I like the need for renewal fees for domains personally, since it means you can't just buy a domain once and squat on it forever.
> Handshake appears to burn the money paid. So that's fine.
That's not necessarily fine if the fee is in custom tokens. By burning they are just reducing supply, locking in the amount paid and increasing the value of their huge holding. It's pretty terrible.
Well true, I don't know what a good way to deal with this would be, blockchain based solutions also suffer from same problem, where early adopters squat on domains and offer to sell them for 10000x markup
How would the blockchain saying that you "own" a domain make you own it more than currently?
It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.
This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
When you accidentally lose it (by losing your private keys), it will be impossible for anyone else to get it back for you. In a sense, this will prove to you that you did really own it and no-one else did.
> How would the blockchain saying that you "own" a domain make you own it more than currently?
There would have to be consensus that the particular blockchain is the source of truth for who owns which domain.
> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.
Yes, and this is something that wouldn't be necessary with blockchain-based domain names. It would not need to know about anything that originates from the outside.
> This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.
I'm far from a blockchain fanatic and using blockchain for land ownership is obviously laughable to me.
> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain
True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself.
Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen
If you were an important, powerful or influential organisation, you could just get DNS servers, OSes and/or browsers to special-case a domain rather than refer to the blockchain.
Unless you have a legal authority enforcing the rule that "what the blockchain says, goes".
So what happens when Microsoft disagrees that I own Microsoft.block?
E: Honest question, comes off as snark a little - would they be able to just take it somehow or would they need to use jailtime and or broken kneecaps to get it off you? Either way the blockchain's concept of ownership seems like it would be broken easily by law and companies with lots of money
They hardcode their IP into IE/Edge and Windows as the host for that domain, ignoring what the blockchain says.
Or more likely, in partnership with other big tech with similar concerns, they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain. This would be fairly easy to justify on grounds of security and crime.
Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place, because the current system mostly works and provides a legal process for disputes which they are content with.
> Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place
This is a given, it's strictly hypothetical.
> they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain
Luckily we already have something similar to fall back on already, that's a time saver!
This doesn't require blockchain. The registrar could charge you a one time fee to buy the domain forever if ICANN allowed it. It doesn't. Permissionless blockchains are especially ill-suited for this purpose because KYC for domain names is a thing.
Well then you're still relying on the registrar, on ICANN, and your local legal system. But also, yes: with a blockchain, you're still relying on the blockchain, which can be attacked. There are no 100% solutions for virtual goods ownership :)
Why? Consider the scenario of a domain name owner dying and his relatives not caring/not knowing he/she owned a domain. With the current system the domain will be eventually available again. What alternative to you suggest?
I don't know how people that suggest using a blockchain would design or already designed the whole system, but maybe you know. If the owner looses access to it's private key is there any way to transfer or expire the domain?
If not, you end up having domains that nobody can use.
Yeah, that's sort of my point. Blockchains make things more rigid when dealing with these types of cases. With a central authority, you can appeal to the humans that run it, you can take them to court if need be.
Yes sorry, I totally agree. I realized just now that I got confused with indentation and assumed that the comment I was originally replying to was saying that it doesn't make sense to pay a recurrent fee for a domain. While instead he was saying that it doesn't make sense to use a blockchain, and I agree on this. Unfortunately seems that I can't edit my original comment to fix the misunderstanding.
This is a problem because you risk having domains that nobody can use anymore.
Edit: as I wrote in another comment, I got confused with indentation and assumed that the comment I was replying to was saying that it doesn't make sense to have a recurring fee for domains. I'm sorry. I do agree that a blockchain isn't a good alternative.
And let's not forget the ever popular, ever spam filled domains managed by https://dot.tk
Like always, free domains often come with weird or shady requirements, I wouldn't rely on them too much. That said, they're great if you're not willing to spend money on a domain yet and just want to experiment.
dot.tk will take away your domains if they get popular and redirect them to ads. Also, their website is a pain to use. I haven't heard of afraid.org doing any nefarious things. I used to use a domain from them (https://easrng.us.to/) before I got https://easrng.net and never had any problems.
Domains, if you check the public suffix list, the eu.org stuff is entered as public suffix, so it counts as a domain like any other to the browser and the eu.org part is just the TLD.
Anyone can add a suffix to the public suffix list, if they give out subdomains to mutually unrelated parties. I added one. I don't think part of the mission of the PSL is to distinguish "domain" from "subdomain". It's certainly not meant to be a list of TLDs, just a list of suffixes below which the namespace is public.
The main distinction here is really just that keeping eu.org costs 20 bucks a year or whatever, and creating a subdomain costs them ~nothing, so it's not really remarkable that these are free, whereas, for example, a free .org would be remarkable.
From the site "The main goal of EU.org is to provide free subdomain registration to users or non-profit organizations who cannot afford the fees demanded by some NICs." They don't claim to be issuing domain names at all.
And? Since they're on the public suffix list, they might as well be issuing domains. Subdomains work differently in a browser compared to a domain and since the eu.org stuff is handled as domain by browsers I see no issue describing it as such.
eu.org is a public suffix (check the list), which means that every domain below it is treated as it's own seperate security context. Meaning cookies are not shared between domain-a.eu.org and domain-b.eu.org.
If they weren't on the public suffix list, cookies would be shared.
This also affect a myriad of other contexts that the browser applies against the public suffix list.
Technically "com." or even just "." could include a A record with a website. However browsers tend to strip the last "." and treat empty or names without "." in them as search terms.
There exist people who disapprove of this behavior.
A few years ago I tried all two-letter ([a-z]) TLDs and found some others that were able to handle HTTP requests, but they were either just redirecting to another domain name (the ones I noted down back then don't seem to work anymore) or returning 500 errors (http://uz/).
These examples should at least demonstrate that there shouldn't technically be some special case for resolving TLDs. They work in normal web browsers, and presumably a lack of A records for other TLDs would just be some sort of convention.
Since the site is the one that made the title, they are inconsistent in how they describe the services.
One way to define a distinction is to look at liability and legal standing. Do users under eu.org have any rights, and if there is abuse, how much legal liability do eu.org have? To take an example, HN users can be kicked out of here at the whims of ycombinator. TLD's usually don't do that and generally require a court decisions before a persons domain can be taken away (assuming fees have been paid).
They are indeed using the name interchangibly. I guess what I meant to say is they are not claiming to be providing a proper TLD when they aren't. I guess it doesn't matter much in practice and that's why people in this thread are using it interchangibly too.
TK was the new .ru, which sucked since while Putin is a jerk, most Russian people are quite nice, just less talkative than people from where I grew up.
I’m involved with a URL shortener service. Service had to ban this domain as sub-domains from this domain seem to be loved by spammers/scammers to host their scams…
Do you ban all the other free sub-domain services too? There's no reliable or honest statistic proving that eu.org is widely used for bad purposes.
And what about URL-shortener services, such as the one you work with? Should they be banned all together? They seem to be popular with spam and scammers...
We were getting spammed by hundreds of eu.org subdomains. We had no choice but to place a ban on the entire domain as banning a few just led to more popping up.
We ban as we see spam. Most free shorteners end up getting banned as there is no need to double shorten a url other than for double obfuscation which is usually shady.
>Imagine how easy Twitter would get rid of spam accounts if they only charged a few sats per tweet.
All I can do is imagine, since I interviewed to be an anti abuse UX researcher at Twitter and they decided to not hire anyone for the role, so I assume they do not see a need for such work since I was extremely professional and did a LOT of research prior.
I recall especially well because it was the same ±1 as the 2016 Turkish Coup[1][2][3], though I've lost some master passwords since then.
> Very likely referring to “satoshis” which is a small amount of bitcoin.
Hackerfreund, nie vergessen: Drei können ein Geheimnis bewahren, wenn zwei davon John McAfee und Dan Kaminsky sind.
(Ich schalte jetzt wieder auf Englisch um, ich muss mich auf maschinelle Übersetzungen für synchrone Gespräche verlassen)
Do people still think Satoshi was a singular guy? I had a convo at a picnic about how it was probably a team and some very smart people acted like they hadn't thought of that, people who definitely had heard of Shamir's Secret Sharing and read Wired or whatever, so should have been able to connect the dots that maybe "Satoshi" was a set of people ,and one of them died or lost access to a key.
Here is the wayback archive of Wikipedia from that summer:
Satoshis. A fractional Bitcoin. Of course the answer is that nobody would use Twitter if that were the case because nobody cares about crypto currencies except for either speculation or fraud.
I care, a lot. I work remotely and Bitcoin is the only way I can get paid from overseas.
In my country most people (even Govt officials) speculate on the US dollars against our currency, there's lots of fraud with cash, or social engineering old people to steal their money from their home banking. We should get rid of all of those as well, right?
1. "nobody cares" - you realize that your statement is wrong if there is at least one person that cares. And there is at least one: Jack Dorsey, definitely not a speculator or a fraud.
2. Bitcoin != "cryprocurrencies" - which is why I didn't include Elon Musk under 1.
A sat = the 100 millionth part of a Bitcoin. Also, a sat can be further divided into millisats (1000 millisats = 1 sat) on the Lightnig Network. So, essentially, very very tiny amounts that can be sent very fast at at very small costs.
On a similar note, most URL shorteners are also on all kinds of blocklists because of their tendency to get abused by spammers. That's just the way things go when you provide easy and accessible services.
Yup! It’s hard to keep spammers at bay, but not impossible. Takes a lot of effort. A big reason to stay away from shorteners that don’t have legit companies/orgs behind them putting in the effort.
They should make a formal web standard that you should be able to prepend "preview." like tinyurl supported if people are going to keep using those things for tasks ranging from dumb marketing bullshit to full on attacking my computer.
I do too. Unfortunately these relics show what the old internet would be today. *.eu.org is mostly populated by scammers.
Building a new internet that starts from where the old internet ended and makes internet work again like old internet is what we need. You need reputation control and propagation etc.
Does anyone have news regarding ccor.org, the cooperative that wanted to take over and operate .org registry when PIR attempted to sell it off?
We could certainly use more cooperative registries/registrars, if only to make domain names more accessible to poorer folks. I was so excited about ccor.org and i'm sad there's been no development since PIR/ICANN folks dropped their corrupt deal.
What's the difference for an end user except for the extra dot?
Isn't that the same with co.uk or com.au?
Americans may find that inconvenient, more radical tongues call it a sign of US imperialism that .com is often associated with the home for US companies.
Right, technically and probably legally there was a list of domains that you cannot register because they act as a "top-level" like co.uk. Not sure how official and how correct the list is.
> Americans may find that inconvenient, more radical tongues call it a sign of US imperialism that .com is often associated with the home for US companies.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to try and make some point about US imperialism in a discussion about a TLD with an extra dot when plenty of countries have a TLD that is customarily used without an extra dot: .de, .ch, .nl, .es, .ie, etc. It's simply a matter of convention (and sometimes local legislation) that .co.uk, .com.uk, .co.in, and others became the norm for commercial entities in these countries while .com similarly became a norm for US companies by convention. There's nothing stopping a non-US company from using a .com domain, as I'm sure you're aware.
How the TLDs work is a really classic example of US imperialism. For example .gov is impossible to get for non-US entities, yet literal towns have .gov domains within the US, and there are even examples of people using .ca to mean california. Meanwhile outside countries have to resort to things like .gov.uk. That's right, tiny rural towns in the US have a better domain than the main UK government sites.
Likewise .com typically implies US, as affirmed by the .com.mx, etc variants
If ICANN wasn't super biased towards favoring the US, do you really think .gov would have been approved in the first place?
> For example .gov is impossible to get for non-US entities
I'll gladly concede this point. I do agree that ICANN favors the US for .gov (and .mil). It would definitely be preferable if these weren't approved at all or at least weren't restricted to US entities.
> Likewise .com typically implies US, as affirmed by the .com.mx, etc variants
I responded to this in my previous comment. As far as I know there wasn't a decision to systematically favor US companies, so I'm not sure what this has to do with US imperialism. There are many websites in the UK and other countries that use .com, even if it's still far more common for US entities, and there's nothing stopping more from doing so.
My point is that the non-existence of a us-specific com suffix (.us.com) combined with the existence of country specific com suffixes (.com.mx, etc), implies that .com is us oriented, in a central sort of way affirmed by ICANN arguably. If com is for everyone, why have .com.mx? etc
It's actually not that popular with most people I know because it sort of muddies the water with most Australians being very comfortable with .com.au and having a basic understanding of its restrictions.
So it's not a normative document, but an empirical document maintained by volunteers. The introduction tells what is the difference between a domain (registered by one entity) and a subdomain (any number can be created by the same entity): If a website sets cookies for something above their domain, e.g. co.uk or org.eu the cookie would be valid on other entities' websites. Browsers use this list to prevent that. eu.org and it's non-registerable subdomains are correctly listed.
As a whole this looks a bit fragile, depending on volunteer work. Or you could say positively good old internet style: No single government or company controlling it.
Sure. They need to ensure, that no South-Tyrolian registers those officially looking ones.
After the 2nd world war Italy just invaded south tyrol/now trentino because they mixed up the capitulation date. They still speak tyrolian there, but belong officially to Italy.
The difference is that this is just a website that offers subdomains and not a TLD. co.uk and com.au operate very differently through a network of registrars and such. The same company that put restrictions on the .uk TLD also manages the co.uk domain in a similar fashion to other TLDs, for example.
You won't see co.uk ever expire because it's owned and manages by the same company that manages the TLD, but it's perfectly possible for eu.org to mess up their renewal and disappear from the internet. There's no direct connection between .org and the company managing these subdomains.
Calling American TLDs like com/net/org imperialism is too extreme. The internet was developed by Americans for American use and other countries were added to the domain system later. When com/net/org because available, the entire system was completely centralised on the USA so it's not that strange that other countries had to make do with just a national TLD. That's not some kind of attempt of the USA to enforce their rules on the world, that's just historical development. These days, all kinds of TLDs are available, including ones in non-Latin scripts. I don't ever see any .भारत domains on the web (and I wouldn't even know how to type it if I saw it) but it's an available TLD for anyone to use. There are even geographical TLDs like .frl (Fryslân) and .wien (Vienna) that go way overboard with the TLD concept imo.
Other countries were added in the mid/late 80s. That's well before most American companies got their domain. In a more equal world co.us or com.us would have been the primary place for domestic use once it has been clear that it's no longer a national thing.
I have no strong feelings about this part of US dominance, it's just a fact of life. There are worse things. Like US agencies doing mass surveillance on foreigners worldwide. Or using extra-terratorial sanctions, assuming they are world-government.
If they delegate it to a nameserver you specify, is it much different to a domain?
I am assuming they delegate in this manner, as opposed to some free web hosts who would host the nameservers and essentially just let you set A records.
Would you say that example.nsw.gov.au is a domain or a subdomain?
Nice to see this here, this was my go to as a student (around 2003?). Now I don't feel buying (renting) a nice domain, but this is really nice to learn about how the system works and you don't have a lot of money or just want to make many domains fast and free for experimentation.
I have two of those, back from when getting a domain name for a project seemed prohibitively expensive and they've since been repurposed for other projects, but I've never had a problem using them, I think I last switched NS records in 2018.
Oh great, another source of "nice looking" .eu.org domains to be used by spammers and for phishing. I bet there will be many naive users (to put it lighlty) that will fall for a scam originating or using such domains :-(
The fact that you can use a legitimate looking subdomain without the need to hide it or fake it, like bank.eu.org in order to trick users that it's indeed a real domain coming from EU official site. We all know that to average internet users .org = organization so you can imagine how they will interpret any .eu.org domain :-)
I haven't used eu.org but for my afraid.org subdomain IIRC I had to point it at an existing server for Cloudflare to recognize it as a real site and give me the NS records.
EU.org is not endorsed to any European Union initiative.
These things are quite unstable. I've seen URL shorteners (even one from goo.gl) and URL "redirectioners" and a lot of things like that disappear. Like Geocities in the wind.
Sadly only archive.org is a source of memories.