I’m quite appalled. Pre-order now! Wonderful new TLD! Buy!
But, it will cost an extra $1m if you want to do it now. Later than that, pay less but wait longer, and risk losing it.
So, pay up or get lost. Can’t afford $1m for a domain? Sorry, bozo, maybe you can have the scraps when the bullies are done eating.
This whole business is massive trash. The days of owning your own domain with any kind of nice name are fading and being replaced with “premium” domains with massive prices.
I very much would like domains to bugger off and be replaced by something that isn’t becoming another swamp on the Internet.
With that, most of the companies that can register .ing for you, listed on their website, will tell you that “.ing” does not exist. Clearly, Google didn’t tell them about launch or they aren’t ready.
This whole thing makes me sad. The Internet is dying and being replaced by literally anything for a quick buck. Now with added smoke and mirrors.
Websites are still super relevant, especially for more serious / professional usages, or in random circles like gaming (since PC gaming is a thing that refuses to die). Domains are still the primary way you get to control your web presence, and websites are still easier to spin up than apps while providing much more flexibility and control.
I do think it depends on what kind of sites you are building. If it's say a recipe website, sure people will just Google it and click on a link. But for websites with a specific purpose I think a easy-to-remember or at least a not-sketchy looking domain name still has some values. Some random examples: wikis (which actually have a .wiki TLD now), professional tools like Figma, a service that you want to sell, or let's say a social site like Discord, I feel that having a clean domain name still makes a difference. I don't know if anyone will ever be able to quantify it though.
E.g. I have been following gaming tournaments, and a lot of them are hosted on start.gg. I find that I can definitely remember it much easier than otherwise and I don't want to use an app for something like that, nor do I feel like bookmarking it.
(Note: To be fair though, start.gg is using a country-TLD and I personally have a distaste of abusing country TLDs like .gg/.io/.ly/.tv/etc but that's another story)
I wonder if there’s a better alternative to current domain formats? Like, wouldnt it be great if you could just use your organization name without an extension? Like just google or apple or whatever. Instead of google.com or apple.com
You can’t register tlds with those names anyway (a random person can’t register google.xyz) so why bother with extensions? Maybe not get rid of the altogether but as an alternative?
It's possible to register at the root, but ICANN has disallowed it for gTLDs (countries see ccTLDs as TLDs they "own" so ICANN isn't interested in trying to impose too many rules on them - http://ai. )
And companies have definitely purchased their own TLD for use cases that don't violate ICANN. For example:
I think people get more value out of the unified search/url bar "just working" without having to think how to use it than they'd get out of not having to type ".com". If they want that kind of workflow they kind of already have it in the form "apple" enter -> first result.
It would also mean every single word entry would have to hit the root level of this public name lookup system since the client wouldn't know until after it checked.
> It would also mean every single word entry would have to hit the root level of this public name lookup system since the client wouldn't know until after it checked.
Caching at multiple levels should work fairly well for this?
Theoretically but e.g. google.com has a TTL of 5 minutes, TLD responses usually have something like a 48 hour TTL associated. Drop that cache timer then multiply by a huge factor because everyone is hitting TLD lookups for random things like "sausage" instead of ".com" and it's easy to imagine the majority of the root traffic volumes becomes bogus lookups instead of actual requests. Once it's into ".com" it's off the public infrastructure and volume becomes a problem of the current pay to operate TLD system.
Could that be done right? Sure, at which point Google would probably want to keep the 5 minute TTL instead.
they click ads and direct links in their group chats and timelines
it’s been like that for a loooong time, entrepreneurs are just clinging to SEO concepts from a decade ago in a void of alternate frameworks that would apply generically
If you could sway people to change the "scary IP DNS settings" you could crush the TLD racket overnight.
Change your DNS server to OpenDNS projects like OpenNIC. [0]
There is nothing stopping me from running my own .ing tld on my own DNS servers other than the mainstream default ISP configured to the de-facto. It's not illegal.
Great. There's a Dutch bank called ING. I can't wait for all the phish.ing to start. IMHO all those new TLDs are just a huge mistake and a blatant money-grab.
>> IMHO all those new TLDs are just a huge mistake and a blatant money-grab.
Especially with this one. There is no room for competition since each verb can only be used once with the ing suffix. Well, competition for who is willing to pay the most, but from the consumer side there can only be one URL.
Reallyfuckingcool.net or .org available, same for getsurfing, learnsurfing and justhangingout. With all these domains there’s no real point unless you are getting a dictionary word or a specific name, imho.
I wonder if we're at the point that the costs of registering a new TLD are immediately recouped from the set of large businesses that must register their name in every TLD?
I was thinking about this too.
Some TLDs look like an obvious obligatory money grab (such as .download), so companies are compelled to buy it.
I have seen some TLDs owned by a company and didn't even bother to set a redirect.
My anecdote is that the ICANN annual fee ($25k) is easily covered by these obligatory registrations and the premium domains. The cost of running nameservers aren't that high. NS1 has an offering, but it's impossible to find their pricing for anything.
Ugh, when I saw the HN headline about this TLD I thought it belonged to ING Group, just like .barclays and .chase belong to their corporate owners. Just shows how suited this TLD is for phishing...
If I were the lawyers at ING, I would be sending Google it cease-and-desist with regards to selling any domains with banking related terms. I actually think they would have a reasonably strong claim.
To be honest both cases are equally strong. Trademark by a bank, and English gerundial suffix. I want to see their lawyers knife fight in a ring while burning piles of cash, it would be an entertaining self resolving problem!
I hate that mentioning example.zip now turns into a link in modern chat programs. At least link preview can be disabled... Also .py is annoying but that one I can understand more why it reasonably needs to exist.
I don't get it, and I'm sure some people fall for the scams, but .com has been a dangerous file format since before the internet became common and that hasn't been much of a problem either.
My guess is that it'll only be a matter of time before .png and .jpg will be TLDs.
I think the idea is ambiguity between a zip file from your coworkers website and an entirely separate phishing website which downloads an entirely different zip file with a malicious payload.
Anything that introduces unnecessary and previously unforseen ambiguity to the olds is just another path to filling the internet with scams
Edit: No I swear, when I typed fuckingoff.ing and post the comment it shows as fuckingofi.ing to me. I edited the post a dozen of times and it always displayed something else. I tested it even on two browsers!
Mobile app is already first class citizen at ING in some EU countries. One is unable to make transactions or even is locked out completely from all online channels after losing access to their mobile app, or if their app simply stops responding on tapping the "Confirm" button. Web is merely second class citizen. No idea how they arrived to this retarded architectue. Submitting any kind of architectural feedback to a bank is hopeless and helpless, these fuckers always know better.
In at least one EU country the only available free of charge second factor of 2FA at ING is their FULL MOBILE BANKING APP. You're posting a comment at HN explaining that "mobile banking app is 2FA because security because EU", are you working there?
Hm, last time I tried 3 years ago paper mails were their only channel (after opening an account online). They were so past century. If they do anything with this TLD before improving their basic banking platform/UX it will only prove the point of how retarded they have been.
I checked for cod.ing and they said it was available. I got my hopes up and went to Godaddy. It costs over $38,000. I guess in some ways that’s good because the purchaser would more likely be someone who wants to launch a legit business or project rather than a squatter. But as others have pointed out, this whole thing is a blatant money grab.
Conspiracy theory here: if you go to a big player like GoDaddy they'll sell their queries and some party will see the domain you want and squat it unless you register right away. Just use the whois command in your terminal.
Unlike most conspiracy “theories” which are unfalsifiable, this should be pretty easy to prove or disprove. Just search for some random plausibly appealing domains and check to see if they’re registered 24-72 hours later.
It’s not a particularly difficult or clever test to run, so I’m definitely not the first person to come up with it. It’s the kind of thing that’s big news if true but a non-story if false. The fact that no one has found it to be true suggests to me that it’s not happening.
I miss the early days of the internet when the playing field was level. You could actually get a really cool/good/interesting domain just by thinking of it first, not by being rich.
There should be some system in place like you can only have X% of domains not being actively used for a legitimate purpose. And if you fall below, you will need to pick Y domains to relinquish or they will be randomly relinquished for you.
There isn't remotely any possible way to enforce this. There are thousands of registrars out there and there's no way to know all the domains owned by a single person or company. Even if you solve that problem, now you'd just have domain squatters spinning up shell LLCs.
Also you have no way to properly define "legitimate".
But it's trivial to just put something on these domains like Wikipedia picture of the day or whatnot, and who's to say that's not "valid"? It's just that no one bothers now because they don't need to.
In principle I agree, but I don't really see how it can be solved in a practical way without a lot of collateral damage.
> Starting today, you can register .ing domains as part of our Early Access Period (EAP) for an additional one-time fee. This fee decreases according to a daily schedule until December 5
Well, Google has to diversify away from being a glorified ad agency. And they are becoming so detached from the reality that more and more people are starting to see them as complete scumbags.
I've reached generic TLD fatigue. There's a new one each week. I regularly buy domains with OVH since they have a wide array of TLDs at a good price[0]. Over the years I let many of them expire because either 1) I let my dreams die, or 2) I couldn't afford to renew it. Mostly it's because I let my dreams die, not financial shortcomings though.
That's a very succint way of putting it. Exotic TLDs are completely unecessary to deliver content. The more that exist, the harder it is to remember them, which is counter to the entire point of DNS.
The more often they’re used, the more likely someone will be able to own <noun>.<noun> or <verb>.<noun> or whatever, rather than “catching 3-4 letter thing you can say alloud” + “current trend of website name hacking” + “current cc tld used in current trend”.
> the Registry itself has some arcane and obfuscated corporate name that was something entirely different from Google LLC (Charleston Road Registry Inc)
That's interesting, more interesting is that Google created this Inc to workaround ICANN requirements
"Charleston Road Registry (CRR), also known as Google Registry, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. Because ICANN requires that registrars and registries remain separate entities, and Google is an ICANN-accredited registrar, CRR exists as a separate company from Google. We offer equivalent terms to all registrars in terms of pricing, awarding domains, or any other domain operations; we'll partner with any ICANN-accredited registrars that are interested in our domains and meet any additional criteria that we set for a TLD." [1]
This is pretty common, as far as I understand. Many registries will run their own registrar, but I don’t believe they can give any special anything for their registrars compared to other registrars.
I get the idea sometimes that the "concept" of a TLD is being destroyed. Whether that be intentionally or unintentionally, I get the hints that we're headed toward AOL keywords all over again.
The "concept" of tlds was already pretty much destroyed with .com boom. Even in late 90s there was basically no true organization or hierarchy on the top level, .com/.org/.net etc were all free for all and most cctlds did not establish any 2nd level domains either (uk being prominent counter-example)
The only hierarchy that really exists and makes sense is the ccTLDs, but only some of them. .de, .cn, .fr, .uk, etc., these are mostly registered by people and businesses within the actual country and used within the country as well. But there's so many other ccTLDs like .us, .io, .ai, .ly, .me, .co, etc., where they're functionally just two-letter generic TLDs, and the hierarchy doesn't work for them.
.me in particular is moving to square space, and Google shut off all of my automatic renews because of it, wreaking havoc when a few of them expired recently.
I am genuinely surprised that ICANN allowed .zip and now .mov. That was a very serious failing of their job. dot .. local? or something? was another huge miss on their part.
Google went from allowing you to buy domains with one click to now showing you logos of companies you can buy them from, not even making them clickable
I don't mind it, it's harder for squatters to control the name you want and if your product/service takes off eventually you just buy the quality TLDs as desired. So many people now just follow links through search, mobile apps, social media posts (etc) vs. typing them in, so having a mint TLD is becoming less important.
Recently I wanted a domain and a squatter was firm on $8k, basically just ignored the sales tactics and after some digging found the same name at an equally great TLD for ~$250.
Overall it's a win, domain squatters will start to realize they're trying to control an increasingly infinite space and those of us doing work on a budget have some leverage to not support their gouging behavior.
ICANN cannot administer every single domain in existence, so they delegate that to other entities. That delegation is segmented by TLD.
Thus, TLDs indicate on who is responsible for administering the domain, and thus who to contact if something has gone wrong (e.g., if law enforcement wants to commandeer a domain). (At least in theory, I'm sure there are ambiguities in practice).
I wonder if they will use these almost like we use file extensions on a desktop OS. Something like draw.ing/1234 would be a link to share are Canva drawing, kind of like 1234.psd tells you a file is a Photoshop document.
Though using canva.com/1234 still makes more sense, from a branding point of view. Draw.ing vs draw.io will being confusing, especially if company names aren’t changing.
Go.ing I get. That one just makes sense, but is ultimately pointless when they already have going.com.
I am gett.ing tired of Google/Alphabet using their de facto "CEO of internet searches" position to coerce new gTLDs galore. Considering the setup fees mentioned somewhere below, I'm not too sure good old modern-art-style money laundering isn't involved either.
I looked at buying transcrib.ing. I got quoted a reasonable price of €17,99 and a less reasonable setup fee of €1.525.570,80. I'm curious about the economics: Who gets that money? And I suppose you don't pay by credit card.
Welcome to American capitalism...where there always seems to be an inner circle or initial group of people who already got first chance at something, and then for the rest of us they simply tells us, "hey, everything is equally attainable by everyone, you just have to work hard at it...nothing is given out for free...yada yada..." This whole domain name business is such a BS money grab.
- sunrise, usually reserved to TMCH users (trademarks)
- landrush/EAP (early access program), open to everyone with decreasing price every day of the phase
- pre-registrations, if I remember well it's to ask the registrar to try and register your domain name as soon as the GA phase opens (and you get refunded if the domain is already taken)
- and general availability
This is classic shit in the domain name business, nothing new here
> Nobody is actually doing anything interesting with these.
Now wait a second, that's not at all true. In my experience there are armies of people who use them to launch targeted phishing attacks at my business if they buy the goddamn thing before I do.
At a certain point if you are lucky enough to have a business that's worth targeting, every new gTLD is just another fuck.ing security expense.
Most phishing I've encountered comes from .com, in my experience. Everything but ccTLDs seems to be listed in some kind of spam filter (I tried to email from a personal .xyz domain for a while, it just doesn't work). .ru is also quite popular for some reason, but that seems to be mostly untargeted phishing attemps. Most shit comes from legitimate(-looking) gmail.coms and outlook.coms.
I have a feeling people trust .com and .net more than they trust .zip and .mov. Without .com, the URL just looks weird to some people.
I can see why you dislike new TLDs if you're trying to protect your company, but you'll always have that problem. It's not like you're going to transfer money to the Taliban to register yourcompany.af, but criminals don't care, the money they transfer is probably stolen anyway.
One exception is the fact that there's an international bank called "ING". They've already registered bank.ing but I don't think they can come close to claiming all possible phishing attempts for their customer base.
While what you say is completely true, unfortunately how I do my own security has very little to do with how my customers do their security. I see ccTLD and gTLD used in spearphishing and domain impersonation attacks on a frequent enough basis that I have form letters for the abuse reports. Start collecting some backscatter with a DMARC policy and you might be surprised at what you discover.
Turns out companies don't want to abandon whatever perfectly good domain they've already been using for decades just so they can have a funny TLD, who would've thought. Only new brands can really benefit from it.
Modern TLDs are used in various smaller services. squoosh.app comes to mind for something I use. The Fediverse is also full of alternative TLDs: lots of .social, .chat, .lol, .place, and .world in the instance list. .com has been exhausted for a while, if you don't want to buy your new domain from a squatter you'll probably need to go through thisworddoesnotexist.com or register domains that look like .onion URLs.
If squatters and registrars weren't so shite, I could absolutely see a new service with a name like "share.zip" or "you.mov" taking off. call.ing seems like a perfect domain for a video chat service. Too bad these domains cost several thousands of dollars (as a starting price).
Too bad any domain with fewer than five letters has been registered by the companies selling these domains the moment the TLDs came out.
Domains aren't used by multi million dollar companies, but plenty of blogs and other independent servers using the alt-TLDs.
So is the way this works that Google pays a bunch of money to ICANN, and then they get the .ing TLD, and can make money by selling individual .ing domains? Is there like a bidding process that ICANN uses to decided who gets the TLD in the first place?
In theory this is beneficial as it helps fund the ICANN and keep it independent. But the reality is that these are effectively money printing machines, effectively out of reach for all but large corporations, which bring questionable value to the internet in general.
I selfishly hope that we can establish a free TLD, or at least one which just directly funds ICANN operations instead of benefitting rich middle men.
I think eventually, the idea of limited, restricted TLDs will be an amusing historical fact (and that's already the case in some ways). But I do share some of the concern about scams/phishing. It certainly seems to confuse less savvy(lax?) users, at least.
Wait... did I just download a 12MiB GIF of someone struggl.ing to feed themselves, someone pok.ing a lightbulb and someone dodg.ing an arrow?
I run `thatwas.notverycash.money/ofyou/` and can tell you without a doubt that this is a great idea that is not at all necessary to act on. You'll get a couple laughs and then it's just a $15/year fee for the domain lingering over your head and credit card.
1. You have to spend like obscene amount of money to get the domain right now. The amount decreases every day till Dec 5.
2. In Godaddy, You pay for pre-registration of the domain, when it opens on Dec 5 and assuming nobody grabbed it before, you'll have a chance at the lottery with other bidders of purchasing it.
3. Godaddy priority registration is showing wrong pricing. The Phase 1 and 2 are already over and hence showing 20$ prices. From Phase 3 the actual prices start.
According to GoDaddy fuck.ing is still available. It also recommended fuck.glass, fuck.contractors, and fuck.barcelona. These new TLDs are pretty neat.
Great, another goldmine "discovered" by Google. They'll make loads of money out of thin air and in the meantime allow people to create some confus.ing and phish.ing web sites (sorry for the pun :-))
For people wondering how some of these domains are already reserved, new TLDs are usually made available in different phases:
- Sunrise is open to TMCH users (trademarks)
- EAP/Landrush (Early Access Program) is available for a few days/weeks before GA and the price decreases periodically (usually an EAP is 1 week and the price decreases daily)
- Pre-registrations are a "fake" phase in which you can pre-order a domain to the registrar, and they'll order it for you as soon as the GA opens (if the domain was already sold during earlier phases, or if someone pre-registered at another registrar that happened to be faster, you'll get refunded). It's a kind of backorder, specific to pre-GA phase
- GA (General Availability), where the TLD is finally open to everyone at GA pricing
During all these phases, domains can be sold in "tiers" (eg. "Premium") which is why some domains (1-2 letters, common dictionary words) are more expensive.
Domain registration is the most fascinating interaction between multiple outlooks. There's the true hacker spirit of DNS resolution as a technology. There's the lawful bureaucracy of ICANN shoe-horning the technology into a legal framework. Then there's the capitalism of registry "operators" who appear to exist almost solely to navigate ICANN.
It really feels like there ought to be a better system.
domains are almost as Lindy (a concept that explains the longevity of things like ideas or technology) as circuit switched telephone numbers. We're not going to shake the concept away for a very long time.
But a domain is now a virtual signal. Most adverts are "search X" or advertising online already so there is a link. There are plenty of cool non-english but pronounceable words out there you can .com let alone cute things .so, .be, .co, .io, .ai, .gg, .dev, etc.
This is kind of what I mean. You're talking about the DNS part alone here. I can encourage all of my friends to pass `/etc/hosts` around, just like those in Stanford originally did with HOSTS.txt, and I have domains.
The mistake was to let Postel mismanage DNS pretty much alone without any significant oversight or defined policies, that set the groundwork for dns to be free for all wild west of which the current situation is just natural consequence
I believe the main problem is lack of competition.
When a customer registers geographical domains, or old school domains like com / net, they can migrate to any other registrar they wish. This option guarantees reasonable prices for customers, even in the very long run.
When a customer registers their domain under TLDs like hot / deals / express they can’t move away unless they’re fine losing their domain name as the result. Most of these TLDs are owned by for-profit companies. IMO, this lack of competition pretty much guarantees the prices will eventually go way higher to extract more profit for these companies.
A while ago, people faced a similar problem with mobile telephone numbers. Many countries have solved the issue with legal measures, they force mobile operators to allow users to migrate to competing operators while keeping their old phone number. Until we have laws forcing internet domain names portability (similar to phone numbers portability), I personally plan to stay away from these new top-level domains.
I don't really get godaddys pricing on these or what exactly they buy you. They're claiming this price is to preregister to maximize your chance to own it. There is a base rate of $19.99 per year but depending on what word you enter, it quotes up to $12k
Namecheap isn't supporting the Early Access Program, so if you want to buy through them you'd have to wait until General Availability in December (and hope no one else got the name first through a different registrar that is doing EAP).
Did everyone forget about the Mike Rowe Soft ordeal? 17 year old Mike Rowe started his own web company and named it MikeRoweSoft.com (on purpose, he knew he was making a pun.)
Pretty much. It is a trademark and holders have to defend against infringements if they want to keep it.
You might win in court/arbitration if you have a legitimate reason for owning the domain, but you're going to need deep pockets to pull it off and be willing to put up with the harassment of a company that has infinity money and wants to crush you for sport.
Several registrars are already selling general availability pre-orders. Does anyone know how this works? I have a feeling that, when the general availability period begins, if multiple people pre-ordered the same one, all but one of them are going to get screwed. Do they at least refund you?
There’s a character in “the truth” by Terry pratchett that ostensibly swears a lot in the book - “I don’t have any -ing friends”, etc. but it turns out he’s literally saying -ing (that being the joke). And I will never not think about if I encounter a .ing domain.
Oof. I've been waiting for this TLD since it was first announced, checking it at irregular intervals, because my last name ends on 'ing'. Just hoping that nobody registers it before me (only 4 letters), because clearly I can't pay those premiums.
"Adobe Acrobat has free online tools that let you easily edit, add comments and fill and sign PDFs right from your browser. Try them out at edit.ing and signing."
They somehow missed sign.ing being properly called out :p
I'm wondering, the info box on the right says the status is proposed, and the linked "Map Status, ICANN.org"[0] lists all 3 applicants. But you are right, maybe I'm reading it wrong.
Stepping back, I kind of feel like Google is abusing their power. Seems like they literally print money by issuing new TLDs every other month or so, for doing… not much. Are people really asking for these TLDs, like .zip and .mov? Some of them almost seems like an extortion where you are forced to protect your brand by buying up relevant domains.
They sold Google Domains, which was a domain Registrar. They still own and control their Domain Registry, Charleston Road Registry, Inc. which manages the gTLDs like .ing and .dev.
Is that an obvious association to the relavent audience? Mixing the French “suisse” with the German abbreviated “ing” is a little odd to my (french) eyes. Or is suisse also common in Swiss German?
IDK how representative I am but as a German "Suisse" is clearly referring to Switzerland (maybe because it's in some Swiss brand names, e.g. Credit Suisse?) and my two associations with "ing" are ING direct banking and industrial engineering (outside the Bachelor/Master system the degree title prefix for a professional engineer was/is commonly indicated as "Dipl. Ing.").
But I wouldn't overthink this. Someone likely pitched this as a clever marketing campaign to show "technological leadership" (the news section has an article dedicated to the site being one of the first .ing domains as if this is a meaningful technological achievement) and got funding for it. That doesn't mean the site will be there or be maintained a few years from now.
Given that French cantons don't speak German and German cantons would rather speak English than be caught speaking French, no, I doubt this linguistic concoction is obvious to either.
Might work in Fribourg, which is bilingual, but that's still a stretch.
Nope. Corporations love to usurp common names and symbols. At some point vain and idle executive board and CXX have a meltdown and decide to "make a statement". Oracle, here, apple, alphabet, magenta color, orange (color and word)...
Honestly at this point, because there are SO many tlds do people even care at this point.
It's just a money grab, and one that is designed to strong arm brands into protecting themselves by buying up all this pointless tlds to avoid brand delusion.
At this point, it seems its likely cheaper to just buy the .com, and let lawyers handle anyone else instead of buying endless pointless tlds, even more so now they are trying this auction/bidding war crap.
How about we put a freeze on all TLDs. and we create rules that require they all go back to a standard fee structure, no auctions, no reserving, etc..
Which is extra dumb because people won't recognize danc.ing as a legitimate domain and the owners are going to have to pay up for dancing.com or end up with a cheaper alternative called like thedancingapp.com.
But, it will cost an extra $1m if you want to do it now. Later than that, pay less but wait longer, and risk losing it.
So, pay up or get lost. Can’t afford $1m for a domain? Sorry, bozo, maybe you can have the scraps when the bullies are done eating.
This whole business is massive trash. The days of owning your own domain with any kind of nice name are fading and being replaced with “premium” domains with massive prices.
I very much would like domains to bugger off and be replaced by something that isn’t becoming another swamp on the Internet.
With that, most of the companies that can register .ing for you, listed on their website, will tell you that “.ing” does not exist. Clearly, Google didn’t tell them about launch or they aren’t ready.
This whole thing makes me sad. The Internet is dying and being replaced by literally anything for a quick buck. Now with added smoke and mirrors.