🆕 blog! “What the UK Government gets wrong about QR codes”
One of my most memorable experiences in the Civil Service1 was discussing link shortening services with a very friendly2 person from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I was trying to explain why link shortners like bit.ly and ow.ly weren't sensible for Government use. They didn't …
Apparently all .tv domains registered through Sarek Oy (sarek.fi; or #Njalla, which uses them) are currently disabled by the .tv registry (turnon.tv / godaddy). No details are known and domain owners were not notified. This affects a few piracy sites, but also any other unrelated .tv domains, unfortunately including my jomo.tv domain. Piracy related .tv domains using a different registrar are not affected.
The demise of the queer.af domain (that just happened to follow a conversation I had with my wife on the weekend, who wanted a new domain name for a new business she wants to set up) made me write up some thoughts on Domain Names:
I suddenly remembered that the domain name registration for Twitter.com was set to expire on January 21, 2024. I had taken a screenshot of this last July.
Curious, I went to see what happened and… the current management is SO CHEAP that they only renewed the name for one extra year… and took care of this 4 DAYS before the expiration 🙄
Very good news: #ICANN is going to define a new special #TLD "internal" meant for use in internal networks only. This TLD is meant to never be used in the broader #Internet. 👍
I hope #router vendors will now react so that those hacky config #domains like "fritz.box" will be replaced with something that ends with ".internal". Those hacky domains always left a bad taste in my mouth.
It's not 100% official yet but the chances look good.
Wrote a couple of standalone scripts to download and parse the expiring, pending delete, and platform-exclusive auction lists provided by NameJet and SnapNames. Let me know if you have any issues running.
You type in to your browser's address bar example.com and it automatically redirects you to the https:// version. How does your browser know that it needed to request the more secure version of a website?
The answer is... A big list. The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) list is a list of domain names which have told Google that they always want their website served over https. If the user tries to manually request the insecure version, the browser won't let them. This means that a user's connection to, for example, their bank cannot be hijacked. A dodgy WiFi network cannot force the user to visit an insecure and fraudulent version of a site.
After about a decade of use, the list is now 14MB in size, with around 130,000 entries in it. You can view the list online or download it.
The most popular (over 1,000 entries) TLDs / Public Suffixes are:
Rank
TLD
Entries
1
com
43,236
2
tk
19,022
3
de
5,216
4
org
4,731
5
gov
4,507
6
net
4,410
7
ga
4,326
8
nl
2,671
9
cf
2,458
10
ml
2,271
11
co.uk
2,139
12
fr
1,714
13
ru
1,516
14
eu
1,283
15
com.br
1,226
16
gq
1,225
17
io
1,215
18
com.au
1,202
19
it
1,103
20
cz
1,004
After .com, the free .tk domain names absolutely dominate. I wonder how many of them are fraudulent?
There are 2,676 .uk domain names - only 537 of which aren't on .co.uk.
Going a bit further, there are 418 IDNs (which start with xn--).
And about 187 have "porn" in the domain.
You can't really extrapolate much from this as a data set. Lots of the domains seem to have expired or otherwise no longer work. Reading around https://hstspreload.org it notes that because this list is hard-coded into Chrome it can take months before a site is added. Similarly, removal can take a long time as well.
I can't help feeling that there should be a better way to manage all this though.
You type in to your browser's address bar example.com and it automatically redirects you to the https:// version. How does your browser know that it needed to request the more secure version of a website? The answer is... A big list. The HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) list is a list of domain names which …
I was listening to a podcast recently which was kind enough to mention one of my blog posts. The presenter said:
...and you should Google for this, because I'm really not sure how to pronounce this. Is it shu-huk-spur? dot mobby?
Le sigh! It's a conversation I have most weeks when I'm on the phone to someone - usually a call centre - and they ask for my email address.
"Sierra Hotel Kilo Sierra Papa Romeo Dot Mike Oscar Bravo India"
Whereupon I am inevitably asked:
Is that dot com or dot co dot UK at the end, sir?
Yes! I have chosen an almost unpronounceable domain on an obscure TLD. Woe is me!
Originally, I thought this wouldn't be a problem. Typing in the domain is quick and easy. But a surprising number of organisations still insist on taking personal data over the phone. Which means more reading out the phonetic spelling.
Frustratingly, a large number of websites refuse to accept .mobi as a valid TLD for email addresses. The geniuses who coded them appeared to think that every email address must end with a 3 character (.com, .org, .net) or 2 character (.uk, .de, .io) sequence. Despite the fact that there are dozens of domains which don't fit in this restriction.
Being the belligerent sod that I am, I refuse to give in to the tyranny of the spoken word! We live in an digital world and digital data should be communicated by digital means. I want to impart information like my email address over the wire - not over the phone.
Regular readers will know that I was thwarted in my quest to buy a .中国 domain - but I did manage to grab http://莎士比亚.org/.
I think I'm going to move my primary email to that domain. When I get some call-centre who won't let me fill in a form online to give them my details, I shall very politely say my email address is:
Eden - yes, like the garden - at Shāshìbǐyà... Oh, of course, the stroke order is... Well, no, it's a Mandarin Chinese domain... No... No... Fine, would you like the punycode representation? Hello?
I'll also refuse to do business when any organisation which doesn't recognise IDN email addresses. That'll show 'em!
Perhaps I'll also move this blog over to that domain as well. I wonder what impact speakability has on SEO?
Sad news! 😢 Many of our domains, hosting rare language #books have been seized some days ago. These weren't #ZLibrary mirrors but separate sub-projects. Over 15 years, we've collected unique texts in languages like Tamil, Mongolian, Catalan, Urdu. These domains hosted rare books & manuscripts, an invaluable heritage for #researches