@CWSmith I thought you were hinting at the domain with the "AI figured what the heck." But then you said general news and I figured it was just a typo😝😅
🆕 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 …
@Edent There's a whole bunch of "free" QR code generators out there which automatically run things through their own link shortener.
A friend got caught out when they found that after a week their QR codes were disabled because the redirector wanted money from them.
It prompted me to throw together https://dorward.github.io/qr-web/ - it took me rather longer to write the rant than it did to write the JS (and I've just updated it with a couple of links to your blog as its an excellent reference).
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:
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.
@Wuzzy FWIW there is already home.arpa for needs like that, "created" by RFC 8375. And everyone could have, from the get go, just avoided that, by applying the golden rule of never inventing names/TLDs, just registering a real one, and then use that as suffix of all internal naming needs.
@Wuzzy ICANN will open a new round of gTLDs in a couple of years. Almost anything can then appear as a new name... Advanced warning for anyone still using these dirty tricks in their infrastructure...
@stefan After Google domains shutdown, I moved all of mine over to WordPress. The prices were comparable. The only issue is that they wouldn't let me transfer over anything that was considered a premium domain. I've heard that cloudflare has pretty good prices for domain name renewals. They have the same premium domain limitation, though.
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 🙄