just realized i've had the mollywhite.net domain for over 10 years(!!)
related sneak peek into an upcoming piece: i firmly believe that if you're going to spend money on one thing online it should be a domain, particularly as online identity gets more fragmented. as platforms come and go, you can always find me there.
🤓 This is gonna be a extremely nerdy toot, but my most favorite piece of code I ever wrote is a small TypeScript library complete with unit tests that makes it super simple to filter a list of domain names by various criteria.
Sometimes I watch eBay reseller videos on YouTube and think what that life is like and then I come to my senses and realize that domain name investing is so much better and I already know how to do it well!
🆕 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:
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.
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 🙄
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 …
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.