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Outdated Domains To Meet Their End

Posted by Zonk on Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:12 AM
from the cleaning-up-the-intertubes dept.
The Internet IT
Dr. Eggman writes "The little used .um internet domain is no more. The domain was used, or rather unused, for US minor outlying islands and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it. This announcement comes as last month ICANN began taking comments on deletion of outdated suffixes. Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites."
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  • Russia (Score:5, Funny)

    by wooferhound (546132) <[moc.dnuohrefoow] [ta] [mit]> on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:16AM (#17813802) Homepage
    In Soviet Russia
    The Domain expires you . . .

  • Let's Not Troll Too Much Please (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mfh (56) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:18AM (#17813824) Journal

    Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union.
    Before we get unindated by a slew of "In Soviet Russia" troll posts, let's think about this domain deletion concept for a moment.

    Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
    The destruction of a domain that is of no use, is nothing to be upset about. But what happens when this motion is repeated on a larger scale when not everyone is in agreement?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by parasonic (699907)

      The destruction of a domain that is of no use, is nothing to be upset about.

      But how much effort does it take to maintain a database of three million Soviet Union TLD's? The time alone to register these domains alone would be twenty-eight and one-half man years at five minutes to register. Just to register them. How much time would it take to switch domain names? How much to try to update links? How much to one's clients trying to get to a site that can no longer exist? Tens of thousands of man years?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Dr. Eggman (932300)
      Then we should try to get as many people in agreement as possible. Maintain the domain until there are sufficiently few (.su's 3 million is too much for me, perhaps a quarter million or less?) and after that point sweep the remaining in to a generic tld like .mis or something else for a miscellaneous domain. I'm not sure how feasable something like that would be, but the least we can do is offer "endangered tld" holders some method to ease into newer or better maintained tlds. We could look at how servers a

      • But the Soviet Union? I thought you guys had disbanded?

        Ambassador:*chuckles* Yes, that's what we wanted you to think!


        Apparently Yukos (and some others) didn't get the memo.

        As for interesting domains- it.su is already taken, for those who prefer things extra hot.

    • Re:Let's Not Troll Too Much Please (Score:5, Funny)

      by heroofhyr (777687) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:44AM (#17814248)
      I'm a little disappointed at the lack (currently I only see one) of "In Soviet Russia" posts under this article. Often they're lame, but once in awhile you see some that're actually funny. I was hoping when I clicked through to this discussion to find some, only to find a single one (modded down Redundant). Sure, they can be rather annoying in irrelevant conversations, but this article is practically an open invitation for people who post the same hackneyed phrases to every article to go wild. Maybe you don't care for them, but I for one welcome our Soviet Russian troll poster overlords. I'm currently checking Netcraft to verify whether or not "In Soviet Russia" posting is dying and will report confirmation later.

    • Re:Let's Not Troll Too Much Please (Score:5, Funny)

      by The_Wilschon (782534) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @11:31AM (#17814948) Homepage
      In America, you get inundated with bad jokes. In Soviet Russia, bad jokes get

      unindated
      with YOU!
  • So how do I get an email addy at one of those 3 million .su domains ?
    • Register a .su domain? Have a quick look on google; there's plenty of registrars that'll happily take your cash in exchange for a .su. Better be quick though! If it gets axed you won't be getting any emails.

  • get rid of all TLDs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pr0nbot (313417) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:21AM (#17813878)
    Suffixes (and host prefixes) were a mistake. We ought to get rid of them altogether.

    • Re:get rid of all TLDs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eln (21727) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:56AM (#17814430) Homepage
      ICANN uses new TLD registration to basically print money, they'll never give up the TLD concept.
    • With a few exceptions, they have pretty much lost their meaning. Few countries seem to have restrictions on the use of their suffix (Faroe Islands being one).

      Suffixes still serve a valuable purpose. They allow us to identify hosts using DNS, pretty handy if you ask me. There may be a better way of doing it but I haven't seen one. mail.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com could be different servers and so prefixes are handy and reliable.

      The only suffixes that are no-brainers would be www and ftp if they're all

  • .su (Score:5, Funny)

    by Arthur B. (806360) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:22AM (#17813900)
    The TLD for bearded Russian sysadmins.

  • Why not just sell it? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Paulrothrock (685079) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:24AM (#17813920) Homepage Journal

    There are tons of words that end in 'um' [morewords.com]. Why not sell domains there so people can get 'cesi.um' or 'im-a-b.um'? It would generate tons of revenue (just like .cx, .us, and .tv) and would free up some domain name space.

    For those who are wondering, there are only 8 words that end in 'su' [morewords.com]

    • And honestly they rule... where can I register ju.jit.su ?!
    • All the -su words there are Japanese. There are more Japanese words that end with -su than that website lists. "Manatsu" being one. And there are probably tons of anime characters whose names end with -su.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by screaser (901255)
      Because let's be honest...

      URLs like in.fini.ty, del.icio.us, etc are both extremely lame and annoying.

      Don't be that guy.

    • There are tons of words that end in 'um' [morewords.com]. Why not sell domains there so people can get 'cesi.um' or 'im-a-b.um'?

      The truth is, that this domain naming scheme does not work very well as a brand. You can have a domain named del.icio.us, but you just _have_ to have delicious.com as a pair for it, or you'll lose a lot of visitors.

      I've seen this naming scheme used by many famous companies (subaru: suba.ru), but they all had them as an aliases for 'proper' names

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Scarblac (122480)

      For those who are wondering, there are only 8 words that end in 'su'

      ... in English. I think it's more common in French and Italian, and probably in loads of other languages I don't know anything about. And other languages do matter somewhat for this sort of thing (see Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])

    • mm don't forget tiramisu [wikipedia.org] :-)

      Now, did you mean there are only 8 words in all the world's languages that end in "su" or just English? I can't believe that there aren't a few more out there in different languages...
    • And what will Putin use for his blog now he can't have poloni.um?

  • New use for .um top-level domain? (Score:5, Funny)

    by adnonsense (826530) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:26AM (#17813942) Homepage Journal

    Why not reassign the .um TLD to the umming and aahing community? There are many ditherers and the like out there who'd love to have domains like "im-not-sure.um", "let-me-see-a-minute.um", "tum-te-tum-te-t.um" etc.

  • Bad journalism? (Score:5, Informative)

    by sczimme (603413) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:27AM (#17813954)
    From the linked article:

    The Soviet Union's ".su" is the leading candidate for deletion; that'll be harder to strike than ".um" -- a Google search produced more than 3 million ".su" sites.

    The Google results were vetted to ensure those were 3+ million unique domains, right?

    A Google search for sites from only the .su domain returned the following result:

    Results 1 - 10 of about 2,670,000 for site:.su. (0.04 seconds)

    I don't know what folks will do without www.jedi.su [www.jedi.su]...

  • ``The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites.''

    Other people using a TLD hasn't stopped ICANN before. See, for example, the .biz TLD that was operated by Pacific Root, before ICANN decided it wanted .biz and simply introduced it. Now we have two of them, with different hosts in each.
  • Miami fell apart in football and now the .um domain...

    Come to think of it, the University of Miami would have been the logical university to control the .um domain.

    I tried to find a website on .um.

    www.um [www.um] points to something. Seems like an exchange point domain. Keeps calling itself ep.net. Except ep.net isn't up.

  • No more .su? (Score:4, Funny)

    by fang2415 (987165) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @10:41AM (#17814196) Journal

    ".su" is the leading candidate for deletion

    Well, no big loss -- .sudo is a much better way of managing things anyway.

  • More TLDs to phase out (Score:3)

    by Animats (122034) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @11:52AM (#17815254) Homepage

    It's good to see ICANN doing some cleanup. For the past few years, they've been something of a trade group for domain registrars.

    A few more TLDs could go. .museum and .aero could be phased out due to lack of interest. The entire list for .museum is a few pages, the domains aren't the top-tier museums, and almost all of them are redirects anyway. .aero has an entry for every airport code (try LAX.AERO [lax.aero]), but those were put there by the domain registrar to give the illusion of activity and they're not the primary domain name for those sites. ("LAX.AERO" is really "WWW2.LAWA.ORG").

    .biz ought to go as slum clearance. .info probably wasn't worth creating.

  • in soviet russia, that which is operated on becomes the operator and that which operates becomes operated on. it's a well known fact in the slashdot community

    the slashdot community is also familiar with the concept of logical paradoxes, like: "i never tell the truth"... well if you aren't telling the truth about never telling the truth, then perhaps you do tell the truth, which contradicts your statement. the resulting lack of meaning renders the entire statement null and void

    now if we are to actually drop the .su domain, when the slashdot community knows full well that in soviet russia, the .su domain drops you, then won't the void created by this logical paradox create a rift in time and space and kill us all?

    good god for the sake of humanity, leave .su alone!

    because in .su, domain drops you!

  • 3 million sites? (Score:5, Informative)

    by helgy (653011) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @12:17PM (#17815616) Homepage
    Probably 3 million pages, not sites. According to Russians (http://info.nic.ru/st/38/out_1362.shtml [info.nic.ru]) there were 7897 domain names registered in .su TLD by 11/26/2006. And looks like they aren't going to give it up for nothing - .su domain is $100/year.

  • .su has a legitimate use (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tetromino (807969) on Tuesday January 30 2007, @12:18PM (#17815632)
    .su is designated as the TLD for companies and organizations that have a presence in many of the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Basically, the same sort of role that .eu is supposed to play for Europe.

    IMHO, the constant attempts to get rid of .su are pure politics: "the Soviet Union was eeevil, so we must erase all traces of it from the DNS system". Blergh. These people are trying to steamroll over numerous legitimate users of .su.

  • More about .um (Score:3, Informative)

    by welshsocialist (542986) <hoshie@mailinator.com> on Tuesday January 30 2007, @04:08PM (#17819226) Homepage
    This is a post for slashdotters confused over .um and the islands they stand for. .um was allocated for the "United States Minor Outlying Islands". The term "United States Minor Outlying Islands" is a catch all phrase that refers to nine islands around the world. Eight of these are in the Pacific Ocean, the other is in the Caribbean Sea. They are:
    • Baker Island
    • Howland Island
    • Jarvis Island
    • Kingman Reef
    • Johnston Atoll
    • Midway Islands
    • Palmyra Atoll
    • Wake Island
    • Navassa Island

    Baker and Howland islands were claimed in 1857. guano (aka bird shit) was mined on these islands during the 19th century. In 1935, an attempt to colonize these two islands was began; World War II forced an end to the project. Howland Island was Amelia Earhart's intended stop on her last flight. They both became National Wildlife Refuges in 1974.
    Jarvis Island was claimed by the US in 1858, but abandoned in 1879 after tons of guano were mined. The UK claimed the island in 1889 and the US claimed it back in 1935. A settlement was started here, but World War II ended those plans. Jarvis Island became a National Wildlife Refuge in 1974.
    Kingman Reef was claimed by the Guano Islands Act in 1856. It was annexed by the US in 1922. It was used a stopover by flying boats in the 1930's. Kingman Reef was transfered from the US Navy to the US Interior Dept in 2000; it became a National Wildlife Refuge a year later.
    Johnston Atoll was annexed by both Hawaii and the US in 1858. In 1936, it was placed under US Navy control. The US Air Force gained control in 1948. In the 1950's and 1960's, Johnston Atoll was used for Nuclear tests, and until 2000 the Atoll was used for chemical weapons storage and disposal. In 2005, the Atoll's cleanup process was finished.
    The Midway Islands were put under US possession in 1867. In the 1930's and 40's, the Islands were used a refueling stop. A key battle of World War II was fought here in 1942. Until 1993, Midway was a US Naval Station. They are also a National Wildlife Refuge.
    Palmyra Atoll was claimed by Hawaii in 1858. When the US annexed Hawaii in 1898, it was a part of the deal. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, Palmyra was excluded. Today, it is privately owned.
    Wake Island was annexed in 1899 for use as a cable station. In the 1940's, a Naval Base was built. Japan had control over the atoll from 1941-1945. Since then, Wake has been used as a refueling stop for trans pacific flights. Since 1974, the Island has been used by the military as an airstrip. In August 2006, a typhoon tore though Wake. Because of this, the island's future use is doubtful. Wake Island is claimed by the Marshall Islands.
    Navassa Island was claimed for Guano in 1857. Mining of the stuff took place here from 1865 to 1898. A lighthouse was built here in 1917; it was used by the US Coast Guard until 1996. In that year, the light was shut off and the island was transferred to the S Interior Dept. It became a National Wildlife Refuge in 1999. Navassa Island is claimed by Haiti and a private claim exists as well.

    For more about these islands, see the CIA World Factbook [cia.gov] and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
    • AFAIK, the .SU TLD was known to be obsoleted for a very long time. Think about it, USSR was no more years before web happened. People who bought names in there have themselves to blame for the trouble along with the registrar.

      You're showing your youth here. The internet was here years before the web existed and .su was a valid domain for email "back in the day". Note to grammatically challenged Slashdotters - note the correct use of "you're" and "your" in my first sentence. Read it and learn.

      However, y

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tverbeek (457094) *
      I doubt .IO is in danger, since it technically isn't part of the UK, and therefore couldn't be folded into .UK.

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