ICANN Considers Single Letter Domains

* * Beatles-Beatles writes "...as the Internet's key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names. In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will chart a course for single-letter Web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those names could start to appear next year."

So who gets them? Sesame street?

[plover]

This posting brought to you by the domains "F" and "U".

Single "Letter" Domains

[Nightreaver]

So MX on these domains won't be very useful?

Now Taco is mocking us

[Anonymous Coward]

He's going to post all Beatles Beatles stories to spite us.

LMAO

[porkThreeWays]

Is this a big joke? Is Beatles Beatles some sort of fictious character they came up with to post stories they find on their own? Stop the madness! He IS mocking us~!!

Re:LMAO

[ptomblin]

We'll know it's really Taco in disguise once he starts posting duplicates.

Only 26

[mysqlrocks]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Re:Only 26

[ZachPruckowski]

no, there are 26 letters, times the major .whatevers There's .com, .net, .org, .info, then the ones that go by country, like .co.uk or .de That makes for a lot more than 26 possibilities, but you are correct that relative to the internet as a whole, it's not a lot of domains.

Re:Only 26

[chris_eineke]

Consider http://k.de/ [k.de] :P

Re:Only 26

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's less than you might think....

gTLDs - .com .edu .gov .int .mil .net and .org

Of those, only the .com, .net and .org are 'open' for registration so that gives you 3 x 26 = 78

Then you've got the new TLDs; .biz .info .name .pro .aero .coop and .museum

Of those 3 are sponsored (.aero .coop and .museum) so the policies regarding registration are at the discretion of the sponsor. That leaves 4 more TLDs under the control of ICANN as far as policies go. We're up to 7 x 26 = 182

Then there are the ccTLDs; .ac .ad .ae .af .ag. .ai .al .an ......... .za .zm .zw

But the ccTLDs are under the control of a delegated agent in the country involved and the policies are once again at the discretion of the delegated agent. You've just lost the 240 x 26 which would have really bulked out those numbers.

Oh, and then you have to take away the 6 existing one letter domain names which leaves us with a grand total of new 'approved by ICANN' one letter domains of;

(7 x 26) - 6 = 176

So it's not that many....

Wrong language

[finelinebob]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Damn ... I knew I should have picked up Chinese as my second language....

Re:Wrong language

[ncc74656]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy. Great.

Damn ... I knew I should have picked up Chinese as my second language

Only the 26 letters of the English alphabet are usable in domain names AFAIK. Letters from foreign alphabets (and ideographs from languages that use those, such as Chinese) are invalid characters.

Re:Only 26

[InvalidError]

If they do letters, they will probably do numbers as well. That's 10 more options for each TLD.

Domains can't begin with numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it's still the case that domain names can't start with numbers. Single character number domain names would and likely won't be avialable for that reason.

Re:Domains can't begin with numbers

[bhtooefr]

Last I checked, 8 was a number.

How many domain names start with 8?

Re:Only 26

[way2trivial]

get the odd's , then sell third level domain rights to a number of radio stations

got 5.com? get 100.5 FM KY bidding against 100.5 fm NY

Re:Only 26

[Spy der Mann]

With only 26 available they should fetch a hefty price and be accessible to only the wealthy.

3. Profit!!!

It all makes sense now.

Re:Only 26

[Rakishi]

So are large diamonds and top of the line cars, your point being?

Re:Only 26

[mysqlrocks]

My point is that if they were going to make these domain names available they should have done it from the very beginning or not at all. It's as if (as the article points out) Central Park suddenly became available for land development. Granted only the wealthy can afford to live near Central Park as it is but that market has developed over time - not suddenly been opened up. Where are the profits from the sale of these domain names going? One could argue that the Internet (like Central Park) belongs to the

Re:Only 26

[keithmoore]

So let's see...ICANN is devoting valuable energy to deciding whether it should free up a tiny number of new domains. The domains will inevitably cost a lot of money. The only question is who gets it. If they released the domains under the normal first-come first-first serve policy they would be snapped up in microseconds by speculators and auctioned off, and the speculators would get the money. OTOH if ICANN tries to make the money itself, or split it with registries, then they subject themselves to charges of inappropriately lining their pockets and favoring wealthy commercial interests.

This will not do a thing for the net as a whole and will only make more trouble for ICANN.

Re:Only 26

[m50d]

OTOH if ICANN tries to make the money itself, or split it with registries, then they subject themselves to charges of inappropriately lining their pockets and favoring wealthy commercial interests.

I think they've already shown they're not overly concerned about such charges.

slashdot.o ?

[saskboy]

how.r.u ?

This could .b confusing, .a?

tinyurl?

[circletimessquare]

does this put tinyurl out of business?

3...2...1...

[AkaXakA]

....Gone before mere mortals can say click!

I just don't see why single letter domain names ar

[putko]

I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.

Nor do I see why they had to get held back (mostly -- just check the list) until now.

Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?

I would guess that at some point you won't have domains, but some sort of searching facility -- e.g. a bunch of tags. At that point, the name won't really matter, and you probably won't want to remember most of them.

E.g. your microwave will have the IP: 123.223.3.123.43....
But you'll look it up on your keychain device, or do a search for "Me" "microwave" to get the magic number.

And your living rooms light switches address will be ...
and so on -- everything will have an IP, but you won't be able to name all that stuff anyway.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Lumpy]

what get's me is that people think that ICANN is all knowing and cant be easily undseated.

These bozo's can be made ignorable overnight with the establishment of a second DNS system. it blows my mind that it has not happened already. and no it would not cause instand caos as some would like you to believe.

ICANN dns and Dave's DNS duplicates would simply resolve to two addresses. have the web browser pop up both and let the user choose.

Having a single DNS system is not a law.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root [wikipedia.org]

About says it all....

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[petermgreen]

there are many alternative dns systems but none of them get much support and any that did take a stand against icann rather than just adding thier own tlds would almost certainly lose most of thier existing users.

managing the top level of a unique nameing system is a natural monopoly.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[KiloByte]

Well... I've used to have an account on my friend's server, i.pl -- and it was really, really sweet. It was helluva easier to get to than any search engine can even attempt.

Instead of using a separate service, and using several words, you can have four characters. Why would you want more? Heck... even typing in the IP is a lot faster than doing that search for "me microwave" you mentioned.

Re:I just don't see why single letter domain names

[bhtooefr]

I would want it (in fact, I'd also want a two letter TLD) if I were trying to create a TinyURL competitor.

tinyurl.com is 11 characters.
u.cc is four.

In places like, oh, SLASHDOT SIGS, that'd help a lot.

What about international characters?

[under_score]

Would the single letter domains allow for international characters? This would be a cool way of reducing the contention for the English/Roman single letters. The article didn't mention this, but it seems to me like it may be possible already given the IDN standards [wikipedia.org].

Re:What about international characters?

[keyslammer]

AFAIK, the standard for representing international characters in a hostname is via IDNA encoding (see RFC3490 [faqs.org]) which maps international characters to ascii characters. It looks like name components in this spec have to begin with ascii "xn--", so a single international character domain name would be at least a 5 character ascii domain name which may already be allowed.

That said, I'm really not too familiar with this subject at all (I just looked up the RFC) so please someone correct me if I'm wrong...

It's amazing...

[LithiumX]

I actually take the time to read a side-dispute over a submitter's reasons for submitting, then blow it off as something that doesn't really interest me.

Then suddenly it seems like he's popping up left and right. It's like something out of a low-grade horror movie. To make matters worse, someone nearby keeps blasting Beatles tunes from their cubicle - not even the good ones. I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.

Re:It's amazing...

[Dirtside]

I half expect an undead George Harrison to start clawing at my bedroom window tonight.

Let's see... uh, no, you're next Tuesday, tonight George is scheduled to terrify a pensioner in Bristol. Sorry about the mix-up.

www.w.us

[digitaldc]

The wuss domain was already claimed by an unknown US government official with a speech impediment and delusions of grandeur.

from the people that brought you ".museum"

[rebug]

Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[MikeFM]

Did anyone ever respect them? I never did. Ever tried to get them to resolve the issue of a register forcibly stealing your domain? Hahaha good luck. User's of eNom know what I'm talking about.

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[m50d]

And you wonder why people think the US shouldn't be in control of DNS.

Re:from the people that brought you ".museum"

[alexhs]

> Does anyone actually respect ICANN anymore?

From past Slashdot discussions, I would say they're getting more respect than the U.N., at least in the U.S.A. ... ;)

Lame gTLDs were a Good Thing! .Museum's better

[billstewart]

ICANN has done a bunch of stupid things over the years, but this is not one of them. They'll only get to sell .sex and .inc and .ltd once, and they needed to learn how to deal with selling new gTLDs on names that nobody's really all that worried about, like .coop or .aero. They did miss a lot of the market window by dithering about it for so long - they've had enough experience by now to figure out where the money is and shake down the customers for all they could get (ICANN's primary purpose is spreading

So wrong ...

[Kope]

The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want.

Now, I will grant that with the advent of search engines, this is far less of an issue than it was 20 years ago.

Still, the domain name conventions are NOT about corporations "extending their branding." It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments. Single letter domain names do nothing to further that purpose.

It's a bad idea not because of any technical limitations but merely because it is bowing to corporate pressures in the governance of the last arena in the world where people have more power than the companies.

But then again they're so few

[Pac]

Unless they go for Unicode, 26 letters plus 10 digits ("1.com") times 14 top-level domains (com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, and .org, .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum) gives you only 504 unique possiblities. 540 if they include .xxx when the US stops being a Christian Fundamentalist Republic.

If you multiply that by the number of country codes (248) you still get only 133920 unique addresses.

Regardless their misguided motivation, it will be funny to see Microsoft, McDonald's and Motorol

In a world where...

[Cl1mh4224rd]

...companies can "buy" legislation, is this really a surprise?

I'm sure the corporations see this as nothing more than the Internet "finally catching up" to the real world.

And, I agree, that's disturbing as hell...

BURN ALL TLD's

[Wellspring]

Blech!

Personally, I think we don't need TLD's anymore. The idea that an independent system should be vetting the .org-ness of an institution (especially in places or countries where the divisions of non-profits, government, and corporate are either non-existent or irrelevant) is to me unnecessary. The internet isn't about "defending the people" or picking winners and losers, it's about an open, largely unregulated system for connecting networks. The moment you go down the road of choosing policies and standards based on protecting or fostering one group over another, you'll never stop.

Ultimately, I think that if I could alter the domain name system, I'd burn all TLD's. Most groups register the .com / .org / .net equivalents anyway. Is slashdot a .org or a .com? Just for example. Why not go to http://cocacola/ [cocacola] and be done with it?

However, I can see the logic of reserving 2 letter codes for countries. After all, they have the guns and decide the laws. I don't know what 1 letter domains could be used for, but I'd prefer that they not be allocated yet either (for future use, perhaps). Selling 26*n (where n == number of TLDs at any moment) domain names isn't really worth the headache of changing the rules, and they could come in handy later.

Of course, then the job of the registrar becomes much more administrative. So odds of ICANN actually doing this are slim --> none.

Re:BURN ALL TLD's

[gfreeman]

Why not go to http://cocacola/ [cocacola] and be done with it?

Because it would be confusing if you wanted to tell someone to go to that site, e.g.

You: "Go to aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash cocacola"
Them: "Sorry, I fell asleep halfway through that. Hmm?"

as opposed to current usage,

You: "Go to cocacola dot com"

It's the "dot com" bit that tells everyone that you are talking about a website, because no-one I know uses the redundant "aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash" bit in normal chat. Of course you could say "visit our website, it's cocacola" but you'd have to do that everytime you refer to the cocacola website rather than the soft drink. Imagine business meetings in the soft drink industry.

Q: "Have you seen cocacola recently?"
A: "What, the website or the company?"

Something needs to distinguish the brand from the domain, because until now, the context has been quite clear whether you are referring to a name, a brand, a site, or the product. Drop the "dot com" and it starts to get confusing.

Re:So wrong ...

[PMuse]

The point of domain name hierarchy, as ICANN has forgotten, was to organize information into identifyable categories to make it easier for people to find what they want. . . . It's about organizing the ip space into human-readable and human-understandable segments.

All due respect to our founding coders, but the notion that we could classify all human endeavor according to a taxomonmy based on the categories educational, government, military, commercial, network, organization, or country was naive and arroga

A new record?

[Tim C]

Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

Re:A new record?

[henni16]

Actually, I see three "journalistic power house" stories on the front page at the moment:
this one, "Microsoft Receives Open Source VIP Blessing" and "Introverts Have More Brain Activity?"

Re:A new record?

[BarryNorton]

This is the second time today two of his were on the front page, and earlier wasn't the first time either. I suggest we all visit his George Harrison tribute site, there's lots of material there that would take literally seconds to collect on the rest of the web, and lots of useful links to boot...

Re:A new record?

[Dachannien]

(Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

I think you mean, assuming Slashdot isn't already on his payroll.

Re:A new record?

[hackstraw]

Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)

Actually, its 3 in 24 hours. Take a looke here: http://slashdot.org/~*%20*%20Beatles-Beatles [slashdot.org]

Its also nuts that this guy has already gotten his karma bumped up. I don't know how much accepted stories raises your karma, but this guy is brand new and has only posted a handful of comments.

Plus the George Harrison site that he is pumping really looks like it sucks. I've heard that he is a search engine optimizer or something. Don't really know what is going on here.

For those that didn't bother to read the article..

[SecureTheNet]

...this does not open up top level domains, like .a or .b This is a proposal to open up something like a.com or b.com.

Yes, I realize there are a few out there, www.X.org comes to mind. Most of the single letter domains are registered to:

[whois.iana.org]

IANA Whois Service
Domain: c.com
Name: IANA_RESERVED

The article also states that IANA started reserving these in 1993, but the whois record for x.org shows it was created in 1997.

Finally, we can get a .m TLD

[spyrral]

When they started pushing .mobi as the mobile TLD, I thought they were joking. Type MORE letters on my phone? A .m TLD (and really, any of the other single letter TLDs) is a much better choice.

Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Nom du Keyboard]

If you think, "Hey, take a chance in the lottery and sell it for six figures aftewards," forget it now. The big companies are beating out the small guy and the Internet ideal of First Come, First Served -- FIFO in Geek terms -- of rewarding the agile thinker doesn't exist any more. Corporate sluggishness and immense political contributions have squashed it.

How have they beaten you to the punch? For example, Yahoo has already trademarked "Y.COM". Even if you get www.y.com, they simply take it away for you for free as the "trademark owner," and brand you as a criminal cyber-squatter in the process.

Oh, and btw, have a nice day!

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[RGRistroph]

Is yahoo actually doing any trade under the mark y.com ?

Re:Don't think you're going to get any of these

[Nom du Keyboard]

since they have already trademarked y.com, isn' that FIFO?

Not it's not, and I'd like to think you'd know better. Applying for a trademark is not applying for a web domain name. It's more like pre-emptive Foo.

Is 'B' distinctive? Is dot (TM)?

[fuzzy12345]

Intellectual property is created by fiat. I'd say in this case it should be ruled that single letters aren't distinctive enough to be used as the 'net equivalent of a trademark.

Besides, if these clowns say single characters ARE appropriate, and then some trademark office somewhere lest some company trademark the dot (as in "The Dot in Dot Com," anyone?) we'd all be POOCHED.

Next in the news - Single Digit

[tomhudson]

First dupe post fromt he future -

November 29th, 2006

Today ICANN announced that they will free up single-digit domains. They expect to make millions off the sale of the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
<p>When asked for comment about ICANN's new single-digit policy, one slashdotter said "Let them sit on THIS single digit and rotate!"

Of course, 1 is going to go for big bucks - "We're #1".
7 also - "Lucky us".
Avis will buy #2 - "We're #2 - we try harder"
3 will be bought out as a business portal - "3's company"
4 will be some scam - "trust us - we work 4 u" - or some golf site - "fore!"
9 will be sold to some kraut anti-drug campaign - "just say 9/nein"
8 will go to weight-watchers or slimfast - "8 too much?"
5 will go to whoever looses the bid for 1 - they''ll then say "5 - we're the quintiscential site" or some other loser shit
6 will go to an online redneck pharmacy - "when you'se feeling six as a dawg, order your meds from 6.com"
0, of course, will be the big one. The BIGGEST sex portal - "come to 0.com - because you can't get any lower than us"

Remember - watch for it next year

tt

why?

[Tom]

Well, I guess the real question is: How much did 3.com pay them?

Beatles

[LlamaGui]

I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail: Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them. It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly). Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page). In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.

Thank god!

[merc]

By the time I get to the 'o' in c-o-m, my fingers are about plumbt-tuckered out!

New Dating Sites

[Flwyd]

I'm betting the domains x.y and x.x will be highly sought after in the lucrative gay dating site market.

One option...

[lpangelrob]

I suppose the largest companies could register these in reference to their stock symbol, and put all their financial information on it. See Citicorp (NYSE: C). They could register http://www.c.com./ [www.c.com] Other notables are Ford (NYSE: F) and Kellogg (NYSE: K).

But yeah. That's all I could come up with.

Ah Memories

[nurb432]

"ya i can remember when domain names made sence, and you could easily find a company or a library.. And could identify off the bat if it was a not for profit entity.."

what is next, random characters of random length?

How to Advertise on Slashdot

[nagora]

Beatles-Beatles, AKA Carl Fogle, is using /. to boost his search-engine jigging company. By hosting gerorge-harrison.info and then getting /. to link to it, and therefore lots of other sites to mirror that link, he is boosting that domain's search ranking (he's up to #10 on Google for "George Harrison"). He can then point his prospective clients to this success when pitching to them for their business.

TWW

I think the whole point of this...

[Gadgetfreak]

was that someone, once and for all, wanted to get rid of the C in the goatse URL.

Get them while they last

[dtfinch]

Only 26 remaining. $9.95/yr. Be the first cybersquatter to own them all.

Here is another idea

[chris_eineke]

Two actually. Two heretic ideas:

(1) Reverse the DNS order (e.g. http://aol.www/ [aol.www])
(2) Get rid of TLDs, make everything up for grabs, and force at least two domain combinations

this makes stuff like

http://microsoft.msdn/ [microsoft.msdn]
http://gnu.linux/ [gnu.linux]
http://debian.sarge/ [debian.sarge]
http://gentoo.linux/ [gentoo.linux]

possible. Imagine the possibilities!

x.org

[3770]

Been there done that [x.org]

Re:But they already exist

[gvc]

x.org has four letters and five characters.

Re:But they already exist

[David Hume]

But these already exist, don't they? Or have I been imagining websites like http://www.x.org/ [x.org] all along?

x.org has four letters and five characters.

I'm not sure that the latter distinction gets what is, or will be, new -- whatever that is. From the article:

Meanwhile, a handful of companies have asked ICANN to free up the single characters. Overstock.com Inc., for instance, prefers a single-letter brand of "o.com" because its newer businesses no longer fit its original mission of providing discounts on ex

Re:But they already exist

[Ulven]

RTFA:

"Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being."

Re:But they already exist

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

q.net is broken.

Re:But they already exist

[mysqlrocks]

FTA:

Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.

Re:But they already exist

[Pxtl]

How long does it take to make a transaction with icann? (26*3-6)*time = how long it will take for this situation to resolve after they release the 1 char domains.

So when do they do the opposite? Make a "general" TLD? Just require that the "general" domains be 4 or more chars. Then send any request involving a TLD with more than 3 chars to the new "general" TLD's domains. Ditch the whole "com/net/org" argument by just letting them name their domain whatever, as long as it's over 3 characters.

Answered in the article

[aepervius]

Quote from the middle : "Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being. One idea was to create a mechanism for splitting a single database into ....". Bold is from me.

Re:But they already exist

[Gordonjcp]

Imagine having just a single character as the whole domain name though - no TLD, just a single letter!

That would open up *thousands* of new possiblilies for domain names...

Re:But they already exist

[ShortSpecialBus]

perhaps my counting is wrong, but I'm pretty sure it would only open up 26...

Re:x.org

[LiquidCoooled]

FTA:

Six single-letter names already claimed at the time _ "q.com," "x.com, "z.com," "i.net," "q.net," and "x.org" _ were allowed to keep their names for the time being.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[TubeSteak]

I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail:

Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on sear

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Tom]

Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters

Seconded

(or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).

Won't work, it's trivial to solve that daily or so.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[MullerMn]

I saw this in a previous story, and initially I thought it was a problem. Now I'm starting to wonder if it really matters?

Whatever his motivations this guy has supplied most of the interesting stories recently. If he's using it to gain a little pagerank increase, does it really matter that much?

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Lord_Dweomer]

You know, before you go ahead and attack the guy, is whats happening with his link scam really more important than the admittedly interesting stories he has on occasion posted?

I mean, this isn't like Roland who linked to the story on his ad supported blog rather than directly to the article. At least this guy has the common curtesy link directly.

And people have said that he changes his homepage a lot, I've just seen the George Harrison one, can someone please post some evidence to the contrary?

I mean, I love a good old-fashioned pitchfork and torch rally on Slashdot as good as the next guy, but I'm wondering if this guy is the right target for it.

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[Lord_Dweomer]

As I was looking at the comments about this guy in his previous MS related story today, someone made the claim that his webpage is full of ads and simply is trying to spam. What follows is my copy/paste response which I'm sure people who haven't dared check out his site yet will be interested in reading:

"Please mod parent down...he asserts that the linked website in question is devoid of original content and full of adverts when in fact IT IS NOT!

I know many of you will not want to verify to increase hi

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[shutdown -p now]

What you achieved by this post is more people clicking on that link in his username, if only to verify your claims...

Re:Heh... **Beatles!!!

[TheRaven64]

Slashdot puts rel="nofollow" into links in comments, which makes the Googlebot ignore them. It only follows the links outside the comment section, including the article submitter. It is not possible to do anything from the comments section.

Domain names are an essential requirement

[alienmole]

Your points all have merit, but people and companies still want something to put in their email, on business cards, and in commercials, which uniquely identifies them and is hopefully memorable and comprehensible. Saying "just type Sony into Google" doesn't really cut it for that purpose.

Re:Domain names are an essential requirement

[dada21]

Yet the Internet (initially) really gained ground when people heard "Use AOL keyword SONY!"

Of course, AOL keywords were a private form of DNS, but they worked well. Sure, corporations with money could own the most powerful keywords, but that is true of domain names as well.

I think, as time goes on, we will see more need for SEO over DNS. Right now I know of at least 20% of my customer base that spends 100 times more on SEO than they ever will on getting a good domain name. If that isn't proof of the limi

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Xarius]

Your idea is absolutely terrible from the perspective of people who run websites. What if I want to link to a particular document at a particular site? Do I like to a google search query and just hope that it's the first result?

Search engines are better than nothing, but by and large they are not great.

This defeats the entire point of hypertext, and you are taking the power away from the people and placing it squarely in the hands of the corporations (like Yahoo and Google).

I admit DNS is not that great, bu

Re:Domain name uselessness

[TheRaven64]

And what happens when this guy gets search engine results? Sure, you get to Google with a small hosts file, but every link from the Google search page will have a host name, not an IP address associated with it.

I'm guessing he just uses that machine for Slashdot, and doesn't ever RTFA.

Is He Serious?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

OK, I'm not really sure whether you're being sarcastic or just doing a Dvorak on the whole current DNS debate.

You're suggesting we all dump DNS and just use search engines for everything. Let me ask you this. When everyone has done this, How the hell will search engines work?!

Consider Google pagerank. It searches you page, finds links to other pages.... but wait! These links are now not direct links. They are search engine terms which may or may not return the desired site, and by clicking on the link, you change its value on the search engines rank.

You'd turn the whole internet in some kind of quantum mechanical system where you're never quite sure where a link points to until you click on it, and once you've done so you've changed the state of the link. I'm sure we'll all get around just fine.

Not to mention the increased bandwidth and overhead. The net would quickly become primarily a system of passing around search engine queries rather than actual end user data.

Your idea sucks. Turn back on your DNS and svae the world some extra bandwidth.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Liam Slider]

but how many people are entering dozens of domain names even in a year of web use?

You know, some people do use more than Google for their internet experience. I enter domain names into my web browser all the fucking time. Just for regular everyday type of stuff.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[Pope]

Right, AAA Plumbing is listed first, and they'd be the last people I'd call, since they're so clearly desperate to be listed highly, I assume their services suck.

Also, your DNS ranting is just bizarre. It works fine for what it does. It's the proliferation of retarded TLDs like .museum and .biz that are the real problem.

Re:Domain name uselessness

[dada21]

A hosts file is not necessarily equivalent to DNS because it doesn't share the data with others nor does it accept power of another PC over my judgement call.

I accept that we need something in place of direct IP addresses, but I also don't want to have to listen to ICANN or whoever is in charge of the system. It isn't really necessary, in my opinion. The majority of sites that I access are not dynamic IPs, and in the event of IPv6 actually going live for 100% of the network, dynamic IPs will be useless.

Wh

Re:Domain name uselessness

[dada21]

You're correct. I'm not saying dump DNS and rely completely on search engines.

There have been a few distributed DNS solutions that have come up over the years, and many of them have merit but aren't fully ready for prime time. For now, DNS isn't a huge problem, but I do see it getting into the twilight years of its life.

As time goes on, though, it will show its age. I don't have the replacement solution, and if I did it would either be ahead of its time or I'd be a billionaire. I will, however, keep loo

Re:Please don't bother

[bhtooefr]

Umm... yes, we do.

FWIW, it's not just ScuttleMonkey - note that this is CmdrTaco that did this.

Obviously the news filters do

[Rooked_One]

so deal with the fact your stories are getting rejected and his aren't. I'm really sick of people beating down on someone becuase they find news the moderators will post. Its nothing but offtopic drivel, and whoever made the parent insightful should be stripped of any rights to hand out points.

Also, I care enough so that i'm posting this knowing that i'll get modded OT.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[hackstraw]

I hate to be pedantic, but 'cd' is not a command. Its a shell builtin.

It was hilarious when a coworker tried to do 'sudo cd some_directory_with_strong_permissions', and was asking me why it wasn't working. What's scarier, is that she had sudo access. What's even more scary, is that she eventually took my job after I left.

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[maxwell demon]

And why is a shell builtin not a command?
For me, a command is something which I can type in a shell. It may execute a shell builtin, a shell function, an alias, or an executable found in the path, but in any case it's a command.

See e.g. the bash man page:

Simple Commands
A simple command is a sequence of optional variable assignments fol-
lowed by blank-separated words and redirections, and terminated by

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[hackstraw]

So before being pedantic, better first check you are right.

I'm always right and I never lie!

Note that even if sudo successfully executed the cd command (say, by executing it in a root subshell), the intended effect will not happen (because the directory change would only happen in the subshell - which immediatly terminates afterwards -, and the original shell's current directory will not be affected).

Yup. That is why I thought it was funny. 'cd' has to either be a builtin for a shell or something you do i

Re:these are simple, just like unix!

[jleq]

jleq.com, bitchezzzzzzzzzz