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Bug The Internet IT

Dot-Word TLDs Further Delayed 86

benfrog writes "The security bug that has been stalling the 'dot-word TLD land grab' might be fixed, but ICANN says it needs another week 'to sift through its mountains of TAS logs, in order to figure out which applicants' data was visible to which other applicants.' Needless to say, some are less than thrilled about the further delay."
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Dot-Word TLDs Further Delayed

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  • Am I Bovvered? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:11PM (#39778419)
    Was anyone who didn't want to buy/sell them keen on the idea anyway?
    • This was a first post, and asks an entirely relevant question. The fact that it was posted as AC is not relevant.

      Therefore it should *not* have been modded Redundant.

      NB: "bovvered" is British slang for "bothered".

    • Some of you may not remember the Internet before ICANN (:-), which was founded about a year after The September That Never Ended, but back when there were only seven gTLDs, the IETF was looking at expanding them, and the Internet Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC) was their organization that was working on it, and had a proposal for adding seven more fairly lame gTLDs (which was a good approach, because they were going to make mistakes in the process and learn things that nobody had expected, so it was better to do a

  • by bmo ( 77928 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:26PM (#39778493)

    ...at ICANT's continuing strategy to turn this TLD thing into a blackmail scheme for companies, orgs, schools, etc. "Here, buy another domain because someone might squat on it!"

    It's not my job to deal with that directly, but as a geek it rubs me the wrong way. It's deliberately injecting chaos into an already chaotic system. It's not like TLDs outside of .net, .org, .com, .edu, and cc codes matter. When is the last time you visited a company that used .biz that wasn't a fly-by-night spammer? Yeah, thought so.

    --
    BMO

    • by Bieeanda ( 961632 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:44PM (#39778591)
      I am too! I've been waiting more than ten years to finally squat www.clownpenis.fart, and now they're making excuses? Who else is going to go after that domain, Lorne Michaels?
      • by bmo ( 77928 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @10:02PM (#39778647)

        >.fart

        What's for sure is that Apple is going to buy .iFart

        --
        BMO

        • i've patented the ifart domain. of course there wasn't any so called "innovation", but what the hell does that have to do with patents anyway. in 10 years time i'm going to sue apple for all they're worth (probably fuck all in 10 years but here's hoping i get rich for doing fuck all... the new american dream).
      • by EdIII ( 1114411 )

        FU

        Not if I get that domain *first* :)

        I won't be squatting either. Going right on my business cards.

    • I agree, of course. The whole idea is ridiculous, and I won't go beating a dead horse here.

      I'm more interested in those "less-than-thrilled" people who would pay $185,000 just for the right to submit an application. The one linked in TFS has this interesting advice on how to deal with a security glitch:

      So my advice to ICANN now: get your skates on! A typically British expression with a clear meaning: restart TAS. Stop faffing about trying to verify every single bit of applicant data that may have been impacted by the glitch. Your updates keep on telling us how no data was corrupted and no sensitive data from one applicant was even visible by another. So do a 180 degree shift in your current crisis management.

      Horrible advice, if you ask me. We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent. I'm guessing these guys are also

      • by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Monday April 23, 2012 @10:58PM (#39778901) Homepage

        We're talking about large corporate entities who think putting down $185k for the right to apply for a vanity domain is money well spent

        In other words, crooks!

        Call me old-school, call me a goddamned luddite, but I see nothing wrong with the current set of TLDs. What I do see wrong with the system is the continued encouragement of domain squatting by entities who add zero value to the internet. We don't need more domains, we need the current ones to be taken away from some of these parasitic organisations who thrive on "tasting", search spam, and pure flipping. There are domains that have been held ransom for 15+ years now, which have never been associated with a proper site other than "click here to buy this domain".

        My solution is quite simple: unless you own a registered trademark, or use your real name or surname, you have to use it or lose it! That takes care of a ALL existing domain squatters who hang on to tens of thousands of domains each, because it only takes one four-figure sale a month to subsidize their entire rotten portfolio. The way ICANN has handled things is an absolute travesty and a gross distortion of DNS' original purpose: to help people find stuff!

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • And please tell me who is going to tell what I must put on my site so it isn't domain squatting? That would mean telling be what content I can not put on my site. That is a slippery slope to censorship.

            I am against domain squatting just as you are, but I am even more against people telling me what I can put on my site and what not.

            Exactly. What constitutes "use it" in "use it or lose it"?

            Must I have a landing page with contact info? Must I have some sort of somewhat functional website? What if I'm using the domain to host a private VPN for me? Just an email server? Is a redirect from something.mine to mine.com acceptable?

    • Hey, ICANN, squat on this!

    • I actually find www.cyberciti.biz [cyberciti.biz] to be quite handy if I need to look something up that is Ubuntu related. I do admit though, that this is I think the first .biz site that have ever found that is useful - I guess that makes it the exception that proves the rule right?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by rs79 ( 71822 )

      "...at ICANT's continuing strategy to turn this TLD thing into a blackmail scheme for companies, orgs, schools, etc. "Here, buy another domain because someone might squat on it!"

      This is the argument put forth by the Intellectual Property folks. It doesn't hold water. Sorry the world isn't com/net/org but nobody gets exclusive use of a shared resource to impose their will on it. You're supposed to have learned this in kindergarten.

      Can you imagine is Usenet was sueable like ICANN is ? rec.autos.chrysler might

      • by bmo ( 77928 )

        You have this backwards.

        Usenet newsgroup hierarchies are in the opposite direction of FQDN hierarchies.

        Introducing a .chrysler TLD is not the same as creating the newsgroup rec.automobiles.chrysler. Creating a TLD .chrysler is akin to creating a whole new Usenet hierarchy unto itself and adding to the Big 8 (I'm ignoring alt for the sake of clarity) - comp. humanities. misc. news. rec. sci. soc. talk. - by appending chrysler. making a Big 9.

        In this way, creating willy-nilly TLDs removes the entire reason

  • .LOL (Score:4, Funny)

    by formfeed ( 703859 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:34PM (#39778545)
    I cann has TLD?
  • by rs79 ( 71822 ) <hostmaster@open-rsc.org> on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:35PM (#39778549) Homepage

    People have waited 15 years for ICANN to finish placating the intectual property wonks and actually do this. A few more days? Pfttttttt...

  • by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:41PM (#39778571) Homepage Journal

    At $185k apiece, I wouldn't think you'd get that many applications to sort through.

    • Most large corporations out there are suckers for this sort of thing and some chunk of big name people/places/etc got suckered into this along with possible squatters who wanted to get in on the action to resell the TLD later in an attempt to make more money. Im sure every name brand item on the market went flooding the office to register .(brandnamehere).
    • The word on the street is that they have received around 1,700 applications.
  • Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lucm ( 889690 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @09:41PM (#39778573)

    There was a time when having a good domain name was required to be found on Internet. In those days, people paid insane amount of money to buy domains.

    Then Google came, and changed everything. The domain name was not that important anymore, not as much as getting a good ranking, for which content was key. So people paid good money to generate content (aka blogs) and enlisted the help of (so-called) SEO specialist, some of which went to far (ask JcPenney).

    Then Facebook came, and changed things even more. No more websites, no more blogs - "just visit our Facebook page and Like us, we'll give you a voucher for a free bottle of shampoo".

    I may be silly but I say: fix DNS and bring back the domains. I don't like Liking and I hate blogs.

    • Re:Evolution (Score:5, Informative)

      by vlueboy ( 1799360 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @10:41PM (#39778827)

      Annoying that to close the "convenience" loop, the *browsers* started redirecting dns misses to search engines, and that even a mistyped ping target no longer returns "unreachable" because your ISP is trying to advertise their own affiliates. This all meaning that even a *wrong* number is a *number* pointing to someone. That's like doing chat-roulette.

      I got tired of manually changing my ISP's modem IPs to non-poisoned DNS, because once in a while failing to use DHCP ones results in complete loss of DNS for some reason.

      Off on a tangent about how fake our root level and IPv4 progress is:
      If I lived alone at home, I could undo all of these "nifty" features, but static IP settings often stop working with 30 days with my large ISP that I don't care to name. I've had to give up on IPv6 because tunnels were not trustworthy and turned flaky...
      Due to flakiness I stopped looking into enigmatic alternative DNS services [wikipedia.org], though rumors of any life in OpenNic are greatly exaggerated (even .FUR is apparently extremely sparsely populated.) And the two total search engines for that thing aren't even OOG_THE_CAVEMAN approved.

      So we see only TLD infrastructure changes actually making it to a browser near us, but little else in terms of paradigm changes. New standards take huge companies and OS makers to push, when they feel like it, and then it's a whole decade for adoption to actually kick in (we got approval for ditching IE6 support only months ago, while sardonically non-IE browsers all decided to stop graceful degradation as users switch to them.)

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        *browsers* started redirecting dns misses to search engines, and that even a mistyped ping target no longer returns "unreachable" because your ISP is trying to advertise their own affiliates.

        The browser could not possible affect ping. The browser redirects URL's that are unreachable, but they cannot do anything about any thing other than that. This is the fault of your ISP (and if it was done by your ISP, your browser wouldn't see and error and wouldn't reject it anyway).

        Off on a tangent about how fake our root level and IPv4 progress is:[...]

        This is only for ``consumer'' grade internet. A simpler idea to get around this is to rent a VPS (I've seen them as low as 3$ per month) and install OpenVPS or some other proxy setup and route through that. As those are used to

  • by multicoregeneral ( 2618207 ) on Monday April 23, 2012 @10:05PM (#39778669) Homepage
    So I decided not to pay attention to it for a few years after .info. Next thing I know there's .name, .asia, .cat, .jobs, .tel, .museum (can anyone even spell that?), .travel, and .xxx. And while all of this is going on, the only tld that anyone even knows exists is the .com. There hasn't been a land grab for any of them. But I can't help getting the feeling that our friends at Icann keep expecting us to get Pokemon fever with these things. Maybe if a new tld was something special again? Maybe if the public was a little better educated on what a tld is, and why we need them? Why do we still need tld's anyway? Ah well. That's my two cents.
    • by Sancho ( 17056 ) *

      I still run into people who can't send to my .mobi domain because their ISP does some dumb preverification of the e-mail address (I think it's checking for more than 3 characters in the TLD) and automatically rejects.

      I also get sites that don't let me buy from them because of my .mobi e-mail address. Stupidly, their support address works just fine, but try to create an account with a .mobi and it gets rejected.

      I can't wait to see what happens when these idiots run into dot-word TLDs. I hope .gmail takes o

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Remind me what TLDs have done for the world? Great idea, but bad because normal people do not know what they are. I work at a .org, and a coworker thinks wikipedia.com is wikipedia.org Why? Wikipedia.com works. Nobody uses .biz, .name, .museum, .mobi or .org or anything but .com and ocassionally .edu I dont think anyone knows what .net or .ly are. In fact google is my hostname looker upper just like most peoples.

    • Remind me what TLDs have done for the world? Great idea, but bad because normal people do not know what they are. I work at a .org, and a coworker thinks wikipedia.com is wikipedia.org Why? Wikipedia.com works. Nobody uses .biz, .name, .museum, .mobi or .org or anything but .com and ocassionally .edu I dont think anyone knows what .net or .ly are. In fact google is my hostname looker upper just like most peoples.

      I visit plenty of .org sites and used to run one. There's a lot of useful stuff on various .edu sites. On the other hand, I can think of only one legitimate .biz site i've used. I vaguely recall going to a .name site once. And until this thread, I've never heard of .museum, .mobi, or .ly.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        And until this thread, I've never heard of .museum, .mobi, or .ly.

        You've never come across a bit.ly link?

  • Speaking of TLDs, one thing that irks me is a certain major local channel [wikipedia.org] that, inconsistently but increasingly, has dropped the .com from mentions of its 7online website (especially during their local news) and even shows subpaths as e.g. 7online/protect (what you'd see if you ever run into their missing person commercial things). As you'd expect, that URL doesn't work-as-given.

    I'm not sure how much of that is laziness, how much is preparation for a future move to a .7online TLD (!!!), and how much is ESP [wikipedia.org]

    • by fa2k ( 881632 )

      Speaking of TLDs, one thing that irks me is a certain major local channel [wikipedia.org] that, inconsistently but increasingly, has dropped the .com from mentions of its 7online website (especially during their local news) and even shows subpaths as e.g. 7online/protect (what you'd see if you ever run into their missing person commercial things). As you'd expect, that URL doesn't work-as-given.

      In Firefox it takes me to a Google search, where the first result is their homepage (not /protect). In bing I get a single result with their page. While what you say seems like a conspiracy theory, I can think of no other explanation for this (well, laziness like you said). I thought it was like BBC saying "Search for <Show> <Topic>" instead of giving a URL, but this is even worse, they give an incorrect URL.

      I don't understand this aversion to .com URLs. Everyone knows what they are and how to u

  • Seems like nobody here likes the idea of .* domain names. Is there anyone out there who likes it?

    Are there public stats showing how many applications ICANN received, and for which names? /me really curious about the results.

    • I can't think of a single reason what so ever to have a strong opinion on this. Ehh if they do, Ehh if they don't.

  • ... and let them create all the domains they want there. Meanwhile we can go about setting up a new TLD managed by someone who can do so responsibly.

    • How about we ask them to reopen the tld submitting, and make a kickstarter project for a new root domain.

      .onion

      point your systems to the new root, and everyone starts over. all sub-domains of the .onion root can only be accessed by tor.

      back to having .com .org .ru .us

      We don't need anything else.

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