Africa Gets Its Own Web Address (bbc.com) 89
Africa now has the unique web address .africa, equivalent to the more familiar .com, following its official launch by the African Union. From a report on BBC: AU commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma hailed its creation as the moment when Africa "got [its] own digital identity." The AU says the .africa domain name will "bring the continent together as an internet community." Addresses can now reflect a company's interest in the whole of Africa. For example, a mobile phone company could create mobile.africa to show its Africa-wide presence, or a travel company could set up travel.africa.
Too long, didn't type (Score:2)
Too long, didn't type. Why didn't they just steal ".af" (Afghanistan today, but common abbreviation for Africa)?
Re:Too long, didn't type (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Too long, didn't type (Score:5, Informative)
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That would be I *bless* the rains down in Africa.
Lol, this is my Dad's favourite song, and for the last 30 years we've been singing 'missed' until Iast year when I was learning to play the song and found the real lyrics. I actually think missed sounds better, as the song has a bit of a sombre tone, about longing and missed opportunities, and missing something huge like the rains in a dry continent sort of resonates with that. Blessed just have the same ring to it.
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Chrome says:
This site can’t be reached
This site on the company, organisation or school intranet has the same URL as an external website.
Try contacting your system administrator.
ERR_ICANN_NAME_COLLISION
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lynx.africa
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Too long, didn't type. Why didn't they just steal ".af" (Afghanistan today, but common abbreviation for Africa)?
Cause then every domain would be "as fuck", which could possibly cause confusion.
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LOL! You're killing me. Funniest thing I've seen all day. Honestly. Let me return the favor:
Buckwheat has converted to Islam . . .
He's now Kareem of Wheat.
What does a n1gger have in common with a soda machine?
They both don't work and always take your money.
Why are there only two pallbearers at a n1ggers funeral?
There are only two handles on a garbage can.
What's the difference between bigfoot and a hard working n1gger?
Bigfoot has been spotted.
Why do n1ggers only chill and kick it?
Because they don't like to h
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I was going to suggest .niqqers. But then there's a problem of distinguishing the subtypes, so it'd have to be a two parter like .co.uk.... so .sand.niqqers and .harambe.niqqers
Great! (Score:2)
An easy way to filter out those Nigerian Prince scam emails!
racists (Score:1)
Ouch, just wait till the racists find out. There's going to be some very bad websites out there...
Who exactly are "the racists" you refer to? (Score:2, Insightful)
Who exactly are "the racists" that you're referring to?
Would you consider black Africans who host a website at a .africa domain that promotes anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-Indian, or anti-Amerindian sentiment, for example, as being among "the racists"?
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If having their precious vanity domain amuses some people, it certainly won't be the dumbest idea ICANN has dabbled in; but it's hard to make a good case for a TLD that is geographic, rather than vaguely tied to a concept, like
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It's not the worst new top-level domain. Not even close to the worst. .science .stream .men .party .top .study .click .gdn .date .webcam .tips .expert .watch .wiki .fail .cool .wtf .xyz .gripe
Same as .com (Score:5, Informative)
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Liquid Crystal Displays
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Lactose Constrained Diets?
"web address" (Score:1)
Good thing you simplified the concept of a TLD to help the Slashdot audience of brain damaged 6 year olds understand that it's "equivalent to the more familiar .com".
I TOTOly get it but.... (Score:1, Redundant)
So who is going to register Iblesstherainsdownin.africa ?
what nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
trying to imply there is any kind of unity between the North African Arab countries and the others...yeah right
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TLDs haven't been used properly anyway. It's a waste.
But that's what you get when you have the legacy of an American-built, American-centric system, designed with imperfect foresight, and there's too much invested to wipe and reload.
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we got a good flexible TLD system that people can use in traditional way or with recent additions.
countries have TLD if they want to use them. the USA put those in a long time ago. And plenty of other product/concept specific ones added if anyone wants to be under them which was international effort
70 percent of the global internet traffic is carried through the USA anyway, fine that they had historic heavy influence on it. The USA built something great and useful for the world.
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The USA gave us a dual usage-based / geo-politically based domain system.
It really ought to be have been solely geo-politically based with a byte or two's worth of flags to indicate content type, and domains restricted to appropriate use.
[domain].[state/province].[nation].[super-national grouping]. With tiered DNS that assumes most of that for you if you leave it out. And you know what? Something to distinguish the domain from the other parts so you could have arbitrary numbers of sub-domain categorizati
another TLD to block in Postfix (Score:2)
Since the only thing (network wise) that comes out of Africa is spam and other crap, blocking this will be 100% perfect compression.
I spent 5 minutes trying pronounce that name (Score:2)
Having done so, I can now conclude my reading of TFS with a proud sense of accomplishment, though I never finished it.
also in news (Score:1)
nigeria just got assigned .scam domain
Enough already with the TLDs (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish them luck, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to be creating yet another top-level domain.
For example, a mobile phone company could create mobile.africa to show its Africa-wide presence, or a travel company could set up travel.africa.
So they'll sell off a few hundred generic words to speculators, but I predict few others will be buying in. Many of the new gTLDs created over the past couple of years are either shutting down, or jacking up domain prices [domainincite.com] into the multi-hundred dollar per year range just to stay in operation. Keeping a TLD alive isn't cheap, and it turns out there's not much demand for all of this namespace after all. When you can't amortize your TLD's infrastructure cost across millions of customers, you wind up having to price each domain so high that nobody's going to buy one.
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It makes no more or less sense than the .eu TLD.
It makes a shitload more sense than every other TLD that has come out in the past 3 years.
parked domains (Score:1)
Poor DNS configuration (Score:4, Informative)
# host 0abaa55f4b4b5f8a9a55d1fe33f49a.africa
0abaa55f4b4b5f8a9a55d1fe33f49a.africa has address 127.0.53.53
0abaa55f4b4b5f8a9a55d1fe33f49a.africa mail is handled by 10 your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.africa.
Great, they have some wildcard garbage going on instead of properly returning NXDOMAIN.
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At least their wildcard bullshit points at localhost, which is better than some ad server, or some malware hosting site (but I repeat myself). It would be worse.
Can we use .js for North America? (Score:1)
That's not a web address... (Score:1)
It's a top level domain. Which is pedantic on some level but...sigh. Whatever, this stopped being news for nerds a while ago.
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Here are just a few of the ones I block (plus a few that aren't listed):
moncler
The Summary is Blatently Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Africa didn't get its own web address. Some company registered the Africa Top Level Domain (TLD). This company has total control over the TLD and likely has no relationship to the continent or any of the countries in it. In all likelyhood the registrant for the TLD is a European or American company hoping to make big bucks charging people to use the TLD. In 10 years 99.999999999% of the domains on this TLD will not even involve an African company or individual.
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I don't know where /. gets their editors, but they're definitely getting dumber and dumber as the years go by.
You are blatantly wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Africa didn't get its own web address. Some company registered the Africa Top Level Domain (TLD). This company has total control over the TLD and likely has no relationship to the continent or any of the countries in it. In all likelyhood the registrant for the TLD is a European or American company hoping to make big bucks charging people to use the TLD. In 10 years 99.999999999% of the domains on this TLD will not even involve an African company or individual.
You don't have a clue. A cursory Google search would tell you that it's operated by a South African company (ZACR), which was awarded control by ICANN following a lengthy legal dispute with a Kenyan competitor (DCA).
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. In 10 years 99.999999999% of the domains on this TLD will not even involve an African company or individual.
In 10 years there'll probably be as many .africa domains as there are now. .asia TLD was released and the discussion was had about whether we register a bunch of names to secure them. We decided it was a gimmick and didn't bother, and it turns out everyone else must've thought the same thing. You see the odd .asia domain from time to time, but for the size of the continent, and the amount of business they do, they are almost non-existent.
I was working in China when the
Too much trouble (Score:2)
I guess it was too much trouble to list the fucking domain in the summary, eh?
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"web address"? (Score:2)
You guys hire complete morons now, huh?
Also, grats on the clickbait tactic of not telling us what the TLD actually is in the headline.
You suck.
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She is his ex-wife.
Separation (Score:1)