[HN Gopher] Memories of .us
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Memories of .us
Author : sabas_ge
Score : 77 points
Date : 2025-11-26 13:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (computer.rip)
(TXT) w3m dump (computer.rip)
| jjmarr wrote:
| Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts,
| such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both
| are still in common use.
|
| [1]
| https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq...
|
| [2]
| https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZ...
| throw0101c wrote:
| For dot-ca, it (used to be) historically mandated that you had
| to use the 'closest' geographic locale for your domain, which
| is how we got https://transit.toronto.on.ca (which now goes to
| https://transittoronto.ca).
|
| At some point CIRA (the non-profit that now runs .ca) stopped
| making that a requirement.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ca
|
| There are still rules on who gets priority on names: toronto.ca
| is the government but toronto.com is a news organization; ditto
| for canada.ca and canada.com; ontario.ca versus ontario.com;
| _etc_.
|
| The three/four-level domains are now generally grandfathered.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| In Norway we have kommune.no for municipalities.
|
| For example:
|
| - Oslo https://www.oslo.kommune.no/ the largest municipality in
| terms of population, and home of Oslo the capital of Norway
|
| - Utsira http://www.utsira.kommune.no/ the smallest
| municipality in terms of population with just 217 people per
| 2025.
|
| - Nordkapp https://www.nordkapp.kommune.no/ home of the famous
| Nordkapp (North Cape)
|
| And there is vgs.no for High Schools.
|
| For example:
|
| - Elvebakken videregaende skole https://elvebakken.vgs.no/
|
| - Nydalen videregaende skole https://nydalen.vgs.no/
|
| - Foss videregaende skole https://foss.vgs.no/
|
| These two and some others are called category domains and are
| managed by Norid, who also run the .no registry as a whole.
|
| https://www.norid.no/en/om-domenenavn/regelverk-for-no/#4.-A...
| ravetcofx wrote:
| country wide like that must be a bit of a pain for local web
| admins for those municipalities to make changes through the
| bureaucracy of government DNS/registrar keyholders. I have a
| friend who works for a university web services and adding any
| subdomain takes months to a year+ with committees, boards,
| meetings and approvals they have to go through first
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Freenet.Hamilton.on.ca got me online in the early days!
|
| I recall a rather tech-savvy teacher struggling to write his
| school-board provided email address for students to submit some
| assignments to.
|
| Was something reasonable until the
| @firstclass.schoolname.xyzdsb.city.on.ca or some related
| silliness
| kraptv wrote:
| I love the old interent. I'll confess I have three locality
| domains and they are wonderful.
|
| I'll confess I have successfully registered a locality domain
| this year (2025) and it was a little bit fun to go through the
| weird hoops to get this new domain registered.
|
| I'm also working on/helping out a registrar whose owned died and
| his widow is resolving what to do with the non-profit.
|
| A related quaint couple of blogs[1][2] if you're feeling
| nostalgic and motivated to register your own:
|
| [1] https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/
|
| [2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html
| johnplatte wrote:
| .su is available for registration, I'm not sure what the "in a
| limited way" is about. In Russia it's used to communicate old-
| schoolness, approximately.
| lxgr wrote:
| It definitely is. In Germany, somebody was selling fraudulent
| public transit e-tickets on an .su domain for a while last
| year.
|
| Not sure who the ".su" was supposed to appeal to, but they were
| slightly cheaper than officially licensed ones, which probably
| helped more than the TLD :)
| rasengan wrote:
| Some IRC networks still use naming as such like
| "server.state.country.dal.net."
| morcus wrote:
| > Technically speaking, the top of the DNS tree, the DNS root, is
| a null label referenced by a trailing dot. It's analogous to the
| '/' at the beginning of POSIX file paths. "gatech.edu" really
| should be written as "gatech.edu." to make it absolute rather
| than relative
|
| I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like
| browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs.
|
| Neat!
| lxgr wrote:
| Presumably they just split the "domain" part out of the URL on
| // and the first / and feed that into getaddrinfo, with the OS
| and DNS doing the rest?
|
| But I agree, it's definitely neat :)
| philsnow wrote:
| Some browsers (and web servers, proxies, and other things)
| treat "example.com" and "example.com." differently for various
| things, like the default limit of per-domain parallel
| connections. See for instance
| https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-...
| Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote:
| They need to, as when the "." is not present, your search
| domains are used, but they are not used when the trailing "."
| is present.
|
| For example, if you enter "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com", and your search
| domains contain one item called "mycompany.tld", then the
| browser will first query DNS servers for "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.",
| and when an NXDOMAIN is returned, they will try
| "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com.mycompany.tld." next. If you type
| "ajdfajkhdfkajd.com." in the browser directly, only the first
| query is attempted.
| dependency_2x wrote:
| My school didn't have a domain name or even an email address, or
| even an internet connection. I think it had 1 or 2 BBC Micros
| though. I remember playing a game where you had to fire a cannon
| (choose angle and power) and hit something. Funny how memory
| works - I assumed I'd remember nothing as so long ago, but
| remember sitting in the room playing that game now, can't
| remember why I could though (why I had free access).
| kbbgl87 wrote:
| > a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and
| power) and hit something.
|
| Scortched Earth?
| rkomorn wrote:
| Or one of its predecessors, Tanx.
| adzm wrote:
| Based on the age of the bbc micro, no way it was scorched
| earth, tanx seems likely (I think it was 3d tanx? I have a
| vague memory of seeing this in a vintage collection)
| stephen_g wrote:
| It did always make me really annoyed they didn't deprecate .gov,
| .edu and .mil and transition to moving those under .us (as
| .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us).
|
| Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American
| exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wonder if some anti-"west" military alliances are eligible to
| get their own .int just like nato.int
| beezle wrote:
| I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp
| still ruled!
| montag wrote:
| I didn't realize how far these had fallen out of fashion. I
| maintained http://kenn.cr.k12.ia.us for a time, and it was so
| hard to remember that domain (scarcely easier than an IP address)
| until I tried to understand it. It's now kennedy.crschools.us.
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(page generated 2025-11-27 23:00 UTC)