.42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain • Hacker News Board

Re: .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

#41

Post by archangel_one » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 9:10 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #8

> WHY we do it > Because a numeric TLD is something new. As far as we know, it has never been tested out in the open. > Because it means being independent from ICANN, and we believe this to be an important aspect of the experiment. > Because we CAN. And "we" also means YOU. Technically, the experiment works. It is not officially endorsed by the powers that be, but it Point 1 is pretty equivalent to #3 "because we can…

As I read it, because ICANN have apparently disallowed numeric TLDs so they don't expect they'll be allocating .42 anytime soon. Whereas ICANN might decide that .foo sounds nice and hand that out to someone, and then you wouldn't be able to figure out which registry to resolve the address against. It's not foolproof of course.

Re: .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

#42

Post by metageek » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 9:33 PM UTC

qjz wrote: post #31

etherealG wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reading the rules from an rfc mentioned on the wiki, if XXX.XXX.XXX.42 is a valid IP address, the client should try to use that first, if not it should only then try to use DNS to resolve.

Reference: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1123#page-13 But note that the RFC assumes there will never be a numeric TLD. Furthermore, it suggests checking the string syntactically to determine if it's in dotted decimal form, remaining somewhat ambiguous about what to do if the hostname looks like IPv4, but the connection fails (it seems unwise to do a DNS lookup for every IPv4 address that's offline). Since IPv4 is rel…

There's also RFC-1738 (URL syntax), which says:

    host
        The fully qualified domain name of a network host, or its IP
        address as a set of four decimal digit groups separated by
        ".". Fully qualified domain names take the form as described
        in Section 3.5 of RFC 1034 [13] and Section 2.1 of RFC 1123
        [5]: a sequence of domain labels separated by ".", each domain
        label starting and ending with an alphanumerical character and
        possibly also containing "-" characters. The rightmost domain
        label will never start with a digit, though, which
        syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP
        addresses.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt

Re: .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

#43

Post by fdghjkh » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 9:37 PM UTC

moe wrote: post #4

Before anyone wonders: No, this isn't an official TLD. The domains you register there won't resolve for anyone unless they futz with their nameserver settings. I'm not sure what to make of this. Looks like a bunch of hackers got really bored and perhaps had a beer too many...

So what is an 'official' TLD? One that is controlled by an American government agency?

Why can't we have our own TLDs - just like we have our own browsers and servers.

Re: .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

#44

Post by ohashi » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 10:08 PM UTC

fdghjkh wrote: post #43

moe wrote: post #4

Before anyone wonders: No, this isn't an official TLD. The domains you register there won't resolve for anyone unless they futz with their nameserver settings. I'm not sure what to make of this. Looks like a bunch of hackers got really bored and perhaps had a beer too many...

So what is an 'official' TLD? One that is controlled by an American government agency? Why can't we have our own TLDs - just like we have our own browsers and servers.

Technically ICANN isn't a US gov't agency but they do have a MOU with the DOC.

Re: .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

#45

Post by jackolas » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 10:09 PM UTC

TamDenholm wrote: post #6

Perhaps the 42registry should try to get openDNS to support .42, that would certainly open up a MUCH larger amount of people that its available to, its also reasonably easy to change to using openDNS servers.

openDNS has little to do with actual NIC stuff. See openNIC for actual alternative root stuff.

Re: .42: new experimental, all numeric top-level domain

#46

Post by manvsmachine » Sat, Feb 05, 2011, 2:26 AM UTC

moe wrote: post #4

Before anyone wonders: No, this isn't an official TLD. The domains you register there won't resolve for anyone unless they futz with their nameserver settings. I'm not sure what to make of this. Looks like a bunch of hackers got really bored and perhaps had a beer too many...

Just a thought: maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Seems like a quick and dirty way to put up a site that people couldn't get to unless they're already know what they're looking for (which would imply that you want them to find it). Probably not the intent, but I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of it essentially being an Internet stash house.