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It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#151

Post by tssva »

zajio1am wrote: post #139
dragonwriter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LA gov doesn't belong to CA gov, federalism, etc. Federalism does not exist within states but between states and the federal government. Los Angeles (whether county or city) is an administrative subdivision of the State of California, not an separate sovereignty. OTOH, Los Angeles isn't getting a .ca.gov domain because the state government doesn't want to dilute it's brand with local government websites, but that's…

While it is true that federalism is a wrong term, but there exists a general idea of independence of different levels of government. I am not sure about US constitutional arrangement, but in country where i live there there is clear and explicit concept that municipal, province and country (executive) governments are independent of each other, not subordinate. Therefore, it would be inappropriate for city to get a su…

The relationship between states and localities is governed by the constitution and laws of each individual state and not the US Constitution.

In my particular state, and in many but not all others, local governments whether that be counties, cities or towns are administrative districts which only have the rights and powers which the state chooses to delegate to them through state law and the particular charter granted by the state to the administrative district. The state through the normal legislative process can change those rights and powers or even eliminate a particular administrative district.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#152

Post by teddyuk »

Spare_account wrote: post #89
krustyburger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume the LA City one was chosen because it’s still shorter than Los Angeles and it also differentiates from LA County. Much of the LA metropolitan area is within the county limits but not part of the city of LA.

The issue with lacity.org is the TLD, which creates confusion amongst the general public. Legitimate domains for government entities should ALL be on .gov, which should be rigorously controlled. Then I can tell my family to trust any .gov site, and assume that anything else is fraudulent. lacity.org undermines this.

Tell your family never to trust any site no matter the domain, sites are hacked too easily.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#153

Post by scrollaway »

rapunkill wrote: post #140
mikepurvis wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like part of that might be attempting to craft a bilingual email address? This kind of thing is tough to get right— in many cases the easiest thing is to just make up a word that's understandable in both languages but isn't obviously preferential to either, like how the transit agency in Ottawa is called "OC Transpo". On the other hand, for email addresses in particular, it should be easy to just have one in ea…

They could/should just use an alias where both email address point to the same inbox and would solve that issue in 2 minutes.

Exactly. Belgium is trilingual and just makes aliases, even to domain names.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#154

Post by CydeWeys »

jrockway wrote: post #57
CydeWeys wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. Here's an example of how it's used: https://thecity.nyc/

I mean, someone made some policy that says that... but it would be fun! Do people still have fun these days?

The reasons why these don't work go much belong policy. Let's say that you're trying to advertise city social services in a subway ad campaign; how in the world do you get people to go to just "nyc" as the domain name? I guarantee you most of them will end up just performing a search on "nyc". It simply doesn't work. When you put nyc.gov as the domain name, everyone knows what that is and how to navigate to it.

Secondly, we have the expectation that subdomains of a given domain are run by the same entity, and represent natural semantic subdivisions. E.g. there's google.com, the over-arching website for all of Google and its first major product, and then for its other major products there's maps.google.com, mail.google.com, docs.google.com, etc.

This doesn't work with nyc, because subdomains of nyc are actually registrable domain names all their own that are controlled by other entities. So you can't have nyc be the overarching website for NYC, and then have parks.nyc, housing.nyc, business.nyc, etc., as natural subdivisions of it, because other people can own those domain names! So now you have no great way to subdivide up your site, and other people's sites are easily confusable as yours.

The only real way to do a dotless root DNS website is if you control the entire TLD; it has to be closed and not open to registration by external parties.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#155

Post by CydeWeys »

eru wrote: post #55
lifthrasiir wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not how .nyc is used or is expected to be used. It's a top-level domain, not a dotless host name. While it is prohibited by the ICANN policy [1], it is not strictly enforced so that there are multiple TLDs with A/AAAA records. They traditionally could be resolved with a trailing dot (thus it is not a dotless host name, that would have no dot), but nowadays many browsers refuse to resolve them without an expl…

HN doesn't like your link's formatting. Try: http://www.pn./ or http://www.pn/

This unintentionally makes a point about how hard these domains are to use; they're not supported very well.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#157

Post by delfinom »

zurn wrote: post #147
anoncake wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the point? How often do you want to make sure you are on a government website without even caring of which country?

It's just a name, doesn't hold any special assurance for most people.

Until some enemy country starts registering punicode domain lookalikes lol.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#158

Post by Cerium »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #100
mike_hock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So an email address that looks like a fraud (or just random) and a domain name that looks like a porn site.

94549 is their city zip code. And a palindrome.

Yep, growing up in Lafayette the teachers always said, no reason not to remember, you only need to learn three digits.

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#159

Post by authoritarian »

rshnotsecure wrote: post #42

I would also like to add signing up for an AWS Gov account was at least 12 months ago...a completely automated process where I was approved in no more than 15 mins. The account had a credit card but otherwise was 100% still in free tier mode, and in fact was being used by an open source team so it included ppl from around the world. The CIA has stated multiple times in court documents (typically they have emerged in…

>I would also like to add signing up for an AWS Gov account was at least 12 months ago...a completely automated process where I was approved in no more than 15 mins. The account had a credit card but otherwise was 100% still in free tier mode, and in fact was being used by an open source team so it included ppl from around the world.

Are you implying this is somehow an issue? Any US person is able to spin up a Govcloud environment, it isn't meant to be limited to only government agencies/organizations.

I recently worked on a project where we created a govcloud for a non-government company that wanted a secure enclave for a subset of their data. It's certainly not a problem, and I'm not seeing how it relates to this article

Re: It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name

#160

Post by zeckalpha »

profmonocle wrote: post #22
bonyt wrote: post #17

> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego. > Yes, you read that right: houston.gov, losangeles.gov, newyorkcity.gov, and philadelphia.gov are all still available. As is the .gov for San Jose, Calif., the economic, cultural and political center of Silicon Valley. A minor nit: Many of these ci…

> Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov. This reminds me of how longwinded the domain hierarchy for .us originally was. In MN (not sure if it's the same for every state), city domains were "www.ci.cityname.mn.us". Then the school district's web site was "www.cityname.k12.mn.us". Not only was the order inconsistent (why not www.k12.cityname etc.?) but sometimes the…

More confusingly, our legislature has used a Mongolian domain name. Looks like they (mostly) have redirects set up now: http://www.leg.mn
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