Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

fredchan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 233 posts

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#221

Post by marysol5 »

Barbing wrote: post #114
donmcronald wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ICANN DNS became a money grab It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield. One day there will be a grab for .com.

Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down. These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.

looking at you Cloudflare

Funnily enough years ago I did a takedown request for terrorist material, realised that the host was in the same building as me. So when the ticket got closed and they didn't make any changes. I walked into their office and showed them a lovely video they had on their network.

Suddenly they took action.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#222

Post by marysol5 »

anonu wrote: post #66
foresto wrote: post #63

Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters. Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.

There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.

"And now a segue to our sponsor, offering a service utterly unique to the USA"

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#223

Post by marysol5 »

tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #177
yieldcrv wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys

Here in sweden, personal data such as name, address, income, birth date, personal number, car ownership, etc. is public by design. I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.

The one I do find interesting, is how the concept of "privacy" has changed in the internet realm.

It wasn't all that long ago I could look up anybody in my town (or any town really) in a big book, and get contact details for them. Unless they specifically opt-out.

But now that concept is seen as madness.

Now companies no longer even list phone numbers or e-mail addresses on their own websites!

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#224

Post by marysol5 »

coxley wrote: post #188
foresto wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for (third-party) sale Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers. > a handful of .net domains that are under $100 And this is why.

Yeah... my .com renewal lapsed due to an expired credit card, and it was snatched before I realized it. They've always wanted $2k for it. Even if I was OK paying in principle, that's too much for a personal blog that gets one post every 4 years.

I had a domain that I was just using for e-mail, just to catch everything and not link directly to me. Then lent the A record to host an archive of something, which got linked around a load of places. So had "SEO Value" suddenly.

Did the same, the renewal failed because the card had expired, and now squatters have been sat on it, probably getting all my spam and resetting my credentials on random websites for the last 10 years.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#225

Post by marysol5 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #85
foresto wrote: post #63

Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters. Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.

you can literally write anything in the whois though registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened nothingburger

I have a .EU domain, of which I'm no longer eligible thanks to Brexit, but the WHOIS is just some junk to make it "valid".

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#226

Post by marysol5 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #49
nstory wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.

What a strange time machine. The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number. I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/

I worked at an MSP managing a tiny one-man ISP that still had dial-up customers in 2017...

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#227

Post by sleepyink »

Wow, this was a delightful experience. I sent off a request for two locality domains (first and last name) and got a response the next day! They were happy to do it and said it was the first personal request that employee had ever received, but there were some examples internally of requests like this going back a few years.

Feels like I got a taste of what the early Internet days were like.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#228

Post by mikey_p »

kmoser wrote: post #220
mikey_p wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My name, and the very fact that I exist are vectors for identity theft. But that doesn't mean I should keep those facts secret either, or that simply attempting to keep them secret will have any effect whatsoever.

Would you post your name, address, DOB, and SSN here? They're easily discoverable on the Internet anyway, so why would you try to keep them a secret? (This is a rhetorical question. I'm not asking you to post that info, for obvious reasons.)

My name is not even remotely hard to figure out, you should be able to leverage that plus some basic info into my home address via voting records in a matter of minutes. DOB might require some sleuthing, but it's not terrible hard to find for many people (often from socials).

At least in US culture, DOB isn't really considered super secret. (If it is I have an excellent source of secret info called "Wikipedia")

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#229

Post by rootusrootus »

yieldcrv wrote: post #143
rootusrootus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again. I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you proba…

I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys

Eventually I hope other states like Oregon will get that, since they tend to copy California legislation. But in the meantime, I will pay a few bucks, because while it may be a failure of the government, I cannot wave a magic wand and fix that. But I can make the data itself go away for awhile.

Re: Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

#230

Post by account42 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #151
NetMageSCW wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have a 3 letter .us domain that I’ve had for a while. Hard to get a three letter domain in any other popular TLD.

can't say .expert that its popular by any measure but I have https://use.expert In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them. The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these d…

.expert is a "new" TLD meaning that the operator can do more or less whatever they want and is not bound to the same ICANN rules as the gTLD operator(s) are. IMO nuTLDs are not appropriate for anything except joke sites.

> For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.

Well yes, that's exactly why we unfortunately need to pay rent for domains - otherwise speculators would just buy them all up even more than they already do.

Post reply on HN