Memories of .us
computer.rip84 points by sabas_ge a day ago
84 points by sabas_ge a day ago
Absolutely fascinating history. I thought I knew DNS fairly well and I had no idea that locality-based domains were even a thing.
Ah, what happened to the site design? It used to have a lovely background and monospace text.
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:
Cloudflare refuses to accept most locality based domains as delegated because they aren’t listed in the Public Suffix List[1]. So for example you can’t use Cloudflare DNS or get a TLS cert for it from them.
Fortunately they seem to be one of the few (only?) providers who does that. So use another DNS provider and Letsencrypt and you’re good to go.
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...
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 videregående skole https://elvebakken.vgs.no/
- Nydalen videregående skole https://nydalen.vgs.no/
- Foss videregående 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...
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
Oslo Commune will have control of oslo.kommune.no, i.e. there are DNS records pointing to the commune's DNS server.
It's no different to administer than if they had oslokommune.no.
(Just like dealing with bbc.co.uk is no different to administer than bbc.com.)
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
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.
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.
My high school is still at www-bths.stjohns.k12.fl.us, and if it wasn’t embedded in my fingertips from working IT there I’d have no idea how anyone is supposed to remember it.
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).
> a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something.
Scortched Earth?
Or one of its predecessors, Tanx.
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)
> 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!
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.
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-...
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 :)
I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp still ruled!
.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.
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 :)
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.
I wonder if some anti-“west” military alliances are eligible to get their own .int just like nato.int
There's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_.in...
I don't see why a non-western military alliance wouldn't be eligible, so long as the meet the criteria — treaty registered with the UN etc.
Some IRC networks still use naming as such like "server.state.country.dal.net."