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#domain#city#domains#county#https#com#name#whois#locality#state
Discussion (104 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced.
Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US.
I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years.
I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though!
RIP Jon.
In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.
https://nationalpublicdata.com/people/l/mark-lord/nv/reno/pd...
Looks like you can reach him at mark84@gmail if you want to say ‘hi’.
In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California
Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies
I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It felt like he saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, that non-commercial vision was not realised
ICANN DNS became a money machine
If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers
I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea
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.
edit -- seems like the server has been "slashdotted" by this thread, I was finally able to get an account created but can't log in. doesn't seem very well coded anyway since I was apparently able to change the password twice using the same activation link lol.
Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.
I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery
I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.
https://incogni.com/
Will WHOIS requests leak my address?
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention)
I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened
nothingburger
Here is archived page
https://web.archive.org/web/20141217060926if_/http://nguyen....
From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).
I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.
The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 (we need .egg and .muffin)
Of the "hackers" to get there before me, I'm happy it's them!
[0]http://mission.sf.ca.us
[1]https://www.noisebridge.net
Now, I'm trying to recreate how I found that, and I can't. But if anyone is interested, try: hostmaster [at] 50N1C [dot] net (spell sonic correctly).
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this.
Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried.
That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated not for official purposes as per the banner a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.
That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together. Cities can also get citystate.gov in some states but I don't know how that process works.
This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.
But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...
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/
[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
Yikes, no!
Can you setup wildcards? Like for example *.[name].san-fransisco.ca.us? That way I can do this once for my own name and have it setup for all future needs as well.
I checked www.whois.us and oakland.ca.us is administered by locality-support [at] about [dot] us
Try sending them an email?
.nyc
.boston
.quebec
.miami
.vegas
http://web.purplefrog.com/~thoth/
I'm very confused by this entry. There isn't even a miami subdomain, just a Dade subdomain.
root-servers.net -> cctld.us -> localitymanagement.us -> miami.fl.us
And it ends there with an NXDOMAIN. Unsurprisingly, a list archived in 2009[1] is no longer accurate. If I'm reading this Internet Monthly Report[2] correctly, that domain came into existence in October 1998.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...
[2]: https://www.iana.org/archive/internet-monthly-reports/1998/i...
The US state ones are just sub-domains. city.state.us isn’t a TLD.
Use something like ebay@shipping.example.com and they send to ebay@example.com
I had to check the server logs to find why I wasn't receiving any mail and now need a top level alias just for eBay to handle their broken mail infrastructure.
I still use that domain for most corporate accounts. Currently, my wireless carrier refuses to believe I exist in some of their systems (but not others) because of it.
Fortunately, escalating complaints with large corporations with shitty practices is a hobby of mine.
Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?
There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.
If your state thought it was a good idea to have two cities named "Star City" that's on them to resolve however they like. Trial by endurance for the city mayor? Draw lots? Everybody in the state votes? Not my monkeys, not my circus.
Manhattan: New York County
Brooklyn: Kings County
The Bronx: Bronx County
Queens: Queens County
Staten Island: Richmond County
All New York City. Same municipality, 5 counties.
Ohio doesn't (or at least historically didn't) have a highlander restriction for incorporated cities.
Oakwood, Cuyahoga County was incorporated in 1951 although Oakwood, Montgomery County was incorporated in 1908. There's also an Oakwood in Paulding County, but its wikipedia page doesn't have an incorporation date or explicitly declare it incorporated or not. I thought there was a famous Ohio city with a same named city elsewhere, but I must have been thinking of somewhere else. I will note that Pennsylvania has an awful lot of same named Townships.
City name in the US ends up being a pretty wild concept when you dig into the details. Often what people are using as a 'city name' is really the name of their post office which statistically has a high correlation with the city they live in. But of course, lots of people live outside incorporated cities, and postal boundaries are independent of political boundaries.
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Edit: already linked in the article! That's what I get for not reading to the end!