Memories of .us
141 points
1 day ago
| 17 comments
| computer.rip
| HN
kraptv
9 hours ago
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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:

[1] https://sleepless.seattle.wa.us/2022-07-01-110449/

[2] http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html

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jjmarr
9 hours ago
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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...

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decimalenough
6 hours ago
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Australia does the same for organizations regulated at the state level, like schools. However, while all other states/territories do $SCHOOL.$STATE.edu.au:

https://www.abbotsfordps.vic.edu.au/

https://southperthps.wa.edu.au/

https://perthprimary.education.tas.edu.au/

https://nthadelaideps.sa.edu.au/

https://www.nightcliffprimary.nt.edu.au/

https://www.forrestps.act.edu.au/

NSW uses $SCHOOL.schools.nsw.gov.au:

https://innersydneyhighschool.schools.nsw.gov.au/

And Queensland for some bizarre reason uses "eq" ("Education in Queensland", apparently) instead of the standard "qld":

https://townsvillesouthss.eq.edu.au/

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mjmas
2 hours ago
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For Queensland it looks like private schools get a .qld.edu.au domain and state schools get an .eq.edu.au one. For example: https://www.twgs.qld.edu.au/ .
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QuantumNomad_
9 hours ago
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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...

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ravetcofx
8 hours ago
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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
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Symbiote
6 hours ago
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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.)

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throw0101c
9 hours ago
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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.

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basch
2 hours ago
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in what I find to be unfortunate, I have noticed a trend in the reverse direction.

http://shoreviewmn.gov/ should have a dot between the city and the state. they chose some form of human usability over precision. I trust it ever so slightly less, because it is cute before hierarchical.

https://www.mvpschools.org/ formerly https://www.moundsviewschools.org are the domain names for a school district. The fact they chose the P between mv and school (which stands for public) makes it look like phishing or social engineering. It erodes trust in both technical decisions and branding decisions made.

Because domains are hard to read, and people were never taught to read them, we lost out on being able to establish trust because something reads "mv.k12.mn.us" (or preferably us.mn.k12.mv) which is two characters SHORTER than mvpschools.org!

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mod50ack
54 minutes ago
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My old school district moved from a localized URL of this kind to a .org a number of years ago (in the early 2010s). It seems to just have become the style, but I never really got it. I'm sure there was a significant cost to migrating what was a perfectly working setup to a whole new domain for website and email!
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Scoundreller
7 hours ago
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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

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retrac
1 hour ago
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www.gov.mb.ca www.gov.nb.ca www.gov.pe.ca www.gov.ns.ca www.gov.ab.ca www.gov.bc.ca www.gov.on.ca www.gov.nf.ca www.gov.yt.ca www.gov.nt.ca www.gov.nu.ca

Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sites under .gov.sk.ca and .gouv.qc.ca (comme de juste).

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musicale
3 hours ago
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> "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu."

https://www.gatech.edu./ does seem to work for me.

It is interesting that URLs often contain two hierarchies in opposite directions:

https://something.myorg.org/something/more/specific/

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kccqzy
58 minutes ago
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Yeah of course adding the extra dot will work. The dot at the end simply means do not try to append the local search domain. Interestingly bad “security” software will often block domains without the trailing dot but permit the one with the trailing dot.

The problem of having two hierarchies in opposite directions means that it is advantageous to store it while reversing one of the hierarchies. I think the earliest Google Search backend used a format like org.myorg.something/something internally. This representation worked great for key-value storage systems where the keys are sorted.

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basch
2 hours ago
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its not really two hierarchies, its just one written backwards for a while, and then forward.

if you reverse the backwards part you get

https://org.myorg.something./something/more/specific/

the dots separate computers or networks and the slashes separate folders.

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dhosek
2 hours ago
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Indeed, back in the 90s I remember trying to decide whether to do foo.bar.com or bar.com/foo for various subsites of my main domain back then.
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endgame
6 hours ago
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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.

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AnnikaL
1 hour ago
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The notion that community colleges can't use .edu no longer seems true. When I took community college classes, I got an @my.smccd.edu email address.
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morcus
8 hours ago
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> 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!

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Lt_Riza_Hawkeye
7 hours ago
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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.

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NooneAtAll3
4 hours ago
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what's search domain?
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adastra22
2 hours ago
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The comment explains it.
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philsnow
7 hours ago
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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-...
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ziml77
4 hours ago
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> Even today

It's not like it's archaic. You still use the trailing dot when setting up DNS records to ensure they're unambiguous.

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lxgr
7 hours ago
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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 :)

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johnplatte
8 hours ago
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.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.
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lxgr
7 hours ago
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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 :)

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phongn
1 hour ago
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I grew up with *.pinellas.k12.fl.us and that domain remains seared into my memory.
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montag
7 hours ago
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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.
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easton
6 hours ago
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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.
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EvanAnderson
5 hours ago
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I did sysadmin work for both a .k12.oh.us and a co.countyname.oh.us. Users at both hated the suffix on email addresses. The hierarchy appeals to the nerd in me but I understand the difficulty people had trying to communicate the addresses to others. (Both now use a .com and .gov domain, respectively...)
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notherhack
6 hours ago
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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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List

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aftbit
4 hours ago
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Wow yes, I also remember my high school's k12 domain name! What an interesting trip down memory lane; wonderful, like most of computer.rip!

Is it possible to register e.g. X.ca.us domains today? What are the criteria required to do so?

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dependency_2x
7 hours ago
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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).
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kbbgl87
7 hours ago
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> a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something.

Scortched Earth?

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rkomorn
7 hours ago
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Or one of its predecessors, Tanx.
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adzm
7 hours ago
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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)
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joecool1029
3 hours ago
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bergen might have dropped the ball but hunterdon’s still works and is in full use: https://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/

Library ditched it for hclibrary.us though. Used to be able to telnet to the catalog at pac.hunterdon.lib.nj.us

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namegulf
5 hours ago
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Many US cities use .us for their official web pages

eg: www.ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us

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stephen_g
7 hours ago
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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.

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drnick1
55 minutes ago
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Cope with it, America invented the Internet so yes, we are exceptional and have every right to use whatever TLDs we created first.
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bigstrat2003
1 hour ago
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I don't think there's any reason to deprecate .edu and move it under the us TLD. Nothing about .edu is US-specific, unlike gov and mil. You could perfectly reasonably have oxford.edu, etc.
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Scoundreller
7 hours ago
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I wonder if some anti-“west” military alliances are eligible to get their own .int just like nato.int
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Symbiote
6 hours ago
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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.

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ViscountPenguin
1 hour ago
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Even if they dejure meet the requirements, I suspect that IANA would be under heavy political pressure to deny the claim.
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beezle
7 hours ago
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I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp still ruled!
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rasengan
8 hours ago
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Some IRC networks still use naming as such like "server.state.country.dal.net."
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