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.su (wikipedia.org)
353 points by gyosifov on Sept 18, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 226 comments



For me .su is a kind of historical curiousity. Not sure if I like it or not, or if it should be phased out, but there are a bunch of Soviet Union related sites in there too and sometimes these are pretty amusing (how about a site of the CPSU?)

Also there's sudo.su :)

Source: am Russian.


> (how about a site of the CPSU?)

You are talking about http://kpss.su ?


Предатели!


That's AMAZING!


Yes, that's it.

Коммунистическая партия Советского Союза

Communist Party of the Soviet Union


There's also aboynamed.su, that is a reference to the Jhonny Cash song [1]

The domain description is actually some part of the lyrics of the song [2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4

[2]: https://www.whois.com/whois/aboynamed.su


Just an embellishment: that Johnny Cash song's words were written by children's author and poet Shel Silverstein.


Some folks have personal websites on the .su domain (mostly Russians?).


There was a joke at the time:

    В связи с геополитическими изменениями домен pos.su изменяется на pos.ru.
Which roughly sounds like "because of the geopolitical changes the domain pos.su will become pos.ru". The joke is that pos.su and pos.ru in Russian sound like "will pee" and "will poo" respecitively.


still trying to get pant.su but it gets renewed every time despite serving nothing publicly :<


I was disappointed to find that http://kat.su/ has nothing to do with curry.


Well, katsu refers to a pork cutlet, which can be used with other dishes than curry. Katsudon is a pork cutlet on top of donburi, for example.


Huh, well that's my new thing I've learned today. I only ever heard it in conjunction with curry-type things (katsu chicken, which was always served with curry, for instance).


Katsu is just a japonization of the word Cuts. Chicken Katsu = Chicken Cuts


Not quite. Katsu is from Cutlet. (cutlet -> カツレツ -> かつ).


Isn't a cutlet a small cut?

As in a small "cut of chicken" is a "chicken cutlet?"


It's derived from French "côtelette", literally "little rib". It's etymologically related to "coast", actually. It being spelled "cutlet" is probably the result of a phonetic spelling of "côtelette" in English being reanalyzed as "cut-let", though, since "a cut of meat" is itself a thing.

It originally referred to the same thing "chop" does today, a slice of meat perpendicular to the spine, containing a single rib. Then it started referring specifically to a boneless chop. Then it started being used to refer to any thin slice of meat. And in a lot of the world it was introduced specifically as a breaded and fried thin slice of meat. And that's how we got katsu, the Japanese version of schnitzel.

Language is weird, isn't it?


Very possible that cutlet means small cut. I don't know the etymology of that word. I was just commenting on the etymology of かつ


Mind moderately blown.



I like torikatsu better


https://kotat.su has been put to good use though!


It had never occurred to me that the existence of the Internet and of East Germany overlapped, and that East Germany would have a TLD.


I hope we keep it. It matches the maps I have from 7th grade.


Reminds me of my 9th grade teacher who was refusing to call it USSR like everyone else and was insisting on saying "usre" (pronounced like a word). To this day still wondering if it was militant, or if she just read that on a map and thought it was a word.


I hope you keep it too. It's been like a decade and I still feel sad that .yu is gone.


Biggest tragedy of the early internet was losing .oz (Which was resurrected in the OpenNIC alternate DNS.)


I strongly agree. When I take notes and put files in geographic directories, I still use .oz.


How was it used?


I'm guessing that's Australia.


Correct. Fun fact: For many years after the rest of Melbourne University moved to unimelb.edu.au the computer science department kept the domain cs.mu.oz as a nod to that history (and that they were one of the first institutions in the world to be part of the fledgling internet). I was a little sad to see that quirky disappear.


Golden words


_But_ when Yugoslavia broke up, we got Montenegro with .me, which makes me smile.


And I am sure Rust folks are happy there is a place to call their own (.rs for Republic of Serbia, since .s[erb] was taken long ago :).


I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.


Maybe remove history books, they also remind people about this.


Removing .su != burning books. I will tell you opposite: we should write in history books the truth about what in realty USSR was and teach children with it so tragedies like USSR never happen again.


He is not saying that "removing .su == burning books", even though both actions lead to permanent destruction of something, I suppose.

> I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

Replace "it" with "history books". You hope that we will not "keep" anything that: "reminds you how your country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union". By this reasoning alone we should not keep a lot of things (including history books) because a lot of things may remind people of something horrible. If you ask me, this is not a good basis of or justification for not keeping that something, which could be ".su", or "history books", or anything else.


>Replace "it" with "history books".

I am against even burning history books from USSR that glorify USSR. BUT we should not use those books to teach history now.


In which case it essentially boils down to: X reminds me of something bad, but I am personally OK with keeping it around. Y reminds me of something bad, too, but I am personally not OK with keeping it. All you did was being selective about it, but the underlying reason is essentially the same, you just apply it selectively based on your own values without considering anyone else's.

Although, this does not seem to meet the seemingly only criterion: "reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union". History books do that, but you do not seem to want to NOT keep them. So perhaps this is not the only criterion, there is something else. What is it? Could it be subjective value? If so, I still think that it is not a good reason to get rid of something because you have not found it valuable AND reminds you of something horrible.


I am not asking to remove based on that I personally dislike it. This is just my personal feelings and position.

But USSR does not exists and there is no reason to keep it. Using it is a kind of propaganda. Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.


> I am not asking to remove based on that I personally dislike it.

> I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

It seems contradictory to me. According to the dictionary, "hope" = "to want something to happen or be true". Asking for something is "to want something to happen" as well. Is this incorrect?


I am not asking to remove based on that I personally dislike it. I am asking to remove it based on:

>But USSR does not exists and there is no reason to keep it. Using it is a kind of propaganda. Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.


I understand that, but you initially said:

> I hope we will NOT keep it. It reminds me how my country was occupied and annexed by Soviet Union.

You mentioned nothing of the sort that you are NOW mentioning as a reason. I am glad that you are not asking for or wanting its removal because it reminds you of bad things. Perhaps it was an innocent omission, or you changed your mind. Either way, glad we could get to the bottom of it.

---

That being said, I disagree with its removal.

---

> But USSR does not exists and there is no reason to keep it. Using it is a kind of propaganda. Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.

>> USSR does not exist

Why is its existence a prerequisite for having a TLD for it? It does not necessarily have to exist in the present (or at all).

>> There is no reason to keep it

There are many reasons. One of them could be not taking people's domains away from them.

>> Using it is a kind of propaganda

Not necessarily. One might just use it for fun, for example: sudo.su.

Plus, all TLDs could be used for "propaganda".

>> Its place is in history books and not in the modern internet.

Such domains could point to valuable resources, they might be an online equivalent of a history book, for all we know. Why should information regarding USSR not be on the Internet, under this TLD? Seems like a good fit.


>I am glad that you are not asking for or wanting its removal because it reminds you of bad things.

I am glad you are glad.

.su was made because of USSR. USSR collapsed. .su should be removed because the reason it was made does not exists any more. Logic is simple.


Its reasons for today's existence can easily change. Luckily your hate won't win this battle.


USSR collapsed. I already won.


Nope. They've won as long as you still hate and remember them.


Every country has done something terrible to another country. There is not getting around that.

And deleting something permanently is very similar to burning something permanently.


.su is for country USSR. That country does not exists any more. And that country have done many bad things to humankind. There are no reason to use it as like USSR exist now too. USSR is a history and lets keep it in the history.


I agree with you about the horrors of the Soviet Union, but if you want people to know what happened, why remove a bunch of highly accessible primary sources?


>why remove a bunch of highly accessible primary sources

I agree with you that we should not remove "a bunch of highly accessible primary sources" .su is not that kind of source. .su "was assigned as the country code top-level domain" and that country does not exists. It is not like picture, book or building. Why should we use it now?


In what sense is it not like a picture?


In that domain literally zero sources of information

And that domain online just because of his owners greed


If there were a .nazi TLD, would there be debate about how proper it is?


Depends on how it was used.

Holocaust museum? OK.

Michigan Militia. Nope.


Imagine if the Confederate states had had a TLD. What do you think, what kind of people would be using it nowadays?


At the moment .su is not used fro museums. You can use it for everything and it is not right.


My usual response to this is "keep it, but turn it into / put it in a museum". However, that seems impractical here. .su can't go in a museum any more than pi can go in a museum.

It could be a museum, but it would by nature be the only one of its kind on this topic -- so, who would get to decide what goes in the museum? The history there is too recent and too global to really find an impartial administrator anywhere.


There are many things that remind people of bad things. That's not an appropriate reason to remove them.


I'm reminded of the confederate general statues in the USA.


Can you imagine if there were a .nazi TLD? Would you think it appropriate to discontinue its use, despite its historical significance?



That is not the point. There are a lot of things in the world that may remind someone of something bad. Take a look at history books. Should we not keep them either because they remind people of bad things? Of course we could use a zillion other things besides "history books" or ".su", the point is the reason behind not keeping or removing them.


"History books" have value in aggregating and presenting information with historical context. TLDs are artifacts without context. A history book that covered the 20th century and blandly mentioned that the Soviet Union was a collection of communist states, without mentioning any other events or context, would be similarly irrelevant, and should be relegated to the trash heap. Same with the .su TLD. We should definitely keep the historical records that it existed, but there is no reason to continue its actual existence at this point.


Those domains have value, too, to the owners, for one, and perhaps to its visitors.

> there is no reason to continue its actual existence at this point.

I might as well just reply: there is no reason to not continue. Why should we take away people's domains just because you think there is no reason to continue its actual existence? Put yourself in other people's shoes, please. Imagine if someone used this reasoning to get rid of or take away whatever you are fond of.

Perhaps these domains have no value to you, which is fine, but we should not get rid of anything just because they have no value to you.


Thousands of people own .su domains (I'm not one of them, FWIW). That's the reason for its actual existence at this point.


A few years ago a friend found binaries of GCC and gzip for Xenix on a .su domain: https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2010/03/20/gzip-for-xenix...

We were looking into Xenix as retrocomputing enthusiasts and we didn't have any compiler, so that had plenty of value for us.


Demonstrating symbol of ex "country" in which there was dictatorship, occupation, annexation and genocide is act of glorification/act of paying respect of/to that "country" and its behavior.


What are your thoughts on the North Korean TLD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kp ?


if it offends you personally, just look the other way. do not preach to others, they may have different opinion, which is just as good as yours.


By that logic, we should certainly get rid of .uk and .us. Even the extremely biased accounts of the USSR that you seem to believe don’t match the continuing brutality of Anglo imperialism.

Read some history, perhaps.


Which one was that?


I believe he is speaking of Ukraine. It is trendy today to say things like that in Ukraine.


Maybe because it was trendy to starve Ukrainians when the Soviet Union existed?


They also numbered three out of nine PCUS general secretary.


Ukrainians were not the only ones to suffer from the famines back then. Multiple parts of the USSR actually did. It doesn't seem like a targeted action on behalf of the govt.


>Multiple parts of the USSR actually did.

Yes but not like in Ukraine.


Yeah, sure.


Communism was such a disaster you can barely tell whether its genocides were intentional!


Poland I guess...


[flagged]


I am from Georgia, not Ukraine. First of all they are Nationalists, not Nazists. I am not supporting nationalist too but anyway that is very different terms even if they can sound similarly. Second I am pretty sure you can find hundreds of real nazist in any country. But even if we suppose that people on video are nazist making inference about country based on minority is very big mistake.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion

their commander Biletskij is MP in Ukrainian parlament. they are still a legitimate force in Ukraine.

wolfsangel on their flag - google it who doesn't know. nationalists, my ass. you cannot find that in "any" country.


>wolfsangel on their flag

nope

It is just abbreviation

And u can find people which like nazis in any country.

Btw when u find them in ur country check who in ruSSian federation curate them


The "Neonazi" country you refer to simultaneously had a head of state and a head of government who were Jewish until a couple of months back.


Unfortunate lack of comma - do you mean they converted to another religion now? /s


i heard that Zelenski is jewish, isn't he?



Russian nazis are not sitting in the Russian parliament and do not have their own battalions, like their Ukrainian peers (see Azov battalion).


That was in 2011. Since that time Putin has been cracking down on Russian nationalists - some got jailed for real crimes they committed, the number of participants in so called "Russian Marches" went down from 10000 to less than 500, number of hate crimes has been similarly reduced.

The Ukraine is moving in the opposite direction.


Russian flag-carrier Aeroflot also has SU IATA code.


And the hammer and sickle logo.

For Soviet-nostalgia buffs looking for a domain, although most obvious choices like CCCP, KGB, Lenin, Stalin and even Gorbachev and perestroika are registered under .su, GLASNOST.SU is available.



AFAIK IDNs are still possible under .su, but may depend on the registrar (non-Russian resellers may not do it).

If you mean what Russian words are available under .su, probably most, for example Ленин (Lenin) and Кремль (Kremlin), though КГБ (KGB), СССР (USSR), Россия (Russia) are registered, as are single letters like А or Х that people may like for a 'short' url.

Although the USSR collapsed not long after the creation of .su, it was briefly in 'proper' use on the internet - unlike, say, .dd, intended for East Germany - most notably via the ISP Demos, which famously used the name kremvax.demos.su as the name of its Usenet site, in reference to an early internet hoax/April Fool's from 1984 (https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html).


> For Soviet-nostalgia buffs ... GLASNOST.SU is available.

That's a bit like suggesting Napoleon admirers should register waterloo.fr ...

(yes, I know it's not in France, but this fits the joke better)


I wonder what happens to .co.uk if the UK dissolves, which seems more possible than it should be after Brexit?


If Scotland leaves, I imagine we'll switch from "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" to "The United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland", thus keeping the "uk". ".scot" already exists.

If Northern Ireland leaves, I guess the UK no longer exists, and we switch to ".gb". Could clone .uk at .gb for a while (ten years?) and give people time to switch, but seems more likely Nominet would prefer to just charge people twice for a .uk and a .gb.

If Scotland and Northern Ireland leaves, that leaves us as just "Britain". Maybe we create a new ".brit" (or whever the 2 char country code will be), and give time for .uk to disappear again.

Wales wont leave.

[edit] I just saw emmelaich's comment that .gb already exists.


The three kingdoms which are united are the Kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland, the first two by the Acts of Union 1707 [1], and Ireland added by the Acts of Union 1800 [2].

Wales is part of the Kingdom of England, under the "Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542" [3].

Without Scotland, it becomes the United Kingdom of England and Northern Ireland, leaving the Kingdom of Scotland. Scotland would be assigned an ISO 3166 code. SC, SO, ST, SL, SA, SN and SD are all taken. Perhaps they can have "AB" for "Alba". The "GB" code would be unassigned.

Without Ireland, it becomes the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Northern Ireland presumably joins the Republic of Ireland in this case.

Without both, it becomes the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of Scotland, etc. England would then need an ISO code, "EN" is available.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1800

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_in_Wales_Acts_1535_and_15...


According to wikipedia [0] and UK government sources [1] there are 4 countries in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: England, Scotland, Wales (together forming Great Britain) and Northern Ireland. If Scotland and Northern Ireland left the UK, it is conceivable therefore that the United Kingdom would continue to exist but as the United Kingdom of England and Wales.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

[1] https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20080909013512/ht...


Wales is a constituent country of the UK but not a kingdom.


The constitutional position of Wales has significantly changed with the three devolution acts introduced in the last 20 years. The Wales Act 2017 in particular made the assembly/parliament permanent and Welsh law as a separate body; that means Wales is effectively its own country in the UK, on par with the other three.


The 1707 Union created the Kingdom of Great Britain. 1801 created United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 gave us the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So if Scotland leaves, the Kingdom of Great Britain ceases to exist. "Britain" ceases to exists as a political/national state. IMHO any reconfigured UK after that is an absurdity.


Are you implying that European Union shouldn't be called that because it does not include all of Europe's countries?

I assume no, so perhaps it's ok for a Kingdom of Great Britain not to include all of it :)

FWIW, Serbia almost kept with the Yugoslavia for as long as it had someone to unite with. It did turn into Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, before ultimately splitting in 2006.

It even got a first case of ISO country code reuse with CS (hi Czechoslovakia), but I don't think there was ever a TLD .cs for it.


> I guess the UK no longer exists

Meh, it will become "the United Kingdom of England and Overseas Territories" or something to that effect. UK is a brand and a symbol that Westminster will never abandon. Serbia, for example, tried really hard to remain "Yugoslavia", and if it weren't for the tensions it generates, that name would still be around.


Great Britain (or Britain) refers to geographic feature (the island) which includes Scotland whether it be part of the UK or possibly not.


The United Kingdom bit comes from joining together the Scottish and English crowns, it wouldn't be affected by whatever happens to Northern Ireland.


Check your passport, it's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

"The medieval conquest and subsequent annexation of Wales by the Kingdom of England, followed by the union between England and Scotland in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the union in 1801 of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom


Wales has .cymru and .wales.


Neither of those are two letter TLDs.


The United Kingdom of England and Wales will remain.


TLDs based on political entities do seem like a bit of a bad idea https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/


Oh, hadn't considered that...

"Should the UK leave the EU with no deal on 1st November 2019, EURid will enforce the following measures as far as .eu domain names that have GB/GI as the registrant’s residence country code are concerned..."


Is the nation state itself not a political entity?


Yes, that's what I was suggesting


Sorry, I thought you were just referring to the .eu tld.


Definitely a danger. The worst is that ppl can't even redirect their old traffic if they have to switch domains.

If someone really wants uk in their TLD they can always go with .uk.com - totally unrestricted.


Depends on the identity goin forward. If England+Wales stick to the name for some reason they will continue using it, and Scots and NI get new ones. (Well, later not if they merge with Republic of Ireland) If they form a new country and rename to "England" (poor Welsh) or "South Britain" they likely will be legal successor of treaties and stuff (like Russia being legal successor of USSR) and can use .UK for the time being.

One effect can be seen on .eu: After Brexit UK entities aren't eligible for .eu domains anymore and depending on the outcome on Oct 31st might lose it immediately (while there are statements for a grace period even on Brexit without further agreement ... but no deal leads to no legal requirement)


Cool fact - .uk isn't the official tld for great britain.

The official one is .gb


No. The official TLD – i.e. “Top Level Domain”, is .uk. It differs from the normal ISO 3166 two-character country code, GB, even though most other countries have an identical TLD and ISO two-character code. The TLD .gb is merely reserved to deter shenanigans.


Both .GB and .UK are the country code top-level domains; .GB because that's the official code, and .UK for legacy reasons.

UK is a reserved ISO 3166 code, to prevent complications with DNS TLD assignment.

The .GB TLD is in use, but there are only three known domains. This is one:

  host hermes.dra.hmg.gb
  hermes.dra.hmg.gb has address 146.80.9.16
  hermes.dra.hmg.gb mail is handled by 10 relay.dstl.gov.uk.


There were some mil.gb domains at one point.


Cooler fact, GB and UK are different. UK is GB + Northern Ireland.

Scotland already have .Scot and I think Wales have thier own also. Not sure I've seen a .England though.


.en would seem apt.


.uk is also the UK's though. The country code is explicitly reserved by the UK, and it exists in DNS because they grandfathered in some old system's domains.


Maybe Ukraine would like the TLD :)


If you'd asked people in 2015 which country, UK or Ukraine, they expected to last the longest, I guess most people would have said UK. I wonder what the answer would be now :/


It wouldn't be any great upheaval. The component kingdoms of the UK would still be separately sovereign realms of the Commonwealth with the same monarch and royal succession. I imagine the process is now well established, as the Commonwealth has more than 50 countries in it, with 16 of them still constitutional monarchies.

.uk would probably remain just as grandfathered-in as it is right now, given that the official 2-letter country code is gb .


.scot seems to be the main Scottish TLD (e.g. gov.scot) and Wales has .cymru and .wales. Don't think there are ones for England and NI though - maybe .ruk would do?


Unlikely Brexit ever happens. There's too much at stake here, globalists would never let it happen. If UK detaches from the EU and it becomes successful, the EU project is over.


Isn't a contradiction that "globalists" are the bad guys in your story and at the same time UK wants to keep the benefits of being part of EU market ?

What I see happening is that in some countries the EU become the scapegoat for the government corruption and incompetence, usually you could use the other party that was before to blame them but if your party was in power for more then 8 years then is harder to find scapegoats.


There's big forces at play that do want it to happen though; financial, in that there's a lot of people that want UK businesses and real estate to drop in value so they can buy it up for cheap, and political, political forces who have an interest in destabilizing Europe (and the world).


> If UK detaches from the EU and it becomes successful, the EU project is over.

I think that's a big _if_ here. Most probably the economy will crumble and there will be fights in Northern Ireland again. Also whatever kind of border has to be established, to separate UK and Ireland, as people would obviously not be allowed to enter the UK/Schengen area without proper border checks...


Why do you think that it's some external force trying to keep the UK in the EU?

With Jacob Reece Mogg and James Dyson moving their assets overseas, are they not now 'globalists'?


Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, there were a set of hacking challenges called the Zebulun Challenges hosted by the site CyberArmy. For the 7th or 8th challenge (Lt. Kernel to Kernel), you had to find a proxy or have an rDNS for your IP that resolved to a .su domain in order to proceed into the simulated system you were trying to hack into.


Which isn't that hard. You just update your reverse DNS.

I assume for a later challenge they actually checked the forward DNS matched. :)


In the late 90's with dial-up connections, most ISPs would not do this, hence the search for .su proxies. Today, it is much easier when you can spin up a VM in the cloud and control DNS entries.


Russian Government owned Aeroflot Airlines still uses SU as a flight prefix.


I wonder what the most exclusive tld is . probably .gov or .mil


.int is more exclusive.

.gov is restricted to US government, but consider the immense sprawl that is the US federal government, and then consider that US state and US local governments are allowed in the club too, and it doesn't look so exclusive any more

.mil is restricted to the US military, but that is a gargantuan entity with countless agencies and bases and divisions and whatnot all of whom seem to want to have publicly accessible websites (even for stuff that is obviously only useful for people actually in the US military), and .mil turns out to be a dime a dozen too

.int – under current rules, you need to be an international organization established by international treaty, or else you need observer status with the UN General Assembly. Numerically that is smaller than either of the above two categories. (It also has some random stuff that doesn't belong under current rules, like the YMCA – which wasn't established by treaty, and doesn't have UN General Assembly observer status – but those are grandfathered registrations.)


Dot int is basically non-existent compared to mil and gov. Also being attached to the UN makes it uncool instantly.


nato.int is the coolest domain in the world for me.


It is also the first ever .int domain, and indeed the original motivation for creating .int (to replace the short lived .nato)


Remember tpc.int?


Has it gone now? Yeah I remember it.


Maybe that is because NATO actually has capabilities to act, rather than just sitting around writing lofty platitudes ;).


.aq perhaps?

“AQ domain names are available to government organisations who are signatories to the Antarctic Treaty and to other registrants who have a physical presence in Antarctica.“


Perhaps (if you may classify it as exclusive) .arpa which is still in use I think but you cannot register new domains.

There's also .aero which is pretty exclusive: "only those in various categories of air-travel-related entities may register." - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d...


.arpa is in use, but only as an internal detail for reverse name resolution (i.e. looking up the PTR record for 1.2.3.4 queries the server 4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa)


Which also yields one of the more interesting backronyms of the internet, as .arpa today is understood to mean "Address and Routing Parameter Area" as opposed to the Advanced Research Projects Agency that was involved in the early internet (ARPANET).


> There's also .aero which is pretty exclusive

Makes me feel like I belong to an exclusive club, but I think the list of people and companies that have .aero is fairly long.


I suspect .va (Vatican City) is up high on the list.


I think one of the most exclusive tld's is .er, you can't register a domain with this tld because there is no registrar for it.


Probably one of the corporate ones like .xyz, .amazon, .bananarepublic, etc.


"As of June 2016, .xyz was the fourth most registered global top-level domain (gTLD) name on the Internet, after .com, .net, and .org." -- Wikipedia.


.xyz is pretty easy to get, it doesn't even cost that much, it's affordable even for individuals


.xyz is easy to get. Also cheap.


I believe anyone can register the .xyz domains. They're typically on sale for $0.99 on GoDaddy for the first year, so there seems to be a lot of junk, volume registrations using it.


My bad, my main point is that likely the most restrictive would be one of the corporate/private TLDs that are for internal use mainly. .xyz was a bad example. Maybe better is .bananarepublic


There's literally hundreds of new gTLDs like this that only have the one required nic.tld on them and nothing else (because they haven't launched yet and might never). My team runs a couple dozen of these.

For comparison's sake, we should probably restrict ourselves to legacy gTLDs, ccTLDs, and open, launched new gTLDs.


.duck, sadly.


Not top-level, but .co.ck is rather well-protected for obvious reasons.


is it really that bad if people use tlds to make immature puns?


trashbat


.gb, the old UK ccTLD, which still exists, but isn't open for registrations. AFAIK there are no websites in it, but you can ping hermes.dra.hmg.gb and friends.


.gle - owned by Google and only for Google properties


I tried to search goo.gle on their whois and it seems like they even support private registration! All the fields are filled with "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY". Unaccessible except by Google, yet private!


Assigned to Google, but I could not find any examples of it actually being used unlike .google


Google Forms direct links use forms.gle


I imagine just for goo.gle


Isn't that goo.gl?


They use it for Google Form/Survey short links.


I'd say .arpa


.in-addr.arpa is widely used for reverse dns


.cancerresearch is near empty. Hard to say on some of the restricted ones since you can't usually AXFR anymore.


I get .arpa in my logs sometimes. But I think that might be a legacy routing thing.


Price-wise the gTLDs for $3-$4,000/year like .Cars or .Security are exclusive.


I remember using a service to get a russian visa hosted on a .su domain. When I found out what .su was, it felt pretty confusing :)


Anyone know of English words that we can use to make a 'domain hack'[0] out of this?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack



What a cool site, any documentation on other operators?


What I do when looking for words is go to `/usr/share/dict/` and grep for things, for example `grep 'su$' american-english` gives me:

  Amaterasu
  Fujitsu
  Ginsu
  Ieyasu
  Iguassu
  jujitsu
  shiatsu
  tiramisu


All registered.


oh thanks. It was just some toy I made playing with golang and tries a few years back. It uses some linux word file as input, I just forget which. From memory, I think these are all the endpoints...

  /startswith/xyz
  /endswith/xyz
  /contains/xyz
  /anagrams/xyz  - exact match anagrams
  /canmake/xyz - all words that can be made with that combination of letters


.de.su would be THE otaku tld, lol


My first thought is that this TLD would be great for Japanese-language domain hacks, i.e., "i.ta.da.ki.ma.su" for a food- or cooking-related site.

(I just checked; sure enough someone's thought to register that one)


My email hosts on @desude.su domain :)

That's a private Google Apps deploy with about 5 users.


.moe exists already ;)


pant.su used to exist


domainhost.su (you can add an insovietrussia subdomain to help people get the joke).


In multiplayer games and chat, an often used acronym was 'su' short for 'shut up', more formal as the widely used stfu.

I remember using it on IRC once in a while when trying to make a longer, multi sentence point and people kept interrupting me.

So maybe a domain like, whydontyou.su would work. Or, for the more frequent speaker: whyinever.su :)


I hope Stockholm University adopts it


That would free su.se for SUSE Linux, perfect.


pleasedont.su used to be registered, and a friend of mine had aboynamed.su once.


I immediately thought of bing.su: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bingsu

It is taken, but not by Bing.


jiujit.su


Shiat.su.

Shih tzu unfortunately doesn't work, but shit.su does.


tirami.su and go.su are already taken


> tirami.su

Surely lots of puns to be made in Italian, where "su" means "up".


ifnosudoyouhaveto.su


If anyone is interested, registering a domain is $29.99/year and requires the submission of an identity document (passport, driver's license, etc).


Curious to know, but where can I buy one, and what registrars offer .su? Seems entirely absent in my usual haunt where I go to get obscure TLDs:

https://www.ovh.co.uk/domains/prices/

There is however the following you can get on OVH which are similar:

    .sucks
    .supplies
    .supply
    .support
    .surgery


Not sure about western registrars, but https://www.nic.ru/ sells them for 590 roubles (~9.2$ || 7.4£)


gandi.net offers them, though they're significantly more expensive than what has been mentioned in this thread already.


Requires the submission of an identity document number (which isn't verified), not a copy of an identity document. Big difference.


Where did you find a price like that? I own one and I pay like 3$ a year. However ID indeed is required.


I pay 30$ a year. Where did you get 3$ a year exactly?!


Well. Even reg.ru / nic.ru (budget unfriendly Russian registrars) charge less than 10$ per year.

Personally I use Naunet (yet another NIC) re-seller (former nn.gdmd.ru which was acquired by ru.gogolev.net).


I'm also paying 25$ per year on nic.ru, the price discrepancy is interesting.


For those who speak Russian here you can find the rules for registration: http://www.fid.su/files/SU_rules.pdf


This is kinda funny. I was able to get a .su domain earlier this year.


I have a domain there, been using it for years, where else do you find 3 letters domains


how about .cs for former Czechoslovakia, ema.cs usage case came first to my mind


Lisa Su needs to buy lisa.su


Oh. All this time I thought it was Sudan.


Once upon a time I thought it would be funny to buy the .su domain for my site, and on April Fools, have a link to it and a script that output all my posts using the Cyrillic alphabet. I doubt I'll ever get around to it.


how does a link like this gets to the front page of hn?


It's interesting because it's still in use, even though the Soviet Union doesn't exist. ICANN hasn't been successful in forcing the retirement.

Compare to the .cs TLD for Czechoslovakia which was phased out and replaced with new TLDs.


I don't think ICANN should retire a domain namespace just because a political entity that it used to represent no longer exists. Cool URIs don't change [1].

[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html


I suppose it avoids awkward politics. It's not clear to me, at least, which country would get to control the former Czechoslovakia TLD.


.an also was phased out when the Netherland Antilles dissolved

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an


I see. I thought it was very strange as no comment & so random.


Also interesting is who is still using it:

> Among the institutions still using this domain is the Russian pro-Vladimir Putin youth movement Nashi, as well as by the pro-Russian armed insurgency in Eastern Ukraine. Some organizations with roots in the former Soviet Union also still use this TLD.

> The domain has been reported to host many cybercrime activities due to the lax, outdated terms of use, and staying out of focus (2% usage comparing to the primary .ru zone).


By the way, Honduras has the ".hn" toplevel domain name.


You click the "submit" link at the top of the page. Then enter the URL you want to submit. It will then appear in the list you can see under the "new" link.

If people find it interesting, they can then upvote it by clicking the little up arrow beside the submitted link. If enough people do that, then it will end up on the front page. And that's all there is to it!


That was quite courteous way to perceive the question and respond. I can do one better:

The link is to a Wikipedia page with a long url. You can submit a title to mask the link. The op posted ".SU" and so .su isn't a link, it's just a title.


There's also the second-chance process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380.




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