At least https://tcl.tk redirects => https://www.tcl-lang.org/

tk and cc, the domains i used to use for php reverse shell haha, bring back memories!

Please submit this to us via our contact form, we will need lots of community input! https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/

It is good that Microsoft Vega is popularizing zero-knowledge identity-based attestations. It's unfortunate that they're doing so in a relatively inflexible way.

I wish the Vega people had oriented their work around general-purpose zkVMs instead of application-specific ZK circuits. The latter is a fleeting efficiency win; the former is a permanent flexibility advantage. ZK-based privacy advocates shouldn't over-index on proof performance on today's systems when zkVM systems have been making multiple-OOM performance improvements over the past couple of years.

IOW, with Nova, the Vega people are trying to do something very clever (just as the BBS+ people are trying to do something very cleaver) that general-purpose compute wins have made unnecessary.

Something like RISC Zero will let you run arbitrary Rust code under zero knowledge in a few hundred milliseconds with little fuss. Nobody appreciates that identity verification is one special case of a vast set of useful applications enabled by widespread adoption of a ZK compute platform.

A friend almost failed an IT class because his website didn't render at all in IE6. This was during the time of IE9. The teacher just hadn't updated their browser in a long time.

I don't get how you get to be an IT teacher without knowing the most basic troubleshooting steps to get assignments to run.

What a memory you have unlocked. They were everywhere. I remember the urban legend that .tk domains were X% of their GDP

Core memory unlocked

Not enough allowance to fund a .com domain, had to use freenom / tk + cloudflare for my first years of self hosting

>One Person, One Subdomain

> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue? Is this a loss leader for other services? Are you operating on a 100% donation model?

We plan on operating the domain as a public good and are actively seeking sponsors to help fund us. Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.

> No parking, squatting, or reselling

Our rule of one person per subdomain will hopefully prevent this at scale, though it will admittedly be more difficult to examine any particular domain so closely. We may have to implement some type of heartbeat where the owner of said domain has to respond within a certain amount of time.

> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue?

Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.

> How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?

This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.

It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.

Much of the cost here comes from compliance with the ICANN gTLD program structure, not from running the underlying technical infrastructure (which is not limited to DNS - you also need EPP/RDAP/etc). See https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements for (hundred+ page) documents outlining registry responsibilities. Registries can outsource some of this to an ICANN-accredited "registry service provider", but should expect to pay upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for the privilege.

Is it really that expensive to run a TLD? Name servers are notoriously long running on ancient spec servers.

I’m guessing, if designed well, the registration process could run on lightweight infrastructure. Maybe $1-5k total per year, not counting time. So it’s enough for a fun hobby project.

Might be a public service? I guess many countries already had such a thing with running cost several order higher than such a thing as a TLD, operating for centuries now.

Controlling the TLD has its own benefits and drawbacks (managing email reputation, for example) but as a regular person I have more reason to trust `.cloud` than `.self` purely on the basis of proven continuity. My `.com` domain will almost certainly live as long as the internet does provided that I keep paying to renew.

Regardless, a UUID is probably the right call. It doesn't help with memorability but it's at least more stable than an IPv4/IPv6 address and can be hard-coded. I wonder if you would get a full zone or if it's just an A/AAAA record given their broader goals of email and VPN tunneling.

imho we should be able to register ipv6 as our identity.

I had a similar class where they threatened to fail us if we didn't use Dreamweaver and instead wrote our own html.

10% apparently for .tk. I also remember .tv windfall, which is 8-9% of their GDP.

Double unlock.

In the mid 2000’s, I moderated a domain name discussion forum in exchange for free hosting. “X forum posts per month = x gb of bandwidth”

My goal was to post enough for them to give me WHM access so I could try to resell it.

Those were the days.

Indeed. That's the necessary

> Think of it as a similar model to ISRG and LetsEncrypt.

In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?

> rule of one person per subdomain

What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.

How is one person per subdomain enforceable? How is a person uniquely identified and tracked?

It costs ~$200,000 to apply for a TLD, and there's an ongoing renewal cost in the tens of thousands of USD.

It's not clear whether they're actually talking about domains or subdomains there, which is a worrying sign from a potential registrar.

This is an idea at this point, the next round of gTLD applications is currently open and we are in the process of applying and we are trying to garner support!

Domain names are not centralized, there is no central entity that controls an approved list of kosher domains.

Dreamweaver was cool as a beginner because it took a lot of the troublesome parts out of the equation. But it did end up being more of a hindrance than a benefit the further you went in.

Yes, one of the key principles we follow is that all the perks we aim to provide must come with some limit to prevent abuse.

That's definitely not a cartel then.

The only mistake was not putting all US domains under .us, now the US has an an exorbitant privilege to print and enforce rules on new TLDs.

Were they paying for the Dreamweaver licenses?

And the .sy boom until startups got enough heat for, you know, funding the Assad regime.

The .ai TLD is some tiny island with a few thousand people

Those were the days indeed. A big part for me is probably because I was a teen at the time with little responsibility, but getting to be a part of the wild west days of the internet was a magical experience.

> In that case it was started by an institution (mozilla) with a lot of heft in the area (mozilla's CA program is one of the most broadly used) and was backed by other orgs (google) that had a vested interest in it's success. I'd be interested to hear which potential sponsors you see in a similar situation here?

We are reaching out to companies who operate in the self-hosted space, academia, ISPs, registars, as well as digital rights orgs. We believe they would be aligned with this mission and ultimately benefit from such a TLD existing!

> What is the plan to (without costly overhead or cost to the end user) validate who is an actual person? Even large corporations with loads of resources have problems with this without resorting to treating it as if a person equals a credit card number.

There are a few emerging technologies we are evaluating to help with this but have not settled on one just yet. Whatever we choose, we will start small and go from there. Worst-case scenario, we start with the credit card approach and iterate. This will ultimately all be a part of the evaluation process we go through with ICANN.

My guess is by using ID verification similar to how I do it on https://onlyhumanhub.com/

For this application round, ICANN is running an Applicant Support Program, or ASP. The applicants seeking to apply for a TLD this round who qualify for the ASP will have a substantially reduced application fee, among other benefits. Our organization is one such org who has qualified for the ASP so we will not have to pay the full $227,000 application fee.

This is practically useless information (and I don't mean that in the flippant "of low regard" slang sense, I mean a literal "this information becomes irrelevant once you look at what practically applying it does" sense). E.g.:

- Centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!

- No centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!

My above pedantry aside, the article is explicitly about "The Internet" (it's even using the capital "I" oft forgotten about these days). I.e. the worldwide bubble which has centrally controlled assignment via ICANN/IANA, separate from other systems using the DNS/IP protocols. That's why it talks about ICANN and why bananamogul mentioned .self has not been centrally registered with IANA yet.

Please. Universities have students by the short and curlies. They can academically do basically whatever they want, and fail you for not complying. Professors can even demand their book be purchased, and fail for not buying the book.

Most universities are unethical shitholes that can do basically whatever they want to gatekeep a diploma.

.io is (British) Indian Ocean (Territory).

To be honest it feels like these answers boil down to "we feel it'd be nice if this existed but we have no actual answers as to how to get it done".

---

To stick with your comparison: when letsencrypt and ISRG launched they had actual answers for how to deal with the hard challenges in their space:

A) how to get included in a trust roots (crossigning with IdenTrust at first and the knowledge and expertise of how to get included in the longer term)

B) Automated domain validation in a standardized way (ACME)

C) Long term commitments of sponsorships to ensure people could trust it would stick around

---

I wish you the best of luck, but I think this might have needed to bake a bit longer before publicizing.

You need to find a benevolent selfless soul who will sponsor you.

I'm curious about how this works, but it doesn't look like I can find out without creating an account. I see that it says "Link your existing social accounts to prove you're not a bot." How does having social media accounts prove I'm not a bot?

How much is the reduced fee then? As I understand it's somewhere between 75-85% less, which is still a lot of money.

Also, who is paying for the reduced fee, administrative and infra costs? And have you actually submitted gTLD application, or are you trying to crowdfund? Unclear to me.

We don't necessarily, however there are many benefits for doing so. We could simply purchase a domain and then build our initiative beneath it but then everything we do would be beneath that domain, meaning there would be two dots in what is our effective TLD. That would also mean we are a bit beholden to whichever TLD we are beneath and also whichever registrar we purchased our domain from. With the services we hope to offer around things like TLS certs and emails, it just makes more sense for use to own the whole thing from the root.

What do you mean by "US domains?" Domains registered by US citizens? Hosted in the US (in which case does that include territories)? Regardless of the definition, I don't see an easy way to do this, nor a reason to, since domains can change hands (and hosts) across countries.

I mean, that wasn’t done by mistake

Apparently nobody cares that .af is now funding the Taliban

Magical indeed!

I once mailed $70 cash (multiple months of allowance) to someone to code a MVP of something I wanted to build.

They ripped me off and disappeared.

And… that’s when I decided I needed to learn to code!

So you have just built a wrapper around https://passportreader.app/, which itself is reading NFC enabled ID/passports from specific countries. The coverage map is here: https://passportreader.app/coverage.

Might be good to know that even in the US this approach would only work for ~50% of people, since a lot of people don't have passports. In most countries this does not work at all, since they don't issue NFC enabled ID/passports.

Oh great, an entire .brave TLD shilling a BAT shitcoin crazy crypto scam. Don't we already have enough of those?

.edu and .gov are us-specific, not sure if that is what they are referring to.

Domains that fall under the jurisdiction of the US? The domains themselves not the websites they point to? Everything under .games is controlled by the US government, the German government gets .games.de instead. To be fair it should be .games.us and .games.de (or .spiele.de)

Even gTLDs using other languages, like .kaufen, are under US jurisdiction. A German website selling to German customers using a .kaufen domain is forced to abide by US law as well as German law or loses the domain. Using a .de domain they would only have to abide by German law. That's unfair that the US government gets to stick its grubby fingers into every TLD that isn't a country code.

Sometimes hindsight is 1/20.

The "how it works" page for that website says that the ID data is "digitally signed by the issuing government". But there doesn't seem to be anything in the docs about how to get or verify that signature. So it seems like they are just asking users to trust them to do the verification.

<something>.duckdns.org. works fine, and being "beholden" to ICANN is no worse than being a client of one of the big traditional gTLDs. If you want "one person, one name", well, .name is there for that.

It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"

What value is there in "horse.horse" being something you can resolve with DNS? What value does <something>.self give me, as a reader, that <something>.name or <something>.me or any of the other zillion variations on the same idea doesn't?

If anything, it creates confusion! "Oh, I met Bob McBobFace. Is he mcbobface.me? mcbobface.name? mcbobface.local?".

I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?

I guess I just don't get the value to the public of increasing the set of dotted word suffixes that indicate that a word is a a cognizable DNS object.

The terms of using that tld say it must comply with Sharia law

pretty strict and apparently the Minister of that agency doesnt care that .af is a domain hack for “as fuck” in the west

Somewhere out there is a developer telling this exact same story. ‘I once agreed to build an MVP for a kid who promised to mail me cash. Never showed up. And THAT’S when I decided to get a real job.’

there's a project for getting retro computers connected to an "internet" with 90s/00s services available, and they use .retro on that. it's pretty cute.

This is the first I've heard of this and search results have been fruitless. Where can I find more info on this?

Except I mailed the cash in advance! It’s okay, it was probably another 14 year old.

My parents were not happy when I told them I sent cash to a stranger. I remember having to do it in secret because they were very not okay with the idea that you can meet strangers online. Hah.

There are three TLDs I block on my computer completely, and all of them are file extensions - .zip, .md, and .mov.

(Yes, the domain "readme.md" exists. Fortunately, whoever owns it is not using their power for evil and does not have any webserver there... but I'm not risking it.)

> It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"

So the new gTLD round is open right now, we're getting more TLDs whether we like it or not. Our goal is to make one that has features built-in which cater to the self-hosting use case. So that is our key differentiator, that every endpoint leveraging our TLD should be someone's small-scale homelab setup.

> I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?

Technically yes it could work, but given the suite of features we'd like to build into our TLD, it would make things more difficult if we didn't own it. We would be dependent on external parties for our root domain, the root of trust for TLS certificates, all users' subdomains would have an extra dot etc.

In other words, he doesn't give a fuck

yeah it was right there

My initial thought as well, so you're no outlier, unless we are.

These ideas are gold! Thanks for sharing. I'm gonna noodle on an unholy mix of 2) and 3) since my dynamic DNS provider just asks that you login once every 30 days and a hash of a (valid) state ID or DL would be an acceptable burden I feel for issuing a domain (or subdomain even).

Please leave states out of this. The State™ is not your friend, and we don't need a future, even more criminal government to have access to the shutdown button of even more of our identity.

Note that I did not single out an individual coutnry. All governments always stride towards autocracy.

The Applicant Support Programme makes it significantly cheaper (if they qualify).

See https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...

And https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dotmeow/meow-next-round...

#2, name matching valid government ID excludes trans people who have not yet legally changed their name. Same reason they can’t get a Meta Verified status, even if paying. Thanks technology for keeping things accessible to everyone!</s>

Enabling digital sovereignty for individuals is our foundational motivating principle!

Except that Klaus Mueller is definitely not unique name. Human names are not that unique.

It just feels a bit like you've decided to solve the hardest possible side quest first.

Everything else on your roadmap could have been built and shipped in the universe that exists, and then if down the road it's working, you could have aimed for your own TLD.

Instead you're putting the TLD first and any of the actual functionality that end users might want afterwards.

> it can be tricky to enforce but I think doable

It’s not doable at all. There are millions of people that don’t need a domain but would be happy to be paid $5-10 by some random scammer to hand over their domain.

Sounds like a bad domain for self hosting. You have to update txt records randomly and your domain can be taken for whatever reason. Whatever value you build goes away if you are inactive. You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added.

I dislike the term “domain squatting”. It should be called “domain scalping”.

.id.au already has some similar requirements for associating a domain with a real world (human) identity: https://www.auda.org.au/au-domain-names/the-different-au-dom...

The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year. This will instantly end the vast majority of domain squatting on the .com TLD and if people can easily get the .com they need for their business then the other TLDs are not going to have much squatting activity.

Why not? Surely you’re putting a cdn in-front of it still.

On mobile this surfaced as trying to download a file called "viewer", couldn't see the url. Def weird

I am probably missing something, but how DNS TXT updates can be made difficult to automate?

That is a fair criticism, however I would say that the reason we are going for the TLD now is because now is the only time we can do it. The last round of TLD applications was in 2012, so if we don't apply now, it could be a veeery long time before the opportunity comes around again. We are a new org and our goal is to build functionality in parallel with the ICANN application which will likely take years to resolve.

Are you working on the not-TLD parts in parallel? If you don't get the TLD, do you plan to launch on a more traditional domain?

The marketing stuff makes it look like the TLD is your main focus.

That's true. But I think it's the same case as a bad actor owning a domain for himself. They still need to do some policing so it doesn't pull down the whole TLD

How does this lend itself to self-hosting then? I think few people will pay that much to self host.

> The much simpler way to avoid squatting is to make .com domains cost $200 a year

A monopolist hiking prices to this extent will likely see legal action against them. That's a 20x increase you're proposing.

It's also unlikely to have a material effect. .com used to cost $75 a year back in the day, and that didn't stop squatters, and high value domain transfer sales. $75 in 1990s dollars is about $150-$190 today.

Also .net.au and .com.au are not available for personal use.

I opened in work desktop. I'm waiting the IT call now

Same for me on desktop.

Or domain ownership.

Hence the "in the first year or two". Some more human effort to showcase proof early on, then the domain is solidified for you like iwth any other registrar. This is something like captcha/bcrypt - a single instance isn't a burden, but doing it at scale is costly.

> You cannot transfer ownership killing any value you added

I think this is by design. The domain should be for personal use - hence free.

I don't get it. How do you handle 10k people wanting, say, garden.com, without a free market?

Tell me you don't know when a CDN is needed without telling me you don't know when a CDN is needed

We can get creative. quick ideas: Send it by printed post. pass it around people to people. an email needs to be added in with some process, and can only get one TXT update value a week.

Many ways of adding friction to obtaining the updatable value - which a human owning a domain would be happy to do, but a squatter would not want to.

It isn't scalping if your actually using it. It's easy to spot a scalping site since its just an advertisement to buy the domain.

i don't like normalizing people hoarding things they don't need in order to sell them for way higher prices to other people that do, do you?

Exactly this, the goal is to design a TLD according to human-centered principles. That is, we are assuming (and enforcing) that every endpoint using this domain will be some relatively small-scale environment for personal use. This is what will allow us to provide a lot of neat functionality but only at that scale.

Or domain leasing.

the most fair distribution for limited sought-after resources that are inconsequential (like domain names) are raffles. let people apply in a 4-week window and then randomly assign it to one of the applicants.

then don't allow reselling, just allow giving it back and do a raffle again

how about make it round-robin, so all 10k of them get a fair slice of traffic? ;)

first served or random from a waitlist are other options.

> Send it by printed post

that's how one of my local companies tries to force clients in. They removed auth code from their web panels and introduced complex snail-mail procedure.

That was clear signal to run, but it took me 6 months to do just the domain transfer.

> The primary purpose of the Cloudflare DNS Proxy is to act as a reverse proxy that sits between your website visitors and your origin server. When enabled, Cloudflare intercepts incoming web traffic, processes it, and shields your server from direct connections.

Maybe you are not up to date on latest trends, but modern CDN purpose is to shield the origin from the public writ large.

Trouble is that we live in an ecosystem, and "hoard the maximum you can defend, not the minimum you comfortably need" is an optimal behaviour emergent from the system.

An ecosystem with an under-exploited niche will eventually produce the behaviour that fills the niche. It's a self-optimizing system. None of this is fundamentally escapable as long as we are living organisms competing for finite resources.

What if it's a domain I just don't want anybody to use?

There is more to a public web service's digital attack surface than what it looks like in a browser. Correlating and using breached passwords from someone's unrelated accounts to their self-hosted service login portals, for example.

> We will send you an auth code via paper mail. The code expires in 30 minutes.

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