sparkline

The Origin of Online Handles - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

My secret is safe.

s13e17: A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More

When Dan wrote this a week ago, I thought it sounded very far-fetched. Now it sounds almost inevitable.

Goodbye.Domains

A graveyard for good domains you let expire.

The History of the URL

This is a wonderful deep dive into all the parts of a URL:

scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]

There’s a lot of great DNS stuff about the host part:

Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularily given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.

Tumble log xyz

Kevin made this handy catch-all service for hosting Tumblr blogs on their own domain (which can bypass Tumblr’s annoying Oath interstital). Here’s mine.

881410 - Incorrect transforms when stripping subdomains

The latest version of Chrome is removing seams by messing with the display of the URL.

This is a bug.

Daring Fireball: Medium Deprecates Custom Domains Service

I know many people love Medium’s editing interface, but I just can’t believe that so many writers and publications have turned toward a single centralized commercial entity as a proposed solution to what ails the publishing industry. There is tremendous strength in independence and decentralization.

CORS

A thorough explanation of the history and inner workings of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.

Like tales of a mythical sea beast, every developer has a story to tell about the day CORS seized upon one of their web requests, dragging it down into the inexorable depths, never to be seen again.

Let’s make the grimy architecture of the web visible again by Russell Davies

Beneath the URL shorteners, the web!

It’s increasingly apparent that a more digitally literate citizenry would be good for a thousand different reasons. A great way to start would be to make URLs visible again, to let people see the infrastructure they’re living in.

Killing Old Service Workers for the Greater Good – Hackages Blog

Ooh, this is a tricky scenario. If you decide to redirect all URLs (from, say, a www subdomain to no subdomain) and you have a service worker running, you’re going to have a bad time. But there’s a solution here to get the service worker to remove itself.

The server-side specifics are for NGINX but this is also doable with Apache.

Phishing with Unicode Domains - Xudong Zheng

Domains registered with punycode names (and then given TLS certificates) are worryingly indistinguishable from their ASCII counterparts.

Can you spot the difference between the URLs https://adactio.com and https://аdаctіо.com?

The History of the URL: Domain, Protocol, and Port - Eager Blog

From the ARPANET to the internet, this is a great history of the Domain Name System:

Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularly given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.

Persistent Domains by Tim Berners-Lee

This sixteen year old cool URI has not changed. I think this idea of domains entering an archive state is worth pursuing.

Also, I love the science fictional footnote “Note for readers after 2100”.

What Do We Own?, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Aaron raises a point that I’ve discussed before in regards to the indie web (and indeed, the web in general): we don’t buy domain names; we rent them.

It strikes me that all the good things about the web are decentralised (one-way linking, no central authority required to add a node), but all the sticking points are centralised: ICANN, DNS.

Aaron also points out that we are beholden to our hosting companies, although—having moved hosts a number of times myself—that’s an issue that DNS (and URLs in general) helps alleviate. And there’s now some interesting work going on in literally owning your own website: a web server in the home.

Why I Don’t Self-Host Anymore | romkey.com

A comprehensive look at some of the problems with taking self-hosting to its logical conclusion: running your own web server.

Tom Morris - .tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic

If I were an American, I’d now be saying something like “ICANN have jumped the shark”. Instead, I’m British, so I’ll say “ICANN are fucking useless twats who need a firm kick in the bollocks”.

My Life as a Religious Parable | Workbench

The popesquatter reveals all.

Link tags: domains

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