FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There’s an ISO standard for that.
.tv Tuvalu
.me Montenegro
.fm (Federation of) Micronesia
Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:
.uk United Kingdom
.co.uk Company
…
Three or more are generic (traditional or new)
.com, .net, .org, …
In some cases, Uncle Sam said “first!” and it stuck.
.edu Education (MURICA)
.mil Military (MURRICA)
.gov Government (MURRRICA)
Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a ‘fun’ acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.
That’s a poor excuse. If something is secret or higher it has a different TLD. The SIPRnet uses .smil for example. There are also tools at the boundaries that don’t allow going from SIPR to NIPR unless they meet specific criteria. Basically you can only leak those secrets accidentally if they were already on a system they shouldn’t have been on.
Zuurbier said he’s been pestering the US government and military for the last 10 years to get them to do something about the problem. The military told the FT it blocks outgoing emails to .ml domains from its own network. There’s presumably little it can do about emails sent from other domains.
its just that with the end of the contract between Mali and the registrar, the military emails got in the news as now army.ml and navy.ml are controlled by the Mali government rather than the CEO of the registrar.
FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There’s an ISO standard for that.
.tvTuvalu.meMontenegro.fm(Federation of) MicronesiaSome countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:
.ukUnited Kingdom.co.ukCompanyThree or more are generic (traditional or new)
.com,.net,.org, …In some cases, Uncle Sam said “first!” and it stuck.
.eduEducation (MURICA).milMilitary (MURRICA).govGovernment (MURRRICA)Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a ‘fun’ acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.
.eduis not only american. For example I know many schools in France have.edudomains and emails, and I believe it’s the case in many more countries.In 2001 it was limited to US educational institutions only, all registrations prior were grandfathered in.
Although I haven’t got a clue why my non-US university, founded in 2009, has a .edu domain.
I did not know that. That’s not cool
Pretty sure most countries use .ac for universities. Ac.uk, ac.au, ac.nz are all standard.
Australia doesn’t. We’re all .edu.au
Edit: here is the list of who uses it. Stands for academia if it wasn’t self evident to anyone else either.
2nd edit: having trouble with escaping characters in the link so it’s defaulting to the ac page when it should be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ac_(second-level_domain)
https://www.monash.edu
And io belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory.
There are thousands of gTLDs now, though. But most of them are brand names.
https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
What about .world?
That’s a generic top-level domain. It is not associated with any country. It belongs to “Identity Digital Inc.”.
That is what made this whole .ml problem. Some people have apparently accidentally leaked American state secrets to Mali by typo.
That’s a poor excuse. If something is secret or higher it has a different TLD. The SIPRnet uses .smil for example. There are also tools at the boundaries that don’t allow going from SIPR to NIPR unless they meet specific criteria. Basically you can only leak those secrets accidentally if they were already on a system they shouldn’t have been on.
Additionally, competent IT would make this fuck up impossible. I’m shocked that they didn’t whitelist TLDs and block all others.
The registar that operates .ml, .tk, .ga, and some others has been having difficulty.
In March they got sued by Meta for operating domains with phishing operations. Their operations have been spotty for the past several months ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555 ). They lost the .ga domain in June ( https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-freenom-ga-domains-are-taken-down-by-registry/77131 ).
The issue with army.ml and navy.ml was just the most recent incident and may have accelerated things, but only by days (maybe weeks) as the agreement that the registrar had with Mali was for 10 years and expired the other day ( https://domainincite.com/28897-freenom-is-losing-another-cctld-after-collecting-military-emails ).
This isn’t a new thing - from the article:
its just that with the end of the contract between Mali and the registrar, the military emails got in the news as now army.ml and navy.ml are controlled by the Mali government rather than the CEO of the registrar.