10/01/2008: NetSol Cybersquatting

Over the last couple of days I’ve read a few stories about Network Solutions pulling a Site Finder by stealing unregistered domain names on which people have run a whois query.

They wait for people to whois query a domain (commonly done as a first step to registering a domain — to check that nobody already owns it), and if nobody owns it, they temporarily register it for five days (after which they’d have to pay for it themselves!) and thus prevent anyone from registering the domain name using a competing registrar. More details here.

According to CNET, they’ve already started backpeddling on this.

19/07/2007: PHP Domain Class

On Usenet an often-asked question is how to programmatically determine the “domain” of a particular hostname. That is, excluding the components traditionally thought of as subdomains. As an example, groups.google.com and www.google.com both have a domain of google.com.

Invariably, one answer comes back stating that you just need to chop off everything from the front, leaving only the last two components. But then someone will chime in pointing out that groups.google.co.uk would be left as just co.uk that way, when what is really wanted is google.co.uk. And the eventual resolution of the argument will be “it just can’t be done”.

The problem is that there’s technically no difference between a domain and a subdomain: it’s simply a matter of convention. Fortunately, this issue is actually quite important to browser programmers, as it’s a key issue in cookie security: browsers must allow subdomains within a domain to share cookie data, but not allow cookies…

Articles Tagged with "Domains"

10/01/2008: NetSol Cybersquatting

19/07/2007: PHP Domain Class