At 12:01 PM 1/22/02 -0500, you wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-admin@aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin@aoir.org]On Behalf Of Barry Wellman Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 10:48 AM To: aoir list Subject: [Air-l] spam, if you can't lick 'em...
When I was a kid, I had a stamp collection. I'll never forget the thrill of getting a Tanna Tuvu stamp.
I am starting to notice that my spam is coming from similar exotic locales. For example, one today came from "chinahot" but by way of ".kr". I can't even begin to guess where .kr is.
So I am thinking of starting a spam collection, of exotic .somethings. Who knows, perhaps it will be worth money someday to a future Brewster Kahle. Would someone please point me to a list of Internet suffixes?
I've actually been doing a little practical research (for webhosting purposes) on two-letter-nation-suffixes for domain names. I'm fascinated by the range of policies. For instance, Tonga, which owns .to, is all too happy to sell their sites to non-tongans for $50 a year (vs. like $10 a year for .com, .net, or .org addresses). So now you've got come.to, listen.to, etc. Russia's another big one for reasons I don't understand. And there are a few others. But while some countries have decided to capitalize as much as possible on their domain names and sell to all comers, others reserve them entirely for their own citizens. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, except in the case of Tonga where ".to" is a cool suffix for a domain name. I also know of some lists that filter some nation-suffixes because they only ever get spam from places with those addresses. So the selling to all comers could really screw things up for citizens of the country who want to set up a legit domain name later. If you want to know where that .kr comes from, you can find out here: http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm . Note that the ".us" suffix is going up for sale sometime in 2002. I guess the whole thing's fascinating because it's all about the politics of naming, since the named addresses are just devices so we don't have to remember numeric servers. Best, --J