It’s not true no one wants .uk domains – just look at all these Bulgarians who signed up to nab expired addresses Hundreds of thousands of unwanted .uk domains are being dropped by their owners – and picked up by Europeans looking to profit from Blighty's registry system. As we have previously noted, the controversial plan to start selling .uk domains, such as yourcompanyname.uk, resulted in thousands of Brits being pressured into owning …
As my SO would describe it - Wherever there’s a scheme … there’s a schemer!
It doesn't matter what 'system' you put in place there is always someone who will try to game the system to their advantage.
While there will always be those who try to game any system, the problem is that Nominet, ICANN, and others have created systems that are designed to be gamed with, purely coincidentally,big profits for themselves.
Quick... I recon "theregister.uk" is taken already as obv not born yesterday. But, perhaps we could setup the.register.u.k? There's got to be a million different addresses we can confuse/scam/squeeze more revenue out of this site from...
Oh sorry, for a moment I was impersonating a TLD provider. ;)
PS, if house/business addresses worked like this, everyone would be "The Queen, at Buckingham-Palace_address"... :(
"I'm a SEO expert"... the internet's oldest profession
Something I've wondered..
What is SEO? Does it stand for "Snake-Excreta Oil" or something?
I've read some of these "SEO expert" sites and, aside from mountainous piles of verbal excreta in the visage of icky marketspeak, I see nothing they do of value (except steal from gullible people).
I see nothing they do of value
I use the graphics package Xara Designer Pro and recently received an email with an "upgrade" offer (the thing has gone partly annual-subscription now) which includes a product claimed to perform SEO on your websites, and claimed to be worth £285, completely free (the XPD upgrade is £89). I think that tells you all you need to know i.e:
One of XDP's functions is web page design. The company also produces an SEO product, claimed to be worth £285, but not actually listed in their main products page and appears not to have a separate product page at all so there's no information on what, exactly, it does. In order to get it used by real people they have resorted to giving it away.
M.
No chance. Why hit your own revenue stream? Who cares about the opportunities for fraud while there are names available to be flogged?
When the internet was conceived (without a mercenary incentive) a logical hierarchical structure was created for domain names that allowed them to be parsed and verified. Progressively, we have had that dismantled so we are now faced with a heap of random structures and particles that nobody can validate - and all in the name of filthy lucre, as is the UK complaints procedure, whereby it costs a fortune to challenge obvious abuse of one's domain name with no certainty of success.
"Uh huh...is that so...tell me more about how droves and droves of Irish people are still leaving Ireland..."
If I made a comment that downright stupid and uninformed, I'd post as an AC too...
They're making room for all the Brits fleeing to Ireland from the impending Brexit meltdown.
Also, they're still free to live and work in 26 other EU states. Why shouldn't they enjoy the freedom?
Not like 1850s to 1970s.
Actually a lot came back early 2000s.
Now Polish not Irish is 2nd Language.
An Irish passport for people not yet living in Ireland is getting popular.
"Now the Irish GDP is up massively, the English have cut their idiot throats, and the Irish are laughing at us."
They're not laughing at you - Ireland will be affected by current events too...
They're just wondering why an entire country would throw away a great deal for the vague promise of something better.
It wasn't the entire country. It was just over 50% of it.
Trouble is even some remainders started seeing the EU in a bad light during the negotiations.
As a remainer myself, it kinda feels like the EU didn't really want to keep us.
Personally, I was only for the EU because of the privacy laws, human rights laws etc.
As a businessman, I can see why a lot of people wanted out. The EU is very anti competitive in some industries. Logistics for one. It's virtually impossible for British firms to compete because the level of enforcement on things like wages differs across the bloc.
For example, in the UK a driver will be earning above the minimum wage and will be paid for the entirety of their trip if they couriering to the main land.
Whereas Polish firms used to only pay their drivers by the KM and only when they're on the move. Poland also had access to huge subsidies on vehicles and fuel...subsidies paid for by the richer nations.
You used to be able to go to Colnbrook near Heathrow and it'd be teeming with parked up Polish vans waiting for work...all sat there costing the Polish firm that sent them there virtually nothing.
In fact some of the Polish drivers were so underpaid they resorted to stealing Diesel from local firms and each other to sell it for cash to other drivers in order to pay for their food while they sat round earning nothing.
A lot of them were flogging smuggled cigarettes in the local pubs.
Not only that, they would regularly overload their trucks. Just outside Staines there were a few lay-bys where you'd see a load of Polskis hand balling freight and consolidating it into one truck making it overweight, so they could leave one truck behind to pick up another load...after charging the client they picked up from for two dedicated trucks.
That's shit a British firm would never get away with. You'd have VOSA all over you, you'd be sued to fuck by your employees and suppliers and you'd go under.
Bottom line, we shouldn't have left but I can understand why opeople wanted out. Especially small businesses operating across the continent.
We just lack a government with teeth and have done for a long time.
There was never any point making .uk available without also phasing out .co.uk, but of cause that then penalises .org.uk ... You either have one or the other and THAT is the main problem here and always was.
The sale of .uk domains to anybody other than legitimate UNITED KINGDOM companies is just another example of how the internet was broken from day one? And creating millions of phantom domains with billions of phantom links is yet another example of the utter mess the whole system is in today.
We are not creating 150 new UK business entities every minute so there is no need to allow any registrar to do that! The whole system is just another imaginary money creating activity. The sale of .org confirms that as the only way that sale can be justified is if the .org doamins are going to be shafted year on year for something that adds NO value to the organisation using the domain.
Well it beats selling stamps and BTW Tuvalu is in dire and imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable. It's a collection of low lying coral atolls. Their aquifers are therefore very shallow and vulnerable to seawater invasion. Then you can't grow crops, the coconut and other trees die and your only water supply is captured rain water.
Higher water levels also make storm surges in the typhoon season more dangerous. Traditionally Pacific peoples tie their children to the trees during storms so they don't get swept away. The adults can cling on. But the storm surge puts salt water on their fields. That can be flushed by rain, but not if it happens too often or the surge is big enough.
"your only water supply is captured rain water" Strangely enough, that applies to the UK as well, it's just that we've had a bit more of it recently than we really wanted. Maybe we should bottle some and send it over to Tuvalu (and Fiji as well, perhaps). Our Aussie cousins could do with some as well.
BTW Tuvalu is in dire and imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable. It's a collection of low lying coral atolls.
. . . December 30, 1999
https://web.archive.org/web/20050213142246/http://climateark.org/articles/1999/milislgr.htm
If nothing is done, Millenium island is going to be underwater in 25 years time due to the huge rises in sea level! Urgent action is required....
And so, 20 years on nothing has been done, and for every bit of pollution reduced by western countries closing coal plants and offshoring industry to China strangely there has been a larger emissions increase in China.
The island shows no signs of being submerged in 5 years time.
Sea levels are currently rising by 3.2mm a year according to this (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/)
And that appears really horrible. Until you actually realise something. Interested in history? You might have come across Doggerland which flooded ~8000 years ago and is now apparently 32 meters underwater. Now, 32 meters is 320000mm, divided by 8000 years = an average of 4mm sea rise a year over the last 8000 years.
Corrections on my math welcome.
1) why only companies? Yes, the .co.uk was set up for companies, but there are others as well, right?
2) limit to UK companies: cue the same howling and screaming as the EU limiting / not limiting (have they made up their mind finally?) access to .eu domains...
> but of cause that then penalises .org.uk ...
People are forgetting .ltd.uk domains. It is noteworthy that in the .uk rules the precedence order for ownership of a domain revolves around .co.uk and .org.uk ownership.
If you have gone to the trouble of getting a .ltd.uk domain then you should get first call on all the other .xyz.uk domains.
"If you have gone to the trouble of getting a .ltd.uk domain then you should get first call on all the other .xyz.uk domains."
So, Stirling Engineering should have first dibs on stirling.ac.uk - I think Stirling University would have words to day on that - and stirling.gov.uk - again, Stirling Council would like a word with you.
That's The. Whole. Point. of a hierarchial naming structure. These morons are the same sort of people who dump millions of files on their desktop, and see DOS 1 as the epitome of file storage.
re .ltd.uk and .plc.uk domains
I heard a story from a Business Link adviser so can't vouch for the accuracy but...
There was a business that wanted to register [example].co.uk but found someone else was using it so they had the bright idea of registering [example].ltd.uk
They did well, expanded, acquired other businesses and it became time to change company designation to plc (public limited company). To comply with the rules (.ltd.uk only available to uk limited companies) they had to drop the ltd.uk registration. Instead they got [example].plc.uk
That meant a significant cost to rebrand website, letterhead, business cards, advertising, vehicle signwriting etc. wherever the web & email address used [example].ltd.uk
Unfortunately the expanded business didn't remain as a plc, too difficult to manage many diverse divisions so they divested themselves of some. The plc designation was no longer appropriate and they reverted to being a limited company, no longer permitted to use [example].plc.uk and so faced the cost and hassle of rebranding again.
The moral of the story: forget about ltd.uk and plc.uk domains, not only do they look odd to the general public but also the limitations on their use could become a problem.
As funny as it sounds, wouldn't that just mean that you could only get to things through someone's search engine? If you didn't reference a domain name, what would you use as a way to locate the site you're going to visit outside of it's physical address?
This post has been deleted by its author
Short, generic names free from cybersquatting claims can often be sold for tens or hundreds of times what people ordinarily pay for domains.
I suspect they also have some value for scammers - retain the .uk equivalent of someones .com or .net, pack th site with opages that look the same and offload some nasties on the off chance that they will stick.....
> retain the .uk equivalent of someones .com or .net, pack th site with opages that look the same and offload some nasties on the off chance that they will stick
Somewhere there will be a rule that says you can't serve malware under .UK and Nominet will probably consider it the registrants responsibility to report themselves if they are in fact serving malware.
Never mind malware, how about targeting $megabank.uk for a nice little earner?
1. Target a domain that is the name of a big bank - a few million non-techie customers.
2. Set up your own company with a name that looks credibly similar to the bank's.
3. Acquire $bank.uk domain, and a valid certificate to serve https on it.
4. Set it up to reverse-proxy the real thing. Everything looks right, and you have a valid cert for "lloyds bonking" or "barclays wunch", or (use your imagination).
5. Because you have the cert, you can now play MITM. Start promoting your site.
6. Finally, if Google try to prevent you topping the search results, it's time for an antitrust case. Of course that's in the name of a suitable proxy; one whose business can be presented as legit. Hire Foundem's lawyers.
Never mind malware, how about targeting $megabank.uk for a nice little earner?
That's what I hated with these barely shortened URLs. When ".nz" and ".kiwi" came out, we suddenly had to significantly increase our expenses for mere pointers to the main site, otherwise we ran the risk of others using our respected name. A competitor could easily enough have brought the URL (after a grace period) and pointed to their site, or faked ours and - if they managed to get it higher in the search rankings - do little tricks like change our rates our put up a "we are currently not taking new orders" banner or...
And that's aside from the risk of using one of our support pages to grab customer details, or accidental email mistypes (not that it'd be a big risk but still, for a small startup every customer is important)
--> Still, at least the NZ lot wasn't as bad as the UK lot - which looks more and more like it was done for financial interest then "helping our customers" interest.
This reminds me of the absurd way in which 0845 numbers were/are seemingly handled. These were mainly used as customer service lines for companies. Through a long and tortuous series of renumberings of UK phone numbers, we have 0845 numbers which are charged an outrageous premium of 50 or 60p a minute to call (they used to be cheap 'local numbers') and owners of these numbers were offered cheap-or-free-to-call 0345 numbers which corresponded to their old 0845 numbers. Also, Ofcom rules state that customer service lines should not be premium rate. So companies had to change from 0845 to 0345 even though nobody want it, or needed it, simply because the telecoms companies charged so much to call 0845 numbers. Now I'm giving nominet ideas!
Ofcom have messed up on a number of occasions...
The other "biggie" which many people here might not know, is how they have ensured that Arqiva make a killing on broadcasting DAB in the UK.
So, Eureka 147 (the original DAB project) allowed each country to allocate space in the RF for multiple ensembles (or multiplexes). In the UK and with the space in the Band III RF spectrum, it allowed for 41 different multiplexes (ref: http://www.wohnort.org/dab/freqs.html )
Each multiplex could contain within it about 1 Mb/s of "radio" which allowed for say 4x radio statiosn transmitting at 256 kb/s - which is nearly CD quality and in stereo. Or you could have 8 stations using 128 kb/s but they would be in mono.
So, out of 41 possible multiplexes, how many did Ofcom licence....?
TWO nationally and a max of 4 for local operators: One for Auntie Beeb and one for commerical operator Digital One and then the others were spread around the country and in such a way that no frequencies could overlap such that they caused mutual interference...
And due to the limited number of multiplexes available, this has forced radio broadcasters to pay premium rates to Arqiva as there aren't enough licences available. *Thank you Ofcom)
If Ofcom had pulled their finger out, Arqiva would not have had a monopoly and we'd have far more radio stations broadcasting in high quality stereo across the entire country.
Instead we have a limited number of stations broadcasting at low bits rates (as Arqiva charge based on the amount of data they broadcast) and in MONO !!
(PS Arqiva now own most of the TV/radio broadcast sites in the UK, making it a monopoly - the BBC sold off it's Crown Castle entity in 1997).
Um, citation needed?
I know 0845 started as "local geographic" equivalent, then got excluded when costs for actual geographic numbers got slashed through inclusive packages and the like. But it's still an order of magnitude less than your numbers. How do you get from there to a big premium? Are you talking subscribers to non-general-purpose packages that charge outrageous amounts for a call to any number outside something looking like a whitelist?
Mobile companies charge an 'access charge' for calling any numbers that aren't 01- 02- or 03- except 0500 and 0800, 0808 etc. It costs an 'access charge' of 50-60p per minute to call 0845 numbers, plus the actual rate, which is 5 or 6 p per minute.
My point is why? Why not just force the operators to stop charging for 0845 and make them like 0345? Instead of making thousands of companies dick around and change their numbers. Or not change their numbers and let the public be ripped off.
I'm only talking about calls from mobiles. Calls from landlines are not affected by this high 'access charge' thing. The mobile companies just wanted to be totally transparent about pricing so rather than charge 60p/minute to ring an 0845 number, they now charge just 6p. Plus the access charge, the amount of which is rarely mentioned.
Awww, the youth of today!
(I'm sure I'm not the only one here who used to have a .gb email address! [ it mapped to the x400 system we had where I worked some time last centuary ] )
You forgot Wales!
- The Welsh voted to remain, English residents swung it https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/wealthy-english-blow-ins-swung-welsh-brexit-vote-r3qkpmnn3.
- Also, the Welsh Assembly rejected the withdrawal bill - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-51181641.
Shame the Times is behind a paywall and invisible to me. I'd not seen those statistics and would be interested, as although I know a lot of actual Welsh people who seem to be as Brexity as Sunderlanders, I know an awful lot who are the exact opposite, though they do tend to be middle-class types from the leafier suburbs or staunch first-language Welsh from the heartlands in the North and West rather than ordinary Joes from the valleys.
I was surprised at the result in Wales and got quite cross that people who have benefitted massively from Objective One funding were rejecting all that with no guarantee* that London would come anywhere near providing a similar scheme. Especially in the immediate aftermath of the farcical about-face regarding electrification of the railways.
[edit], I found a couple of third-party articles: one from Nation.Cymru and the other from The Guardian.
M.
*I realise they've made a few vague promises since, but at the time of the referendum they were notably silent on the matter and past performance does not fill me with any sense of optimism
It was "The Guardian" link I mean to post (I hit the Times paywall too.. Googling for a link, then copy/pasting the wrong one!)
Yes, I was also angry at the strong valley support for leaving, especially with all the EU help for the old mining communities.
And London has always skimped on us.
I'm in Gower, which voted remain (just!) . These were some of the payments from the EU just for the swansea area:
EU Investment around Swansea£72M/year for Farmers
EU Support for Farming
In 2017, the EU invested £72,089,747 to support 5,408 farmers around Swansea.
£22M for Research
EU Support for Research
The EU has invested £22,288,064 to support 87 research projects around Swansea.
£410K for Culture
EU Support for Culture, Creativity and the Arts
The EU has invested £406,074 to support creative projects with partners around Swansea.
£24M for Young People
EU Support through Erasmus+
The EU has invested £24,367,103 to support 190 education, training, youth and sport projects with partners around Swansea.
£290M for Growth and Jobs
EU Support for Employment and the Economy
The EU has invested £290,732,578 to support 51 projects to create jobs around Swansea.
https://www.myeu.uk/ contains details of all EU projects, searchable by area / postcode / interactive map.
I'm in Gower
Well, if you are driving down the Oystermouth Road at some point, wave to me at the National Waterfront Museum, also a beneficiary of EU funding and one of the "anchor points" on the European Route of Industrial Heritage along with two other museums in the group (Blaenafon and Llanberis).
M.
Nominet play lip service to good management. They roll out the old drab response every time. They know full well that what they did by releasing .UK domains was undercut all the investment that Companies have put into .co.uk .Grossly stupid and unfair. I let "some" .uk drop yesterday and noticed an eastern european company catch many. Good luck to them, no one wants them.
Nobody types in a URL these days. Even if you are typing in the “address” bar it goes straight to a search engine.
So you could have a url of www.aihfdhfdgfdgfd.uk and as long as the sight is decently indexed and contains relevant pages you customers will find you.
Apart from that if I did come across a site with a .uk domain I would just assume it was associated with some scam as no respectable company would use this TLD.
The whole DNS system has fallen into the control of greedy and corrupt individuals, and, there is no effective way to stop them. Long term however this is an own goal as trust in DNS vanishes.
I see a business opertunity for a credit rating type agency to give allocate scumbag ratings to URLs.
Why does the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland use UK. Shouldn't Ukraine have it? I know Ukraine was a satellite of the USSR, but still, GB is used for almost everything else.
OK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland pinched it and UA is the code for Ukraine, except on loads of food and product labels that use GB and UK or EN and UK.
So can the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland lose UK if it loses N.I.?
So can the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland lose UK if it loses N.I.?
If Northern Ireland separated from the UK, the UK would become Kingdom of Great Britain.
If Scotland got their indepedence, KGB would become Kingdom of England (England and Wales)
If Wales then got independence, we will still be Kingdom of England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_formation_of_the_United_Kingdom
Question is would we get the tld for .kgb or .ke?
If Scotland has independence, would we also lose .gb?
(for non brits, that a reference to a TV comedy)
I was sure that when Nominet were listing the benefits of releasing the .uk registrations one was something like that name holders should have a UK address (so customers could have greater confidence they were dealing with a uk entity). I went looking on Nominet web site but couldn't find that page, what I did find that really made me laugh was this claim:
"Doing the same thing for over twenty years tends to make you pretty good at it. If you are also a growing business with a passion for improving and refining the service you offer, chances are you’d have some sharp skills and a decent product by the time you’ve got two decades under your belt.
And so it is with Nominet. We’ve been the registry for the .UK Domain for over twenty years, managing what has grown into one of the largest country code top level domains (ccTLDs) in the world, despite our diminutive geographic size."
Those like myself who have encountered their incompetence, mismanagement and disregard for anything other than their income beg to differ. Or do I? 20 years experience at prioritising income generation over providing a competent service - yes they're doing pretty good at that.
Now my question is what are the terms under which this national asset, a natural monopoly was handed over to a commercial operation? Are they upholding the terms of that incredible generous gift or was there any requirement that it be operated for the benefit of uk citizens. Or was it a simple matter of: we don't understand this internet stuff; Nominet, take the problem off our hands and "fill your boots".
I'm not normally one who would espouse nationalisation, management by government is usually lousy, but surely even government couldn't do worse than this bunch of overpaid incompetents. Perhaps a better approach would be to put the UK registry out to tender, let someone else have a 10 year contract.
Oh and here's another joke from Nominet (there's plenty more of this self-congratulatory BS)
"The phrase ‘strong and stable’ has had some bad press this year. Political overuse aside, we remain proud to say that both words apply accurately to our running of the UK’s country code top level domain (ccTLD). For over twenty years we have been working to maintain the relevance, stability, security and safety of the .UK domain. We keep pace with the criminals, stay ahead of the trends and ensure everyone understands the benefits of being part of the UK’s namespace."
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