Country code top-level domain

And the G comes from really the ICANN side, generic.

So a generic top-level domain in contrast to a ccTLD, a country code top-level domain like .ca in Canada or .au in Australia.

So generic is the ones that you're used to seeing, .com, .net, .org, and now .bank and .insurance.

That .bank and .insurance didn't exist then, until you guys created it.

Right, well, link in the show notes as usual.

Chrome's response to recent ccTLD registry hijacks.

It turns out recently Google became aware of the hijacks of the .gh for Ghana, .sl for Sierra Leone, and .as for American Samoa country code top-level domains had been hijacked.

My first thought was, I wonder if all three of those countries outsourced to the same company to run their CCTLDs.

And let me think, who are the others that were basically...

Oh, I saw on the excerpt from Sherpa, and Yanni was saying... that no, he's got a thumbs down for .ai, has none in his portfolio, and he, you know, he spends a lot of money in the domain space investing, and, you know, he's the one that was leading his, the LFG group, you know, all those applications, so it's not like he's opposed to taking risks in the domain space, but was like, no, the .si, no, no, no, with these ccTLDs.

Well, Josh, when you hear these two different types of, you know, it's OK to take this risk.

And then you hear somebody saying, no, it's really just, you know, a waste of time and waste of money.

Is that a possibility for you?

We are thinking of all possibilities, but, um, don't think we are the most clever people in the world, and we are discussing with some of our colleagues, because there is a huge trust amongst ccTLD operators.

It's really a community that I think it doesn't exist anywhere, so we really share, and we got offered help from all of the center members.

So it's really a nice community, and we are talking with our colleagues who offer platforms And we will decide then whether for sure we will not develop our own platform from scratch.

It should mean...

So if you ask me, no, I mean, we didn't want this.

I know that everyone is saying, "Yeah, but look at this amount of money," but it's not all about money, especially not with the ccTLDs.

We have different responsibilities, I think.

And I think that if people did know more, you know, about the, the true, the true, like risk, reward, and benefits of whatever domain name that you choose, I think that in my example with the SLD scope, it would be very, very difficult to come up with a good reason why you wouldn't go as an in- as an intelligence company, as you wouldn't... for why you wouldn't go with scopeintelligence.com at $3999 over any of the other options.

So when you mentioned .io, .co, .ai, of those plus the .si, so these four ccTLDs, which ones do you think are priced best for domain investors to get in? Meaning .io is, has a good wholesale price, you can pick up some good ones, and you believe the end user market is there.

I mean, basically, where is the best value with those four ccTLDs: .ai, .si, .co, and, uh, what was the other one I just said?

Um-

.io.

Top of the news.

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Ulrich writes, "This keeps happening to country code TLDs more often than other TLDs.

ccTLDs were established in the beginning of the Internet and do not always obey the modern rules of how TLDs are operated.

With DNS often being used as a proof of ownership of a domain, DNS tampering can also affect the issuance of TLS certificates, which in some ways is supposed to be a backup for DNS in establishing if you are connecting to the correct site." Scotus writes, "Johannes's point about the way some ccTLDs are operated is a good reminder that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and attackers are relentless about finding that link and exploiting it.

I don't think it's gonna be hard for them to stand up that infrastructure again, but hey, maybe there was more to it and we're just, uh, we're just seeing what they're talking about.

We've also seen, uh, someone hijack some ccTLD, uh, registries, uh, in order to... uh, like whole country codes in order to be able to redirect domains to obtain certificates for a bunch of services, including Google services.

Not sure how useful that was gonna be to the attackers given that most browsers now, they will pin certificates for sites like Google.

But it's, it's a reminder that you can't take for granted that like a ccTLD is actually not owned, right? [laughs] Uh, which is a pretty crazy thing.

Uh, there's been a bug, there's a bug in something called GoBalance, which is like a load balancer for Tor onion sites, so I'm guessing the FBI's having a wild time with that one.

Again, we've linked through to it in this week's, uh, show notes.

There are questions about some of the methods, both from sociologists and from female gamers.

Twenty, what's in a domain name? How ccTLDs hacked into startups.

Over the last ten years, there's been a significant increase in tech startups and new companies using country code top-level domains, ccTLDs, in lieu of more traditional and old-school domain extensions like com, net, and org.

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