A domain hack is an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full "name" or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

For example, blo.gs makes use of the TLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell "blogs", chronolo.gy uses the TLD .gy (Guyana) to spell "chronology", and tel.ly uses the TLD .ly (Libya) to spell "telly" (a popular British slang term for television).

The third-level domains del.icio.us and cr.yp.to make use of the SLDs icio.us and yp.to from the TLDs .us (United States) and .to (Tonga) to spell "delicious" and "crypto" respectively.

In this context, the "hack" represents a trick (as in programming), not an exploit or break-in (as in security).

Shorter domain names

Domain hacks offer the ability to produce extremely short domain names. For example, blo.gs has a total of only five letters, versus the blogs.com (eight letters). Domain hacks default to the omission of the www. prefix, with the side effect of shortening the domain name, as every letter is taken into account as the site's title.

This makes them potentially valuable as redirectors (like i.am, which redirects to FortuneCity's V3 service) and as base domains from which to delegate subdomains.

History

On Monday, November 23 1992, inter.net was registered.^[1] In the 1990s, several domain names ending in "pla.net" were registered. On Friday, May 3 2002, icio.us was registered to create del.icio.us, the most visited domain hack, with the prepending of the "del" third-level domain.

Yahoo! acquired blo.gs^[2] on June 14, 2005, and del.icio.us^[3] on December 9, 2005.

Who.is is a whois server, indicating the registered ownership information of a domain. It was established June 12, 2002 and registered to an address in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Whocalled.us, a consumer-complaint site listing telephone numbers of known telemarketers, was first registered in 2005.

On 11 September 2007, name servers for .me were delegated by IANA to the Government of Montenegro, with a two-year transition period for existing .yu names to be transferred to .me. One of the first steps taken in deploying .me online was to create .its.me as a domain space for personal sites.

Se.cx

The shock site Goatse.cx introduced a domain hack consisting of a domain name ending with "se" and the domain .cx (Christmas Island). On January 14, 2004, the Christmas Island Internet Administration revoked this domain registration for acceptable use policy violation.^[4] Similar names have been used for parody sites such as oralse.cx or analse.cx. In some cases, .cz (Czech Republic) or .kz (Kazakhstan) are used instead of .cx.

Other languages

A fad amongst French-speakers was to register their names in the Niue TLD .nu, which led to "so-and-so.NU", which in French and Portuguese means "nude" or "naked"; however, as of 2007, Niue authorities have revoked many of these domain names. The handful that remain are joke domains without actual nudity. Likewise, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish speakers sometimes use .nu, because it means "now" in these languages.

Some organisations situated in Switzerland use TLDs to specifically refer to their canton (like the Belgian TLD .be for the Canton of Berne).

See also

• Country code top-level domain
• Generic top-level domain

References

External links

• Domain Hacks: Inventive or Poor Attempt at Being Cool? Domain hacks examined in depth by doma.in writers.
• Coolest Hostnames on the Net (1997) list of classic domain hacks & strange hostnames & email addresses.
• Montenegro .me tld to attract interest for domain hacks Montenegro .me tld to attract interest for domain hacks.

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