<a href="http://ai" rel="nofollow">http://ai</a> is an interesting case. It was there from the early days of the web, back when you could type "ai" into the mozilla url bar and it would take you there. Today firefox "helps" you out and changes what you typed into something else because it knows better than you do what web site you want.<p>It's run by a character named Vince Cate who moved to Anguilla to protest taxes or something. He was from the US and gave up his US citizenship. He talked the Anguilla government into letting him set up its internet infrastructure for them.
At one point of time, `<a href="http://to" rel="nofollow">http://to</a>` resolved to a "It works!" page [1]. I've always thought it would be cool to have a URL shortener with links such as `<a href="https://to/library" rel="nofollow">https://to/library</a>` or something similar. Oh, how much fun running your own TLD would be...<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150319211308/http://to/</a>
> Some have A records pointing to the root servers. I’m not sure why this is - I think it might be because no DNS has been configured in the TLD zone for these TLDs.<p>I was also curious about this. It turns out that it's because dig interprets some TLDs as DNS record types (MD, MG, MR, MX) or DNS classes (IN and CH) of the same name! Not sure why, but when given only a type or class (without a domain name), dig actually queries for a list of the root servers, which explains the strange results. Looks like using the -q option to specify the domain name works around this.
It’s interesting that Anguilla is the ai domain. I didn’t know that! It’s also a nice little island to take a trip to if you want to go somewhere that’s not too touristy. Beautiful beaches, and at least last time I was there, they didn’t allow cruise ships. So it ended up being a beautiful and quiet getaway. They do, however, drive on the left side of the road, but with North American cars, so it’s a little odd driving there at first!
You can also use Unicode ligatures to make URls which <i>look</i> shorter.<p>From that list, you could use <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> ㎝. / - that's U+339D if HN mangles it.<p>I wrote it up at <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/buying-a-single-character-domain-and-3-character-fqdn-for-15/" rel="nofollow">https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/buying-a-single-character-d...</a>
Cool to know, i guess.<p>TIL that dotless record on newer gTLDs is forbidden, which explains my age-old question: "if google holds google., why are they only using it on domains.google? Surely having the url <a href="https://google" rel="nofollow">https://google</a> would be desirable for the folks in marketing?". The answer is that they can't possibly because the ban was added precisely because of this.
Check out the URL Shortener T.LY. It's one of the shortest domain that allows you to create short links that I know of.<p>>> <a href="https://t.ly/" rel="nofollow">https://t.ly/</a>
It would be great if someone with an ultra-short URL could run one of the "what's my IP address" sites on it, like:<p>ifconfig.co<p>ifconfig.pm<p>ifconfig.show<p>ipaddr.in<p>ipconfig.io<p>They return plain-text IP address to curl/wget, while serving up a more detailed web page to other web browsers.
I used to have an email address with a three-letter username @eh.net, which was actually surprisingly annoying to use. If you ever gave the address to someone they'd be very confused at how short it is.
Shortest address is <a href="http://1" rel="nofollow">http://1</a> Not on the internet, though. Just on the network.<p>Kinda surprised Linux routes 0.0.0.1 to my router, when used as a destination address. Might be fun to use it as a local redirector whitout having to do any DNS shenanigans.<p>Edit: yep, it works
Interestingly, in my lan:<p>dig ai @ googledns works<p>dig ai @ unbound works (DoT cloudflare behind)<p>dig ai @ dnsmasq NXDOMAIN (openwrt, forwards to unbound)<p>Thus something's up with openwrt (22.03.0 release) dnsmasq, or dnsmasq in general.
Just to check: Could it be that pihole (dnsmasq) has an issue with these dotless domains?<p>I'm getting a NXDOMAIN for `dig ai.`, but when directly doing with an upstream server (i.e. 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1) it perfectly works.<p>I assume this is the result of the `Never forward non-FQDN A and AAAA queries` setting being checked in pi-hole (which is AFAIK the default).
Quick question: my systemd-resolved doesn't want to resolve `ai.` (`dig ai.` results in a SERVFAIL, but doing `dig ai. @8.8.8.8` works fine). Anyone have this problem? I already checked upstream resolvers and they work with the bare TLD, any hints to how I can get systemd-resolved to resolve this?
<a href="http://ai" rel="nofollow">http://ai</a>. resolves for me, but <a href="http://ai" rel="nofollow">http://ai</a> doesn't. Is <a href="http://ai" rel="nofollow">http://ai</a> invalid or is that just my DNS?
All the domains have an invalid TLS certificate. Now, it would be very interesting to see the process for actually obtaining a valid certificate for one of these. Anyone know if there are reasons one could not be obtained?
I love short URLs! I found quite a lot are available for .cx (which is the Christmas Islands), so I got <a href="https://fh.cx" rel="nofollow">https://fh.cx</a> for myself a couple of years ago.
> I imagine most browsers etc. would consider a URL with an empty hostname invalid – Chrome considers both <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> and <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a>. invalid, at least.<p>An empty hostname is invalid according to RFC 7230:<p><i>A sender MUST NOT generate an "http" URI with an empty host identifier. A recipient that processes such a URI reference MUST reject it as invalid.</i><p>This requirement also carries over to HTTPS.
Could shave off a character by using ftp:// instead of <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> though I suppose modern browsers have removed FTP support recently. Are there any protocols that are known by even shorter abbreviations?
Ha ego bump, I like to think I inspired this submission?<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801317" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32801317</a><p>17:07:12 vs 17:10:57<p>great minds, yada yada ;-)
aka.ms is short but probably not thr shortest, but I would say it is the shortest most popular url possibly. For those who don't know, that is MS's link shortner for official URLs
TLDR It's <a href="http://ai" rel="nofollow">http://ai</a> (or <a href="http://ai./" rel="nofollow">http://ai./</a>) and a few other 2-letter TLDs. Doesn't seem to work on my Android phone but works from another machine.
You don't need the <a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> for pn. (At least in firefox on my laptop) pn./ suffices.