During the old days lots of things were easier to get.
Semi related to this - Ian Goldberg famously had the email address n@ai (Ian backwards if you missed it) - which caused problems for many mail clients and validators. I’d imagine cypherpunks.ca is easier to use. I saw similar things with one of the Balkans in 1998 - I think it was Croatia, where some government officials had name@hr email addresses.
I miss web indexes. It felt much more like an act of discovery to drill down to a topic I might not have otherwise been interested in to find some gem of a web page, and then to check that pages links and webrings. It always gives me joy to come across one, even if all the pages on it are long abandoned.
Reliving that is one of my favorite things about the wayback machine, usually starting from one of the big sites that indexed many topics, but the web-rings and obscure personal link collections are rarely more than a few clicks away from there.
That's a real bold move, climate-wise. It's an island whose highest point is about 200 feet (65 metres) above sea level, and it's smack-dab in the middle of the hurricane highway...
The lengths the Cook Islands have to go to prevent folks from registering profanity is entertaining (there was a spate of .co.ck novelty names before they locked it down)
ai was also one of the ccTLDs that had an MX record for a long time, and I believe (although never had reason to confirm) actually used it. foo@ai tended to be a fun test case for e-mail validation.
I used to work for an IoT startup that really wanted the domain mq.tt. And in that era, Trinidad and Tobago's national domain administrator would only conduct business in-person, and required payment by international money order.
A facilitator was found, a deal was negotiated, and then the lawyers got involved and went "no way in hell will we let the company's primary domain renewal rely on someone walking a money order into an office in Trinidad". C'est la vie
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 46.7 ms ] threadNow it looks like restaurant adverts. Maybe not much happens there any longer.
Semi related to this - Ian Goldberg famously had the email address n@ai (Ian backwards if you missed it) - which caused problems for many mail clients and validators. I’d imagine cypherpunks.ca is easier to use. I saw similar things with one of the Balkans in 1998 - I think it was Croatia, where some government officials had name@hr email addresses.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2002-January/...
https://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://www2.yahoo...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990125094806/http://www.direct...
Didn't some of the cypherpunks move out to anguila to avoid the crypto export bans during the first crypto wars?
While I too would prefer it, I realize it is an idealist fantasy at this point.
https://www.ck/
A facilitator was found, a deal was negotiated, and then the lawyers got involved and went "no way in hell will we let the company's primary domain renewal rely on someone walking a money order into an office in Trinidad". C'est la vie