Tangentially related - 20+ years ago I managed to register a π domain under one of the primary TLDs.
As in, the registration form was accepted and the fee was charged.
Then, few days after they emailed to say that "due to technical difficulties" the registration can be registered and they have no choice but to unregister it.
My brother had a friend who tried to register fuck.com in the early days of the Internet, around 1994, and the registrar was confused and wanted to know why he wanted to register it. This was when the Internet was mostly universities and a .com cost $100 to register.
I managed to register a one letter domain below a CC-tld, despite that country having a rule against it. Their signup form had two stages and the check was only on the first page... so all it took was changing a hidden form field.
I had it for a while until they started charging a lot for it (it was Turkmenistan).
my grandmother used her offline-only computer for solitaire
what are grandmothers even doing on the internet, theres dangerous viruses and worms on there!
is there any other medium where the range of participants in the pool goes from "55 year career professional" to "hardened criminal" to "kindly grandmother"
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/11/domain-hacks-with-unusual-u...
HN seems to encode it as punycode when it shouldn’t; it skipped normalization.
Also, some programming languages treat it as a valid identifier.
As in, the registration form was accepted and the fee was charged.
Then, few days after they emailed to say that "due to technical difficulties" the registration can be registered and they have no choice but to unregister it.
I was so close, damn amateurs.
I had it for a while until they started charging a lot for it (it was Turkmenistan).
Now, present the same list to an I.T. professional with the same questions. Perhaps make sure they are not carrying any weapons before you try.
This is just one reason why visual inspection of URLs and "hover over this link" haven't been useful defenses for a long time.
what are grandmothers even doing on the internet, theres dangerous viruses and worms on there!
is there any other medium where the range of participants in the pool goes from "55 year career professional" to "hardened criminal" to "kindly grandmother"