So they registered the domain "www" just like they could have registered "google" or "lol".
You can access Google by typing:
- google.com (domain name)
- www.google.com (subdomain)
The same for the domain in question:
- www.ai (domain name)
- www.www.ai (subdomain)
~~The reason why typing ".ai" or "ai", etc. In your browser works is in IMO due to the internals of the browser that automatically adds a www in front of the domain if it can't resolve it because historically so many websites run on http://www.example.com and neglect to setup http://example.com~~
So to take my example from above: The registry responsible for the AI TLD set up a website on the domain name "www.ai" but neglected to set it up on the subdomain "www.www.ai"
Instead, they set it up on the TLD "ai" which is indeed very unusual.
This is not correct. The TLD alone is a valid domain name, although in most cases it must be followed by a trailing dot. "ai." is valid, "ai" may not be.
It is a valid domain in the technical DNS sense. But practically speaking, each TLD has "ns" entries in the root zone database, not "A", "CNAME", etc. entries. This is just a guy who registered www under a TLD that's it.
I'm not saying "ai" is not a valid domain. I'm just guessing why people get to a website when they just type "ai".
I'm on my phone now, if you search for the ai entry in the root zone file (https://www.iana.org/domains/root/files) you should find that IP returned by your host command.
Can you try curling "ai" and see if the content returned (if any) is the same as the one from "www.ai"?
They are the same, but that's not really the point. www has been registered in addition to the entries for the root TLD. You said "the internals of the browser that automatically adds a www in front" - that's irrelevant. host isn't doing that, curl isn't doing that.
To all who can't replicate it: Clicking a link, copy/pasting the URL, and typing it from the keyboard all behave differently. Make sure that you manually type
http://ai/
into the location bar (do not use https). Also try with and without the trailing slash.
Safari on macOS will not load this address. It does resolve, weirdly, "host" in the Terminal works and I can see Safari's requests being answered by my home DNS server in the logs.
But Safari just throws an error: Can't connect to the server "ai".
Update: It works if you include a trailing dot: http://ai.
Update 2: HN's URL parser does not include the dot in the hyperlink. Frustrating.
A long time back I entertained the idea of buying hc.im and using the email address le@hc.im. (my name is michael) Perhaps making business cards with a laser cutout so I could turn the card over if it wasn't apparent. But two-letter im domains are a very expensive ongoing cost so it didn't seem worth it for the gimmick.
I have a very short email address (in the form a@aa.aa) and I haven't found anywhere that doesn't accept it - except for humans, who often refuse to believe it is real and will insist on a longer one.
I have a similar one and it has been rejected many times. I still write to the company but nobody gives a shit. I also tried on twitter.
Surprisingly people are fine with it, I think that this is thanks to social media handlers such as @wazoo - people group all these together as "email and such"
I suppose it should be possible to get an MX record to work with a root domain, but that person that has it would have to probably work for or be the owner.
>A domain is a non-empty ASCII string that identifies a realm within a network. [RFC1034][1]
>The example.com and example.com. domains are not equivalent and typically treated as distinct.[1]
When a user needs to type a domain name, the length of each label is
omitted and the labels are separated by dots ("."). Since a complete
domain name ends with the root label, this leads to a printed form which
ends in a dot. We use this property to distinguish between:
- a character string which represents a complete domain name
(often called "absolute"). For example, "poneria.ISI.EDU."
- a character string that represents the starting labels of a
domain name which is incomplete, and should be completed by
local software using knowledge of the local domain (often
called "relative"). For example, "poneria" used in the
ISI.EDU domain.
Relative names are either taken relative to a well known origin, or to a
list of domains used as a search list. Relative names appear mostly at
the user interface, where their interpretation varies from
implementation to implementation, and in master files, where they are
relative to a single origin domain name. The most common interpretation
uses the root "." as either the single origin or as one of the members
of the search list, so a multi-label relative name is often one where
the trailing dot has been omitted to save typing.[2]
Okay..WTF? http://ai. Didn’t work on Chrome Mac but it works in Safari for iOS. Is this a bug or how the hell is this possible? It’s flipping everything I thought I knew about domains upside down.
You can access Google by typing:
- google.com (domain name)
- www.google.com (subdomain)
The same for the domain in question:
- www.ai (domain name)
- www.www.ai (subdomain)
~~The reason why typing ".ai" or "ai", etc. In your browser works is in IMO due to the internals of the browser that automatically adds a www in front of the domain if it can't resolve it because historically so many websites run on http://www.example.com and neglect to setup http://example.com~~
Edit: as pointed by another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690379) there are actually TLDs with A records which is the case here.
So to take my example from above: The registry responsible for the AI TLD set up a website on the domain name "www.ai" but neglected to set it up on the subdomain "www.www.ai" Instead, they set it up on the TLD "ai" which is indeed very unusual.