[YPPH]

US government domains seem a little over the place. I'm surprised by the number of courts and counties that have random .org and .com domains. In Australia, it follows a pretty strict structure: Federal: entity.gov.au State: entity.wa.gov.au (example for State of Western Australia) Local: entity.stirling.wa.gov.au (example for a local government in Western Australia),

So, for example, the Federal Court is fedcourt.gov.au as it's federal.

Strange how the US has such a mishmash.

[chasd00]

I work with US state governments a lot. Departments treasure their .com domains because they can actually get updates to the zone file without having to go through months (literally) of repeated requests to get something added to the .<state>.gov/us domain. If a department or agency has to reach outside to the state IT department for anything the timeline doubles or triples. It’s a real problem.

[Mountain_Skies]

I used to do lots of consulting work for various departments and agencies in the state I was in at the time. The biggest issue was that the state IT department wanted everything centralized, running on only department servers, using a single platform chosen by them (Vignette StoryServer). Most agencies found that to be too restrictive, especially since at the time Vignette only used TCL.

Even worse was the IT department's insistence that agencies sign a 99 year contract for cost sharing, the amount of which would never be known in advance since it would only be calculated quarterly based on all expenses the state IT department incurred hosting state agencies.

[frakt0x90]

Same for the enterprise (non-tech I assume) world. When I was on the business side, we treasured any compute we could get that was not tied to corporate IT. Going through them would turn a 1 day fix into a 2 week endeavor. Product development would go from 1 month to 6 or more.

[bombcar]

You've found out a huge reason cloud took off so hard. Lots of it is shadow-IT.

Nobody except a few universities actually uses subdomains as they should be, where you actually delegate the subdomain to the business unit using it.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I tried to access gettysburg.edu the other day and was greeted by a stupid redirect page (with a meta refresh tag) insisting on use of www rather than just issuing the redirect immediately.

The reality is they're stuck in 1995 and won't make rational changes.

[sneak]

I think someone extremely rational is making a lot of big changes and I could not be more excited to see the outcome.

[mlhpdx]

Yes. I remember the delight of deploying my first server with a credit card. The previous one had taken 6 weeks and $100,000 out of our department budget. Such a godsend.

[belorn]

Do you mean that all .gov domains are handled by the same dns service provider? I can understand if the TLD registry is a pain to deal with when it comes to changing information at the top, but zones files? The whole design of dns have delegation as a central feature so that the registry do not need to do everything.

[Mixtape]

Just my $0.02 as a net/sysadmin for a small municipality in the US:

A big part of why we haven't been able/bothered to migrate to a proper .gov domain boils down to the amount of technical debt we'd need to pay back in the process of doing so. Everything that we do uses our non-.gov domain, namely our Office 365 connectors. On top of that, end users' day-to-day communications with the public make use of the existing domain. Modifying that in any capacity could prove disruptive to ongoing communications and potentially render them liable for dropping the ball somewhere. Not to mention that every single internet account ever created by staff using the current domain would need to be migrated or risk being lost forever.

Additionally, we're a small team. Only myself and one other individual would really have the technical knowledge to migrate our infrastructure. The opportunity cost involved would be massive. There are grants available to help us with this, but obtaining/using those can get complicated at times.

Ultimately, the pros just don't outweigh the cons enough to make a huge difference. From a purely academic angle, should we have a .gov TLD? Absolutely. In practice though, the residents and staff are familiar enough with the current one to render it a non-issue. The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

[massysett]

> They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

I haven't even done that much, I couldn't tell you offhand the URL for my county government. I always just search in Google, which takes me right to the page I need (roads, solid waste, library, etc.)

[prmoustache]

> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

That mean they can easily be redirected to a phishing website.

[Mixtape]

Absolutely, and that's a risk that we carry, especially in the public sector. That being said though, I don't know if adopting a better-regulated domain is itself enough to alleviate that.

The very unfortunate reality is that many (most?) users evaluate phishing attempts with the null hypothesis that "this is trustworthy". They are looking for evidence that something is wrong and assuming all is well if they don't find it. To that sort of user, the thinking goes something like:

* Some trustworthy sites use .com.

* My municipality is trustworthy.

* My municipality uses .com.

If you draw out the venn diagram, there's a clear gap in that line of thinking. That doesn't matter to someone's Great Aunt Linda though. She just knows that .com is what goes after Amazon and Google, so it must be good.

With that in mind, could using .gov help to protect those folks? To a certain extent. I can see the argument for keeping the more discerning few from getting scammed. For the broader group though, it won't change anything.

Offhand, the alternative solution that I'd offer would be providing clear communication standards to the public. Specifically, defining when, how, and from whom municipal notifications go out. Think of it like the IRS only sending physical letters; archaic as it seems, it makes it pretty obvious that an email "from them" is bogus. The clearer someone's understanding of where to find us is, the more optimistic I am that they'll get where they need to be.

[xp84]

> They just memorize "[municipality_website]"

Nah, even worse, they type “municipality” or some butchered typo of it into their browser, triggering a Google search, and click the very first link they see (sponsored or no) - so they can wildly easily be tricked into phishing websites.

Arguably we’re all victims of the decade or so when Google was so good at serving up the right site, so most people just got used to not knowing any URLs. People Google “YouTube” or “cnn” rather than type even the .com after those words.

[Mixtape]

IMO, poor website UX plays a big part in this too. People are far less likely to Google "[city] public works" if "public works" is a top-level menu item on the city website. When you first need to click a hamburger menu, hover over the "departments" entry, select "other departments", and then pick "public works" from the site header though, Joe Public is just going to do a search.

[TRiG_Ireland]

People type full domain names, including the .com, into Google, because they have no idea that the address bar on their browser even exists.

[xp84]

Yes, what really makes people like us cry is watching someone type in just the word Google into the ubiquitous search/URL bar, hit enter, click Google’s first result for Google which is google.com, then type “cnn.com” into the search field, hit enter, and then click an ad or result for CNN.

[fencepost]

You say there are grants available, but given the current environment actually relying on those seems risky - even if you were actually to get the money up front it seems like it might get clawed back.

[Mixtape]

You are correct. This is a consideration at all levels of government currently, with faith in those grants' persistence varying based on an individual recipient's responsibilities.

[cbozeman]

> The average non-technical user doesn't "see" "[municipality].[state].gov". They aren't familiar with the concept of a domain hierarchy at all. They just memorize "[municipality_website]" and move on with their day.

You've just highlighted the problem. This is something every single human being in America should know, and arguably almost the entire world.

This falls directly under the rubric of Basic Computing Knowledge > Basic Internet Knowledge.

Every single time I see someone searching for "microsoft" or "apple" I immediately stop them and tell them, "You've already done most of the work. Microsoft and Apple are commercial entities. Add .com at the end, which is what .com means. Commercial. You're adding extra work for yourself."

Yes, a few people pop off at the mouth at which point I remind them ignorance is of a thing is easily remedied with a little give-a-damn, and saves everyone time and money.

Talk about a fucking miserable failure of education. I'm 44. I expected the generation 20 years younger than me to be impossibly skilled with computers to the point that I wouldn't hope to even match them, much less surpass them. Instead what we got was a world where we dumbed every goddamn thing down so even the most drooling moron can utilize it.

It's pretty disappointing, to put it mildly.

[pests]

I think your view on the world might be a little skewed. Every human in the world needs to know how domain names work? What?

[xp84]

They should know the basic principles! For the same reason they should know what a noun and a verb is. For the same reason they should know that you can multiply something by 10 by adding a zero. When so much of our lives revolve around the Internet, basic literacy about its fundamental mechanics makes a lot of sense. The alternative is the world we live in now, where it’s trivially easy to scam people because they believe www.irs.gov.login.html.b3293.cn/login is functionally equivalent to www.irs.gov/login.html?b3293.cn

Imagine if people were this bad at counting, or at knowing the difference between US currency and monopoly money.

[pests]

> so much of our lives revolve around the Internet

This was my core point, that this is true for you but is not actually true for everyone. To claim the entire world needs to know this when people get by just fine every day without being online or being on a device is absurd to me.

[xp84]

I wasn’t only talking about nerds. There are not a lot of people anymore who are not impacted by the Internet and who don’t usually use it.

And they don’t get by just fine every day.

People get phished and scammed constantly, in many ways that could be prevented if people had and remembered like a 2-week unit in high school on how the Internet works.

I’m not saying they need to understand even the fact that DNS converts names to IP numbers. Merely that it’s a hierarchy and how to trace responsibility (originating from the right side).

That’s no more difficult to grasp (if taught properly) than how to read the address on an envelope and understanding that “San Francisco, California” means a city in San Francisco located in the state of California.

Other lessons in the unit would include how email works including its lack of guarantees of authenticity. And finally, what encryption means and applying that knowledge to safe and unsafe ways of storing and transmitting information.

[nightfly]

Everyone should know how phone numbers work too, no different

[EvanAnderson]

My county government started w/ a "co.Name.oh.us" domain name back in the late 90s. People in the government hated it. The complaint I heard most frequently was that the public couldn't get it right-- too many dots.

I was a fan of the ".co.name.oh.us" naming because it made logical sense. I could easily find any County website in the state. My intuition now is that anything logical (or, perhaps, just anything I like) will be hated by the public. >sigh<

The county moved to "NameCountyOhio.gov". It's 5 characters longer than the old domain name but isn't hated. The public still gets it wrong often, expecting it to be "NameCountyOH.gov".

Edit:

Okay, so I got this totally wrong. Chalk it up to poor memory for stuff 20+ years ago.

There's RFC 1480, first of all: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1480

The old County domain was "co.name.oh.us". I completely forgot the hierarchy was flipped for localities, with the locality being the higher level domain and the designation for type of locality (city, county, etc) being second.

For K-12 school districts, libraries, colleges, and others, the hierarchy comes first (like "name.lib.oh.us").

[abtinf]

[countyname].co.[stateabbr].[ctld] is injecting ontological metadata into the data, which is bizarre.

Would be better to just get rid of the “co” layer.

[EvanAnderson]

There are separate hierarchies for cities (".ci.oh.us", school districts (".k12.oh.us"), public libraries (".lib.oh.us"), and probably others I'm not aware of. It seems like there could be name collisions between those different entities that would necessitate the additional layer.

Edit:

Per my parent comment I screwed this up and misremembered the hierarchies. The locality name comes first for localities, so you'd be looking at things like:

ci.medina.oh.us - City of Medina

co.medina.oh.us - County of Medina

medina.k12.oh.us - The Medina City School District

medina.lib.oh.us - The Medina County District Library

[abtinf]

So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties, and most entities (cities, districts, etc) exist within counties.

Maybe there should be a “falsehoods programmers believe about government structure” article, but I can think of very few exceptions.

“cleveland.cuyahoga.ohio.gov” seems like a logically guessable domain.

[EvanAnderson]

Oh, I agree. It's logically guessable and the right hierarchy. It'd also never fly. >smile<

> So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties...

re: falsehoods - Alaska has no counties. Louisiana has "Parishes". Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments. Also, see Townships.

[xp84]

Sometimes I think our country would be better understood as 50-something separate countries, kind of like the EU, except without the general goal the EU has of increasing amounts of cooperation and convergence. Since in America, everything that’s different from one place to another is generally different because somebody very influential wants it to be. As programmers I feel like all this inconsistency drives us crazy because it seems pointless, but as a citizen, I can see how it would be a tremendous waste of effort to try to force national standardization merely for standardization’s sake when we have so many real problems that need to be addressed.

[201984]

Virginia is another edge case here, where cities aren't part of counties and are directly under the state. If you look at a map, you'll see holes in a bunch of counties where the cities are, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_counties_...

[mistrial9]

All of these are tiny exceptions compared to the vast number of counties within US States. However, reality is made of exceptions! All things considered, it is interesting and important to have local exceptions in a nation IMHO.

[abtinf]

> Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments

This breaks my brain.

[saalweachter]

I'm always a little bit angry that New York calls Townships Towns.

[saalweachter]

New York spans five counties, which lack county governments, instead having borough governments subordinate to the city government.

Washington, DC is a city which is in neither a state nor a county.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._municipalities_... has a hundred or so cities that span counties.

[mistrial9]

it turns out, cities are among the least well-defined geographical features in local government of the USA. There are many odd and unusual arrangements at the city level. The US Census maintains a collection of more clearly defined entities.

[dragonwriter]

I can think of lots of exceptions to the part about substate public entities existing within counties; CA, for instance, has quite a number of JPAs and similar entities that involve multiple counties, or entities from multiple counties, for some purpose; e.g., The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, etc.

[adrianmonk]

You can't get rid of the "co". It's needed for disambiguation.

For example, here in Texas, the City of Dallas is located in Dallas County, but they are separate things. If you want to pay a parking ticket that you got in the City of Dallas, you need to go to the city's web site. If you want to pay your property taxes, you need to go to the county's web site.

Also, the City of Austin is located in Travis County. There is an Austin County, but it's 100 miles (160 km) away. The only connection is that they are both named for Stephen F. Austin.

[xp84]

Interesting. Here in CA we have a few fused “City and County of X” governments. In those cases, the borders are one and the same, and there is only one governmental entity in charge of it. Mostly, this is convenient.

[abtinf]

Actually I just looked at the original post, which indicates that both oh.gov and ohio.gov exist. Ohio.gov actually works.

So countyname.ohio.gov would be perfect.

[EvanAnderson]

The city of Medina Ohio, Medina County Ohio, and the Medina City School District have entered the chat.

[abtinf]

County: medina.ohio.gov

City: medina.medina.ohio.gov

From brief googling, the school district is subordinate to the county, not the city, despite its name.

medinacityschools.medina.ohio.gov

Or

cityschools.medina.ohio.gov

Or

mcc.medina.ohio.gov

Or

bees.medina.ohio.gov

[BobaFloutist]

What would you do for the City and County of San Francisco? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

Do they get two separate websites?

[EvanAnderson]

> medina.medina.ohio.gov

I love this so much.

It makes me sad that Buffalo, NY is in Erie County. That could have been great.

[0xbadcafebee]

That's the genius of having states, counties, cities, towns and villages that are almost entirely decentralized. When an evil force takes over the government and wants to rule the whole country, they can't, because nobody even knows how a single tiny village is organized. Complete disorganization and inefficiency as a defense against tyrrany. (or, well, at least, slowing it down)

[mschuster91]

> When an evil force takes over the government and wants to rule the whole country, they can't, because nobody even knows how a single tiny village is organized.

As we're seeing right now this isn't true. Everyone is afraid because the current federal executive doesn't give a flying f..k about norms, including telling people "comply with what DOGE wants or get fired" or drawing up lists of "Government Gangsters" [1]. And so, everyone is bending over in fear of getting in the crosshairs, getting government spending contracts cut, getting fired, getting death threats like Fauci, or getting extorted to buy ads on Twitter [2].

Side rant: where are all the "don't tread on me" gun nuts that have arsenals rivaling what would be a special forces unit in smaller countries?

[1] https://rollcall.com/2024/12/09/trumps-pick-to-lead-fbi-iden...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-x-...

[formerly_proven]

> Side rant: where are all the "don't tread on me" gun nuts that have arsenals rivaling what would be a special forces unit in smaller countries?

They won the election?

[Retric]

Gun nut and republicans have overlap but aren’t the same group.

Quite a few are really into Libertarian values and hate Republican stances on a wide range of issues.

[mschuster91]

> Quite a few are really into Libertarian values and hate Republican stances on a wide range of issues.

Mostly abortion and to a lesser extent the "war on drugs". The rest is seeing especially Musk's blatant self-dealings [1] and teardown of "big gubmint" as something laudable.

"So This is How Liberty Dies, With Thunderous Applause"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43127819

[Retric]

There’s far more fundamental disagreement between the parties than that.

Libertarians strongly oppose government intervention in the economy like farm subsidies or specific tax cuts for specific industries. The Reputation party says it believes in free markets, but it doesn’t act that way.

The gap between Republican stated goals and actual policies is really stark. I think it mostly works because so few people dig into the details, but some people get really disillusioned.

[orblivion]

Yeah, it's not "Don't tread on the executive branch". Quite the opposite.

[massysett]

> As we're seeing right now this isn't true.

It's absolutely true. My county and state government has not changed. My kid goes to the public school, which has not changed. Indeed some of my state officials are suing the federal government.

State and local governments provide many services of enormous importance: schools, police, fire, roads. The President is not ruling all of that.

[bombcar]

The problem isn't who provides it, it's where the funding comes from.

If the local school is 90% funded by local taxes, they can ignore the state and federal government for quite awhile.

But if it's only 10% funded directly by local taxes, and the rest (even if coming from the locality!) is funneled through the state and/or federal government, then they can be squeezed on the money side.

[xp84]

Fair point.

For the past few decades, though, it feels like we’ve been locked in a permanent war between two opposing factions that barely admit each other’s right to exist, let alone to disagree, with the goal of forcing federal government policy to agree with, alternatingly, the “left” or the “right” orthodoxy and for the feds to force those ideas on the whole country.

Wouldn’t it be more productive to just massively cut federal taxes and obligations, and let Republicans live in Republican controlled states and let Democrats live in Democrat controlled states? Then the state governments can raise taxes and be able to use their taxpayers’ money as they see fit.

This way, if you want any category of government goodies, from single-payer healthcare to fixing the roads, you only need to convince your fellow state residents to pay for and tolerate it, and the people you don’t trust from far away can’t block you.

The federal government has only shown any particular skill at operating the military (no one’s dared to invade us since 1812!). Maybe we just let them handle that, plus uncontroversial standards and maybe make trade agreements. Let states handle the rest.

[bombcar]

That’s close to the original plan (even more so if you look at the articles of confederation) and is actually quite present in many things (look at the ACA for example).

But it should be more explicit in many cases. As we see routing everything through the federal government gives it more power than “expected” - like how it regulates drinking age via federal highway funds.

[mschuster91]

> State and local governments provide many services of enormous importance: schools, police, fire, roads. The President is not ruling all of that.

A lot of that hinges closely on cooperation with the feds, and the Trump admin has repeatedly said they will go and target "sanctuary cities" - so much for states rights.

In doubt, the federal government will pull off another drinking ban - the age for drinking is 21 because the federal government threatened to retract highway funding many decades ago, and that was explicitly ruled to be constitutional [1].

Do not think even for a single second that you are safe from the impact of the Trump admin even if you live in a deep blue city in a deep blue state.

In doubt, your daughter might not be able to access plan B any more (or your son stuck paying child support) because, of course, that one is on the target list as well, or your trans kid might not receive the care they need because the federal government plans to ban that as well, and if it's just by banning federally active insurances from covering the cost for such treatment. Or if you're Black and your kid needs to take ADHD meds? Say goodbye to your kid [2].

You all are anything but safe, but by the time you realize it because it starts finally affecting you and your loved ones, it will be too late. Take that warning from a German and heed it because we actually lived through that and learn about the time of 1933-45 and the years leading up to it in school!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

[2] https://wordinblack.com/2025/02/rfk-jr-black-kids-adhd-drugs...

[Mountain_Skies]

Probably out celebrating the shrinking of government, which is one of their core desires, if not their top desire.

[brookst]

…while uploading their ID’s to government mandated databases in order to watch the trans porn they want to completely outlaw, in the same of small government?

Nah, they just dropped the pretense. Small government was always code for “leave me alone and make those people suffer.”

[foobarian]

Luckily they are not the only ones with guns.

[cjs_ac]

I swear 'defence against tyranny' is the justification for every ridiculous thing the US does.

[JustExAWS]

Have you been following US politics lately? Right now there is an election denier in a cabinet position. It’s partially a good thing that elections are controlled by states as some protection.

[cjs_ac]

That just proves my point. All that obsessing about preventing tyrants, and you still end up with one. Maybe if, as a culture, you spent less time poring over quotes from eighteenth-century political thinkers to divine the best possible theoretical form of government, and more time solving concrete problems faced by real-world people, this wouldn't have happened.

The Westminster system is looking very 'worse is better' at the moment.

[palmotea]

> The Westminster system is looking very 'worse is better' at the moment.

The same one that just today got Apple to remove E2E encryption from iCloud, so it could get backdoor access to people's data?

I beg to differ. Centralization is bad. IIRC, it's what's enabling Musk to do so much damage so quickly, and the UK has more of it.

[0xbadcafebee]

Culture's a funny thing. Extremely hard to change, very hard to predict or control. Based on my understanding of history, almost all cultures fail.

The ones that have lasted the longest have been taken over by foreign empires and despots, but persisted nonetheless. Others were taken over and converted to some other culture, or died entirely.

Want a really long-lived culture? Look at Egypt, India, Persia, China. Want a culture that resists outside influence? Probably Egypt, maybe next India, and then Rome - but the former were conquered, and the latter died.

(I'm a shit lay-historian so please somebody correct me)

If you look at the evolution of life on this planet, it's never really clear what's a "superior" lifeform until you look at it for a few hundred million years. Crocodiles looked like the dominant lifeform for a pretty long time, but even that ended. Our cultures are absolutely infantile in the grand scheme. We can come up with ideas and try them out, but there's no telling what works long-term. Only future generations can judge.

[JustExAWS]

The majority of the people in the US want the current situation. Between the fear of the country becoming minority-majority,losing “traditional American values”, and protecting pets from being eaten by Haitians, they see Trump/Musk as their last hope.

Admittedly, it didn’t help that the DNC re-enacted “Weekend at Bernie’s” with Biden for two years.

[saulpw]

No, a plurality of people voted for the current situation. Not a majority of people, not a majority of voters (many of whom didn't vote, or weren't able to vote), and not even a majority of people who voted (49.8%, and no you can't round up).

Also, voting for slate of candidates on one day in the middle of a billion-dollar multi-year misinformation campaign, does not equal "want the current situation". I agree that an egregious number of people are actively cheering for the current chaos, but let's not give them more psychic power than the institutional power they are already wielding.

[DeepSeaTortoise]

> Maybe if, as a culture, you spent less time poring over quotes from eighteenth-century political thinkers to divine the best possible theoretical form of government

The problem being the founders having been anti-tyranny extremists.

E.g. the founders' opinion on whether everyone should be able to own his private tanks and warships is crystal clear: Absolutely. It's literally why they didn't just write "The right to bear arms shall not be infringed" but also "A well regulatef militia, being necessary to the security of a free state".

And nowadays the left screetches about noone needing to carry a butter knife with a blade length above 3inches and the right is divided over whether Soros should be able to buy Minuteman missiles with USAID money.

The only reason the right is disagreeing with the founders at all, is because the founders thought if a few immoral entities, not under the control of the people, became obscenely powerful, the people would just make use of their militias to get rid of them (see declaration of independence).

And that's also why the selfdeclared elite keeps trying to restrict the 2nd amendment. Because it protects the first. And why they keep trying to restrict the 1st amendment (hate speech, micro-aggressions, control over all the media, online censorship, "fact checking", trillion dollar judgements against journalists for minor offenses, ...). Because it protects the 2nd and all others.

[__MatrixMan__]

Are you proposing we create a government position for Musk and promote him into it so he can officially have no power? I think I'm on board.

How does it work, does one have to consent to become king or can we just sort of make it happen?

[xienze]

> Right now there is an electric denier in a cabinet position.

There's a whole lot more than one. Remember that when Republicans win, the results aren't "denied" but the Democrats sure do cast a whoooole lot of doubt on the proceedings (i.e., "well yes they won but voter suppression, I'm just saying...", "well yes they won but Russian Facebook propaganda, I'm just saying...", "well yes they won, but hanging chads, I'm just saying...").

I'd say "election denial" comes in degrees...

[JustExAWS]

Newt Gingrich outright chastised the Republican governor of GA for making voting more convenient in minority neighborhoods was going to increase the chance of Democrats winning. He said the quiet part out loud.

Not to mention that in Texas, student IDs issued by public colleges aren’t legal IDs to vote. But gun permits are.

Of course there is Russian interference on social media. Not that I think it makes a difference.

Complaining about any of those things though and saying that’s why Trump won is crazy looking at the numbers. He won fair and square. Both of those things can be true.

[xienze]

> Not to mention that in Texas, student IDs issued by public colleges aren’t legal IDs to vote. But gun permits are.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume one of those IDs can be obtained by non-citizens and the other can't, not sure what your point is here.

[cbozeman]

Yeah... and it's largely worked. That's the reason it's employed in the first place.

[rvnx]

In that world, we should store that in a blockchain for more efficiency, rather than a csv file.

[0xbadcafebee]

The whole point is for it to be disorganized and flexible. A blockchain is way too organized and rigid

[adolph]

otoh, a blockchain is also immutable unless you take out the entire thing, you can't just alter previous transactions without invalidating subsequent ones

[mannyv]

You can't access the blockchain when the power + internet are gone.

[adolph]

Very true, and also true for the compared technology, csv. In a larger sense, the two are complementary and wouldn't be mutually exclusive.

[plorg]

My state has a telecommunications network that was responsible for bringing the Internet to schools and libraries in the 90s. As a result many of these institutions were assigned domain names under ia.us, which the network controls on behalf of the state. The state government gets the state.ia.us subdomain, libraries got their own second-level subdomain under lib.ia.us, schools under k12.ia.us (private schools under another level pvt.k12.ia.us, although their website now lists that as pvtk12.ia.us; my elementary school domain of the first form still resolves), community colleges cc.ia.us and so on. I didn't know better at the time and assumed the whole US was organized that way. In any case no one liked having [e-mail] as their email address so most of the schools bought a second .net or .org domain.

I know my high school moved off the ICN T1 service in the early 2000s, but it looks like the domain records are still maintained, as the old address still resolves correctly.

Edit: see EvanAnderson below I didn't realize this was ~formalized as an RFC and actually was relatively standard across states, I assume for the same reasons very few public entities were using these hierarchal addresses as their primary by the time I really got online in the mid 2000s.

[arscan]

URLs are a part of the UX of websites. The domain often represents the first interaction between the user and the site. Domains that follow a strict hierarchical structure that aligns to some real-world hierarchy may not be the best first interaction with the user, or at least not in the opinion of those that are creating the site.

So, I think it’s natural for site owners to want this freedom. Then it comes down to whether there should be constraints forced on them or not by policy for some greater good. In the US, generally, central planning on this type of stuff isn’t really part of the culture.

[nothrabannosir]

Oh I thought you were going the exact opposite direction with that reasoning. A hierarchical url is good because it immediately establishes trust and provenance. Currently I never know whether I’m dealing with a for profit entity pretending to be governmental, or actual government.

But maybe that is part of the culture?

[arscan]

To technical people, sure. I don’t think the average person knows about provenance rules of subdomains though and how it’s useful… it’s more just a bunch of symbols they don’t care about.

And we understand the threats here… a very real problem is someone forgetting to renew one of these .org or .com domains (maybe the person that maintains it retired) and a malicious actor grabs it after expiration, stands up a scraped copy, and uses it to collect parking ticket payments or whatever.

I was actually thinking a bit more about the diversity of domain names under .gov, though I realize now that the parent comment I replied to was about .org and .coms. I think you get a bit of those provenance assurances if they are under .gov, as a practical matter it’s harder for malicious actors to own one of those than one under other tlds. And then instead of forcing a strict taxonomy that is mostly for the benefit of the infrastructure maintainers (very enterprise software), there is freedom to use a name that makes the most sense for the target user.

[cbozeman]

No, people need to learn how the Internet is organized and named. It's the same as learning the Dewey Decimal system so you can navigate your local library.

It should be taught in school exactly the same way. It's more important in the year 2025 to know that, than it is the Dewey Decimal system, which is still taught in a majority of schools for some reason.

People should know what it means to be connected to a .gov, .com, .org, .edu, .net, .mil site, etc. I know we have a lot of new TLDs, but knowing the originals should be a bare minimum. This isn't rocket science, hell, most of these domains are almost self-explanatory even as three letter codes.

[BobaFloutist]

Nobody knows the Dewey Decimal system, they know subject/author/title hierarchy at best, and even then given the ambiguity in subjects they often resort to the computers or librarians to search the catalogue and get directions.

[sybercecurity]

The .gov TLD was only for the Federal government in the past, it was opened up later to state/local governments. By then, some had already had <something>.<state>.us, or some other TLD. Most probably thought it was too troublesome to migrate over. That and the fees were more than any other gTLD (though not now).

[xattt]

Canadian domain names in the 90s also followed this newsgroup-like syntax: <website>.<city>.<province>.ca

At least one site (transit.toronto.on.ca) still has an active domain in that format, even though it’s not operationally-related by the City of Toronto.

It’s quaint that folks wanted to root their web presence in their physical world.

[LorenzoGood]

Like ouac.on.ca.

[xattt]

Tangential: toronto.edu redirects to U of T.

Major early 1990s vibes and the woody smell of the graduate computer labs.

[LorenzoGood]

Hopefully I get to go to Toronto lol.

[kube-system]

It isn't really that strange, it mirrors how decentralized and fragmented government in the US actually is.

[duxup]

I can understand some local government official "I don't know how to validate things to get a gov ... but I do know how to register a domain" and it's .com.

[cbozeman]

Then they should use this amazing tool we have that contains damn near the entirety of accumulated knowledge of Humanity called The Internet.

You don't even have to search any longer. You can literally ask a conversational AI, like this...

How would a local government official obtain a domain name with .gov for their governmental office?

ChatGPT said:

A local government official can obtain a .gov domain for their governmental office by following these steps:

1. Verify Eligibility .gov domains are restricted to U.S. government entities, including federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments. Local government agencies, such as city or county offices, are eligible. 2. Choose a Domain Name The domain name should clearly reflect the governmental entity (e.g., cityname.gov or countyname.gov). Avoid abbreviations or acronyms unless commonly recognized. 3. Obtain Authorization The request must be authorized by the highest-ranking official of the government entity (e.g., mayor, county administrator). They will need to submit a letter verifying the legitimacy of the request. 4. Submit an Application Visit domains.dotgov.gov to apply. Create an account and complete the application form. Upload the signed authorization letter. 5. Await Review and Approval The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reviews all applications. If approved, the domain is registered, and the office will receive account credentials. 6. Configure DNS and Website Once the domain is active, configure DNS settings. Set up email services and website hosting as needed. 7. Maintain Compliance Ensure the domain is actively used for government purposes. Keep contact information updated to prevent domain suspension. There is no cost for registering a .gov domain as of April 2021, since it is funded by the federal government.

There is literally no excuse for not knowing what to do in the year 2025.

[andelink]

Not the best instructions given. I'd erase it all and simply say: Go to https://get.gov/domains and hit the "Start a domain request" button.

[dragonwriter]

There was a period right when lots of entities decided that they needed a web address where the US government was making an effort to get everyone who wasn't the federal government (including local and state governments, federal contractors, etc.) off of .gov and stop new non-federal registrants to .gov (I don't think it lasted long, but I distinctly remember it occurring), there was a defined hierarchy for local governments under .us, but most local governments weren't aware of it, and I'm not sure the registrars they went to dealt with .us domains, and people ended up just doing whatever...

[mixdup]

> Strange how the US has such a mishmash

We have so many subdivisions, and in many/most cases there's no accountability (by design) from one level to the next

Feds can't force states to use .gov addresses, and most states don't force counties or cities to use whatever the state's top level is. Some do, or try to encourage, but it's like herding cats and when there's 50 states and a couple thousand counties, and then tens of thousands of cities that all have varying levels of authority to enforce anything on the next level down it's never, ever going to be uniform for us

[belorn]

Looking at the list I wold assume that the majority of those are not the "primary" domain, and indeed if I click around randomly, most of them redirect to somewhere else.

[kccqzy]

The most amusing example is https://gooutsideandplay.org/ which doesn't look like an official government website at all. And yet it's the official website for county parks in Santa Clara county. Anywhere in the world one can go outside and play and yet this vanity domain is restricted to Santa Clara county parks.

[dave881]

I assume that this is the result of a few quirks here in the US

- Lots of things came online in the US before ccTLDs were common, and are still rare for US based orgs

- US states have quite a bit of freedom in how they communicate with their citizens.

- US states vary greatly in services provided and population (from ~600,000 up to ~40M)

[__MatrixMan__]

It makes it pretty difficult to tell whether your parking ticket is a phishing attempt.

[kevin_thibedeau]

That hierarchy exists for US states. It just is rarely employed because politicians and administrators don't know how the Internet works and insist on vanity domains that can't be easily discerned from scammers.

[Operyl]

It’s not terribly difficult to get a gov domain, it’s just much easier to do an ordinary one. Smaller towns and cities outsource to cheap WYSIWYG type builders that also include a domain so it’s really simple to just go that route too.

[Mountain_Skies]

It can get quite unprofessional at that level. There was a small suburb in our metro whose .com domain was an insult against the core city. I'm sure they thought it was funny but eventually it did get changed to the town and state name.

[FinnKuhn]

Wait until you see the situation in Germany. Everything uses just a normal .de domain, no special TLD for government institutions at all.

[9dev]

It’s awful, really. Some domain names are so awfully chosen, they sound like scams. Take the government program for financial support to students, called BAföG. Here’s a bunch of domains related to that:

  * bafoeg.de
  * bafoeg-digital.de
  * bafoegonline.bva.bund.de

Or, the worst one in my opinion: the German federal ID card has an integrated RFID chip that requires a PIN to unlock. You can use that chip to authenticate against a few government services online, which rely on the PIN as proof of identity. The PIN can be reset using a OTP sent via snail mail.

Q: where you you think can you order that letter?

  a) Bundesdruckerei.de
  b) personalausweisportal.de
  c) pin-ruecksetzbrief-bestellen.de
  d) bmi.bund.de?

A: yes. It’s c. Seriously.

[bombcar]

Healthcare billing in the USA has gone this way. You're going to see emails from my-doctor-billing.com directing you to hospital-pay-site.biz and they're all totally legitimate.

It's nuts.