I have a story on using weird/fishy/phishy TLDs: Recently my colleagues and I started collecting information on all the available compression methods for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS, a popular method for 3d scene representation). There were quite a few works in the area with naming conflicts already, so I thought to give it a unique short name to refer to - and came up with “3dgs.zip”.
A few days later we started putting together a web page, and I noticed that .zip actually is available as a TLD. Impulsively I bought the domain, https://3dgs.zip/, launched it and printed it on a few shirts before heading off to a conference. Felt a bit weird that there is a .zip TLD, but I was in a rush and I didn’t ponder its existence any further.
But strange things started happening: setting up the domain for a GitHub page worked, but in the process downloaded a 0 Byte file called “3dgs.zip”, when submitting content one of the GitHub.com forms. And a few days later colleagues told me they had trouble accessing the site. After some DNS sleuthing and then some back-and-forth with our IT dept, it turned out that our organization has blocked the whole TLD - for every Windows user, out of phishing concerns of people being confused.
I’m no security person, so the reasoning felt a bit weird to me, as I guess the .zip TLD can’t hurt anybody; downloading a .zip might, which you can attach to any link name? But in any case I wasn’t able to find any .zip URL with a purpose, but lots of Reddit posts of angry sysadmins who bemoaned the influx of terrible TLDs with mostly phishing use and vowed to block them all. So they probably have a point in downright blocking the whole TLD.
Now I’m sitting here with my .zip url. Had to revert the page to use github.io, so people in my organization (and similarly thinking ones) would be able to access it. Guess I’m cured for a while, won’t be using any novelty TLDs anytime soon…
A few days later we started putting together a web page, and I noticed that .zip actually is available as a TLD. Impulsively I bought the domain, https://3dgs.zip/, launched it and printed it on a few shirts before heading off to a conference. Felt a bit weird that there is a .zip TLD, but I was in a rush and I didn’t ponder its existence any further.
But strange things started happening: setting up the domain for a GitHub page worked, but in the process downloaded a 0 Byte file called “3dgs.zip”, when submitting content one of the GitHub.com forms. And a few days later colleagues told me they had trouble accessing the site. After some DNS sleuthing and then some back-and-forth with our IT dept, it turned out that our organization has blocked the whole TLD - for every Windows user, out of phishing concerns of people being confused.
I’m no security person, so the reasoning felt a bit weird to me, as I guess the .zip TLD can’t hurt anybody; downloading a .zip might, which you can attach to any link name? But in any case I wasn’t able to find any .zip URL with a purpose, but lots of Reddit posts of angry sysadmins who bemoaned the influx of terrible TLDs with mostly phishing use and vowed to block them all. So they probably have a point in downright blocking the whole TLD.
Now I’m sitting here with my .zip url. Had to revert the page to use github.io, so people in my organization (and similarly thinking ones) would be able to access it. Guess I’m cured for a while, won’t be using any novelty TLDs anytime soon…