A domain hack is an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full "name" or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.
For example, blo.gs makes use of the TLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell "blogs", chronolo.gy uses the TLD .gy (Guyana) to spell "chronology", and tel.ly uses the TLD .ly (Libya) to spell "telly" (a popular British slang term for television).
The third-level domains del.icio.us and cr.yp.to make use of the SLDs icio.us and yp.to from the TLDs .us (United States) and .to (Tonga) to spell "delicious" and "crypto" respectively.
In this context, the "hack" represents a trick (as in programming), not an exploit or break-in (as in security).
Shorter domain names
Domain hacks offer the ability to produce extremely short domain names. For example, blo.gs has a total of only five letters, versus the blogs.com (eight letters). Domain hacks default to the omission of the www. prefix, with the side effect of shortening the domain name, as every letter is taken into account as the site's title.
This makes them potentially valuable as redirectors (like i.am, which redirects to FortuneCity's V3 service) and as base domains from which to delegate subdomains.
History
On Monday, November 23, 1992, inter.net was registered.[1] In the 1990s, several domain names ending in "pla.net" were registered. On Friday, May 3, 2002, icio.us was registered to create del.icio.us, the most visited domain hack,citation needed with the prepending of the "del" third-level domain.
Yahoo! acquired blo.gs[2] on June 14, 2005, and del.icio.us[3] on December 9, 2005.
Who.is is a whois server, indicating the registered ownership information of a domain. It was established June 12, 2002 and registered to an address in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Whocalled.us, a consumer-complaint site listing telephone numbers of known telemarketers, was first registered in 2005.
On 11 September 2007, name servers for .me were delegated by IANA to the Government of Montenegro, with a two-year transition period for existing .yu names to be transferred to .me. One of the first steps taken in deploying .me online was to create .its.me as a domain space for personal sites.
Se.cx
The shock site Goatse.cx introduced a domain hack consisting of a domain name ending with "se" and the domain .cx (Christmas Island). On January 14, 2004, the Christmas Island Internet Administration revoked this domain registration for acceptable use policy violation.[4] Similar names have been used for parody sites such as oralse.cx or analse.cx. In some cases, .cz (Czech Republic) or .kz (Kazakhstan) are used instead of .cx.
Other languages
A fad amongst French-speakers was to register their names in the Niue TLD .nu, which led to "so-and-so.NU", which in French and Portuguese means "nude" or "naked"; however, as of 2007, Niue authorities have revoked many of these domain names. The handful that remain are joke domains without actual nudity. Likewise, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish speakers sometimes use .nu, because it means "now" in these languages.
Another French-speaking example is teu.be, where "teube" can be translated as "dumb" or "dick" in English. Voyez.ça ("see that") is a collection of JPEGs and Louez.ça ("rent that") is a listing of rental properties in Montreal, Canada. "Aucun.info", which means "no information", is used as a base for FreeDNS subdomains.
German examples are Schokola.de (chocolate), Autom.at or fals.ch (wrong).
In Dutch, company.it stands for "information technology company".
Some organisations situated in Switzerland use TLDs to specifically refer to their canton (like the Belgian TLD .be for the Canton of Berne).
An Afrikaans example is dieInter.net, "die" meaning "the" in English ("the internet"). Email addresses in this domain can then be expressed as "user at the internet".
A Portuguese example is vai.lá ("go there"), a redirector much like go.to in English or cest.là ("it's there") in French. There are also a handful of sites on subdomains of vai.nu, which means "go nude". Other examples include notici.as, (as «noticias» means "news") and dicionar.io (where dicíonario means "dictionary").
In Spanish, « redes » means "networks" so red.es is used as the site of Spain's domain-name registry operator. The site educ.ar ("To educate") is the Argentine government education portal.
In Russian, net (as «nyet») means "no", so there are many domains in the format "something.net".
In Czech, Polish and Slovak, to means "it", so there are many domains in the format "do-something.to" (e.g., zrobie.to, meaning "I will do it").
In Slovenian, the najdi.si ("Find it yourself") is a popular local search engine.
A Gibraltarian example is gibtele.com - The phone company in Gibraltar is called Gibtelecom and they have used the .com to their advantage.
Hungarian domain hacks include domains that use the Moroccan top level domain .ma (meaning "today"); an example is magyarorszag.ma ("Hungary.today"). Other examples are a social networking site mutasd.be ("introduce him/her") and the localized personal email policy site of five.sentenc.es: Öt.mond.at.
A Serbian example is bankerinter.net - an ISP based in Niš.
A Indian example is tuticor.in - a web portal for the famous port city Tuticorin in India.
A Chinese example is http://hen.huang.hen.bao.li/. "Hěn huáng hěn báolí" is a popular expression on Internet in China, which means "Very erotic, very violent" in Mandarin.
There are few Italian domain hacks too: for example, vai.li (meaning go there) offers free redirection service. An Italian IRC network was running at the address chung.li in the past, named after the famous Chinese karate practitioner. Another curious example is a weblog running at alber.to, which owner's first name is Alberto. The Italian .it domain itself allows several domain hacks, too.
See also
References
External links
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