Re: [ATM] AOL woes

["Donald Good" <donald.good@comcast.net>]

Off ATM topics, but may explain some AOL and other ISP woes.

Bob, nav.to is a Tonga domain.  It has become popular for some countries to
market their assigned country code when they can make interesting domain
names from them.  Others you "May" have seen are .tv (Tuvalu) for television
and .co (Colombia) as an abbreviation for Company.  However, advertising for
these "custom" or "personalized" domains rarely identify the associated
country.

The ending after the last dot is called a top level domain or TLD.  ALL 2
letter endings are reserved for country codes (an exception being made for
.eu which is reserved for the European Union) and are referred to as ccTLDs.
Currently, there are 248 ccTLDs.  There are 676 two letter combinations, but
only the 248 ccTLDs are available.  To list a very few are: .us, .uk, .ru,
.jp, .cn, .de, and .fr (no slight intended for not including all of them
here).  How these ccTLDs are used is up to the Internet authority in each of
those countries, including where the domain names derived from them are
resolved.  Some ISPs may feel that some countries do not handle their ccTDL
with sufficient security and may block communication to or from them, which
is within the rights of the ISP.  For a complete list, see
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm

The 6 original non-country top level domains (3 letters) were .com, .edu,
.gov (US government only), .mil (US military only), .net, and .org to which
recently have been added other 3 or more letter TLDs.  For a complete list,
see
http://www.iana.org/gtld/gtld.htm
These two lists contain all the TLDs that are currently recognized by the
Internet.  Other networks such as Bitnet or private networks may recognize
others.

I tried to find information about nav.to, but a search on various whois
services gave "not found" or indicated Tonic, (referring to www.tonic.to)
which is the governing registrar for .to domains.  Tonic states that
information on .to domains is private and no whois service is available.
While this is also within the rights of country code authorities, hiding
ownership of domains is generally considered bad practice (more easily
allowing spammers to operate) and may be why some ISPs block them.  Going to
www.nav.to directly is relying on the owner/operator of the domain to report
truthfully about itself which is "circular reasoning" so there is no
guarantee of the results.

In this case, I was redirected to home.v3.com, an ISP which belongs to
FortuneCity.com, Inc. identified on its site and in whois services.  A list
of its domains is at http://www.v3.com/sub-domain-list.shtml showing not
only many .to domains, but also some .at (Austria) and .by (Belarus) which
make "readable" web page names.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: atm-bounces@atmlist.net 
> [mailto:atm-bounces@atmlist.net] On Behalf Of Bob May
> Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2005 12:33 PM
> To: atm@atmlist.net
> Subject: Re: [ATM] AOL woes
> 
> Say What???  Where did you get that one?  I do know that 
> there is a guy sitting on several versions of Bob May in 
> Texas but didn't know of anything from Tonga//  All that is 
> mine is the two that are listed below with the nav.to my 
> earlier one and that is a Fortune City account.
> Bob May
> bobmay at nethere.com
> http: slash /nav.to slash bobmay
> http: slash /bobmay dot astronomy.net
> Addresses have been munged up to keep spammers from bothering me.
> replace the obvious words with the proper character.
> Thank you for your understanding!
> 

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