• @[email protected]
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    391 year ago

    Well, this is just weird. When I was migrating from Reddit to this fediverse world I chose .ml and thought it was short for “machine learning” which seemed as a cool domain for me at the time.

    • @[email protected]
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      481 year ago

      FYI, two letter TLDs are country/region/jurisdiction specific. There’s an ISO standard for that.

      • .tv Tuvalu
      • .me Montenegro
      • .fm (Federation of) Micronesia

      Some countries append additional modifiers to classify their uses:

      • .uk United Kingdom
      • .co.uk Company

      Three or more are generic (traditional or new)

      • .com, .net, .org, …

      In some cases, Uncle Sam said “first!” and it stuck.

      • .edu Education (MURICA)
      • .mil Military (MURRICA)
      • .gov Government (MURRRICA)

      Just like what happens with Mali, what some silicon valley hipsters decide as a ‘fun’ acronym is just that, a fun thought. If the corresponding government decides to take away a specific domain, they probably can.

      • @[email protected]
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        251 year ago

        .mil Military (MURRICA)

        That is what made this whole .ml problem. Some people have apparently accidentally leaked American state secrets to Mali by typo.

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          That’s a poor excuse. If something is secret or higher it has a different TLD. The SIPRnet uses .smil for example. There are also tools at the boundaries that don’t allow going from SIPR to NIPR unless they meet specific criteria. Basically you can only leak those secrets accidentally if they were already on a system they shouldn’t have been on.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 year ago

            Additionally, competent IT would make this fuck up impossible. I’m shocked that they didn’t whitelist TLDs and block all others.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          The registar that operates .ml, .tk, .ga, and some others has been having difficulty.

          In March they got sued by Meta for operating domains with phishing operations. Their operations have been spotty for the past several months ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194555 ). They lost the .ga domain in June ( https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-freenom-ga-domains-are-taken-down-by-registry/77131 ).

          The issue with army.ml and navy.ml was just the most recent incident and may have accelerated things, but only by days (maybe weeks) as the agreement that the registrar had with Mali was for 10 years and expired the other day ( https://domainincite.com/28897-freenom-is-losing-another-cctld-after-collecting-military-emails ).

          This isn’t a new thing - from the article:

          Zuurbier said he’s been pestering the US government and military for the last 10 years to get them to do something about the problem. The military told the FT it blocks outgoing emails to .ml domains from its own network. There’s presumably little it can do about emails sent from other domains.

          its just that with the end of the contract between Mali and the registrar, the military emails got in the news as now army.ml and navy.ml are controlled by the Mali government rather than the CEO of the registrar.

      • @[email protected]
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        181 year ago
        • .edu Education (MURICA)

        .edu is not only american. For example I know many schools in France have .edu domains and emails, and I believe it’s the case in many more countries.

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        Thanks for the clarification. If this instance goes down please someone start an ‘‘lemmy.ai’’ instance. I want to follow the same logic that I went with since the beginning.

    • livus
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      1 year ago

      No, it’s Mali.

      The rumour is that lemmy devs chose it to mean “marxist leninist” but I think it’s more likely they wanted a free domain name.

      • ghost_laptop
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        401 year ago

        The rumor is fake, the devs have said it multiple times. If they would have wanted to do some funny Marxism meme they would have used .su

        • @[email protected]
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          81 year ago

          Maybe they didn’t choose it for that, but to be fair they are definitely and admittedly Marxist-Leninists

          • ghost_laptop
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            241 year ago

            Yes, as there are plenty of other developers who are openly liberals or some other flavour of capitalism. You don’t need to agree with the developers political choices all the time to use their software.

          • @[email protected]
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            -21 year ago

            Yeah they are, so if they did choose .ml for that reason they would have no problem admitting it also. So it’s pretty clear that they just wanted a free domain.

    • Zyratoxx
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      1 year ago

      I mean, I knew it was a country top level domain but I was told Dessalines intended the “ml” as an abbreviation for “marxist-leninist”

      • ghost_laptop
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        231 year ago

        That is not true, he has said multiple times it was used because it was free.

        • Zyratoxx
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          1 year ago

          Some Lemmygrad dude bragged about that… Should have known it was wrong.

          Anyways, thx for the clarification