China has a million unicode domains (慕田峪长城.网址 is the tourist site for the Great Wall), Japan has barely more than zero. That difference puzzled me until I saw the Japanese magazines below (posted by Derek Guy).
Clearly, the Japanese learn enough A-Z in primary school that ordinary magazines can use a lot of Latin letters, which implies that their readers are also comfortable with Latin domain names and email addresses.
I couldn't understand why so much spam got through the filters.
Yesterday and today I checked 667 addresses that have tried to send me spam in the past days. 661 of the 667 are listed by the Spamhaus Zen list right now, but Google's public DNS resolvers report that only 33-74 are listed, so Spamhaus is effectively neutered.
Google offers two IPv4 and two IPv6 addresses. All four report similar numbers, and the results have been largely stable over the past 24 hours.
A smaller RBL operator does not suffer, so I expect it's some sort of rate limiting by Google. DoS mitigation gone wrong.
Ever since I moved to Munich, I've been struck by the large number of TLAs in Germany, and also by the strange subdomains.
.de has no official subdomains, so people have invented both geographical subdomains and topical subdomains. Good examples are -muenchen.de for anyone located in Munich (bit-muenchen.de, bja-muenchen.de, bjv-muenchen.de, bk-muenchen.de and so on) and -derfilm.de for movies (austinpowers-derfilm.de, etc).
Recently I came across a complete list of .de domains, so I started counting. Which TLA is the most popular? Which German "city subdomain" has the most domains?
All the TLAs are registed. When the natural TLA is taken, people have different strategies:
Add hyphens. There are 8111 domains like t-l-a.de.
Add -web or -online to make sure that people understand that not only does the company have a domain, it's even online! […More…]