Are any of those not run by the archive.today guy? That site has like a dozen aliases.

I own a .name domain that is an initialism for my wife and I, and Namecheap never gave me any problems adding a record for vpn.mwai.name, for example. In fact I never even realized you could register a 3LD, much less that this was the intended(?) behavior.

The idea is:

* .name is open for everybody

* a company called "Global Name Registry" scooped up a BUNCH of common last names, including fraser.name

* Global Name Registry then sold access to neil.fraser.name for far cheaper than the fraser.name domain would cost on its own; someone else could also buy john.fraser.name or jane.fraser.name, so the single fraser.name domain that they owned could have dozens of customers associated to it. They worked with ICANN to allow each domain to have its own registered owner.

* The article in the OP bought neil.fraser.name and has used it for years

* Verisign bought Global Name Registry; later they realized, hey, we're sorta not making a lot of money on this idea, and we're spending a lot of time/resources maintaining these domains "for cheap" and chasing renewals, and not scooping up more customers. Let's just stop it and stop paying for fraser.name and the potentially hundreds of other domains we own.

* Neil Fraser, not the only Fraser in the world, is upset because he might lose the domain he's had forever

So one CAN buy the mwai.name domain, as you have, and continue using vpn.mwai.name just fine. It's just you can't "officially" start selling out these subdomains as a separate registrar entry.

Is this quite accurate? My reading was that Global Name Registry was the registrar for the .name TLD, with Verisign providing DNS and email forwarding services, but that for several years GNR would only grant registration to third-level domains, then would set up corresponding second-level domains and email forwarding.

I guess in practice it doesn't make much of a difference for me anymore, I registered mwai.name 20 years after they began allowing second-level registrations and more than 15 years after GNR was sold to Verisign. So presumably GNR's concept was long-abandoned by the time I made my registration (which was, to be truthful, mostly based on mwai.name being the cheapest domain with the initialism). I was more curious about the implications of having held a second-level domain, whether it could have caused trouble for me or for a different person who held a tertiary domain. But also my registrar at least doesn't seem to allow tertiary domain registration for .name.

Any any case, nothing in OP or any of its referenced sources suggest Verisign is giving up .name. rather they will stop accepting and serving tertiary registrations, so if Neil wants to keep his domain he or another beneficent Fraser will need to register the fraser.name domain and register the subdomains for neil, joe, jill, or whichever other fraser currently owns a tertiary domain. The same would be the case for anyone else who still held a tertiary domain. Perhaps Verisign or the registrars who work with them might be able to migrate the registrations of anyone with these domains, particularly in what I suspect are most cases where there is a single tertiary registration under a secondary domain. Perhaps offer fraser.name to Neil and he can add his own subdomains.

I was intending to replying to a different comment on the above thread, sorry if this made my previous reply a bit incoherent.

Oh, I get it, I guess the question is what will Verisign do with the surname.name domains. They could be auctioned individually or by bulk, and somebody could buy them. But in essence they are exercising their right as a 2ld holder (Global Name Registry) to stop providing service.

This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is only after verisign bought the 2ld holder that they became the holders and are now proceeding to extinguishing them after embracing and extending.

Might be an anti-trust case. Like textbook clear-cut case. IANAL, this is not legal advice.

> This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is only after verisign bought the 2ld holder that they became the holders and are now proceeding to extinguishing them after embracing and extending.

Why should I care as the customer? If I buy a for-life subscription plan and the company gets bought, can they just not honor it because it’s a different company now? Maybe they should check which promises they are buying when acquiring other companies.

You should post it as a top level comment, I finally understood the situation exactly here.

Cowsup is mostly correct, but GNR didn't snap up subdomains, they owned .name originally with the explicit intention of providing domains by name and initially did not accept second-level registrations. Verisign owns all of .name and will simply stop accepting or serving third-level registrations.

Thank you for the clarification. Not sure if it was the author's intent but they made it sound like .name will cease to exist.

No they didn't. The only way to interpret it that way is to only read the title (i.e., be a typical HN denizen) and stop there, not even getting to

> On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the '.name' hierarchy in order to simplify their administration.

My mental model suggests that makes it more likely to have been crapped out by Claude.

If the book really is difficult to come by I don't know that I'd prefer it to only survive as a statistical approximation that can be mostly retrieved if you utter the correct incantation. The AI trainers don't care about the book. It's just a commodified stream of words.

An Iron Mountain employee is quoted in this article saying basically that.

I get the sense that people who spend all day interacting with software can start to see every interaction, especially in online text platforms, as a kind of API or user interface. You might learn to instrumentalize your interactions and relationships with people. Chatbots, including coding agents, only reinforce this kind of behavior, as they don't have the kind of limits of patience or of bodily or emotional needs that humans have.

The zip files can be up to 50GB as well, but they recently changed something on the backend so that if you do use the zip option you may still get however many 50GB files then maybe a 1MB, a 7kB, and a 1GB file, I assume because of the way they parallelize the tasks. I don't know if the tar option behaves in the same way.

Oh, interesting - I wonder if that's new. The last time I checked (granted, a few years ago), it was limited to something much smaller.

I have noticed that the tar files toward the end tend to be smaller, but they still typically weigh in at multiple gigs apiece - 37, 14, etc.

Flock has also set themselves up on a way to intentionally make both themselves and their customers largely unaccountable to the public through legal channels.

That area (Taymyr Peninsula) looks crazy remote and inaccessible. It would be wild to be there, let alone experience an eclipse there. I think it might even be illegal to do so without a permit, though I'm also curious what enforcement looks like in an area so far from what we think of as normal infrastructure.

> I think it might even be illegal to do so without a permit

Do what, just visit? Seems to be public land as far as I can see, and very empty on top of that, I don't think anyone would mind you being there to see an eclipse :)

It still started in russia though, even if nobody was there to see it

Oh, sure, this is just my rumination on experiencing something that seems so existential in such a solitary place.

Laughable excuse for a country that will declare a gambling company systemically important to the economy.