For some reasons, work has taken me to investigate current usage of Internationalized country code top-level domain. Something I came across all the way back almost two decades ago.

I remember it was a big thing being promoted by NICs. As a web engineer, I have also found it to be an interesting technical endeavor (with Punycode and etc) and spent my own effort to make sure the <IDN>.tw site I managed at the time also resolves on <IDN>.台灣, given that per NIC rule they auto-register you with the IDN ccTLD when you register for a second level ccTLD domain. Edit: I misremember this.

Fast forward to today: I was struggling to find a live website that resolves on an IDN ccTLD hostname. I no longer handled that <IDN>.台灣 website and my successor broke it (probably because of me failing to document my work.) The university websites that I know of at the time all stopped resolving on their IDN ccTLD hostnames. Hell, even the TWNIC website doesn’t resolve on twnic.台灣!

Eventually through the wonder of Wikipedia, I found the one website that resolves: уміц.укр, Ukrainian Network Informational Centre. It is good enough for me even though it won’t connect over HTTPS.

Ukrainians never disappoint.

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

This piece is a good history lesson of why XMPP failed to gain momentum and a cautionary tale on how companies can commandeer open, “public good” protocols.

My experience with XMPP was limited: in an unpublished project, I wired GMail to MSN Messenger though the protocol. I know enough to know XMPP as a precursor of things being re-invented (my other favorite that falls into category is NNTP, and even e-mails to a certain extent.)

From the post, it sounds like the danger arise of an intentional commercial protocol fork that designed to compete with the original protocol. I wonder if there are things to learn (like governing model) from protocols that so far had survived risk of fragmentation.

Something to dig further.

When people talk about LLMs being at its “Netscape Moment”, this is the thing that ponders me the most.

Tristan Harris, which I covered his early work, timewellspent.io, and Aza Raskin, discuss, quote, “how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world.“

The Internet already died once, and it, and the remaining human creativity, may very well die again.