Soviet Union TLD Owners Snub ICANN 306
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has up a post about ICANN's latest decisions about country-code TLDs. The body is making an effort to tackle the problem of Yugoslavia's .yu outliving the country by over a decade but is far from getting its way with the Soviet Union's domain .su. Around 2,500 new .su sites are created every year despite ICANN ordering its retirement — the disgruntled .su registrars have announced an 80 per cent price cut in the price of .su domains in response. 'It makes the much-publicized wrangles over the ".xxx" domain seem tiny by comparison. And it convinces me of the need to reevaluate the existence of the US Dept of Commerce-backed non-profit organisation that is ICANN. The current squabbles are petty compared to the diplomatic arguments that TLDs could cause. An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?'"
Cue the ISR queue (Score:2, Funny)
Must Resist! Will fading! Must be strong. NNNRRRRR!!!! NOOOoooooo!!!
In Soviet Russia TLD discontinues YOU!
Re:Cue the ISR queue (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed!
Sure! (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely! They'll be glad to crack the whip on registrars of non-countries like the Soviet Union and Taiwan.
Re: UN absolutely? (Score:2, Interesting)
Top level domains should be about routing traffic competently. I do not care if the USSR or Yugoslavia or Aland or the Faroe Islands or Antarctica are countries or not. You have to balance traffic routing as engineering efficiency and some ability to legally control the activities of the us
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Ok, some pretty basic mistakes here. First, you should never take anything on Wikipedia as gospel. A Wikipedia article is only as credible, reliable, or objective as the last person to edit it.
Secondly, when you read this kind of info, you need to read stuff a little more carefully, regardless of the source. The article has some con
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It is a common misconception among people who have never
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http://www.nic.ru/en/ [www.nic.ru]
the fee is 3000 rubles (about $120) per year so it's a relatively expensive TLD to register in.
I hope commierat.su isn't taken!
It wasn't when I just checked but having posted your intention on
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This takes the whole geography absurdity out of everything, since
Re:A rose by any other name. (Score:5, Informative)
I would very much like to know the story of how x.com goes to paypal.com ?"
Two letter domains were never an issue. They're all taken from aa to zz.
The single letter ones are a special case. It went like this:
Nobody ever registered one. At some point a few leaked out. q, s and x I think. At this time there were about 800,000
So, Postel put a hold on single letter domains. They appear as "reserved by the IANA" (never mind IANA didn't actually exist then, that is it had no legal personality, it was just an acronym Postel liked to use).
The theory was, if the root or tld servers melted down under the load of a million com named then there were these 26 one letter domains that could rescue is. I'm sure yahoo woudn't mind changing everything to yahoo.y.com.
There are about 40 million or so names in the com zone now. Yet still the single letter domains are reserved by ICANN ("because they always have been and Jons dead and we don't really know what we're doing") and any tld string must be three or more letters.
x.com was a papypal competitor. It was actually the good one and I was pretty pissed when paypal bought or consumed x.com. x.com gave me a card and a check book. Paypal just gave me grief.
x.com bought the domain off the guy who registered it originally. q.net is probably still for sale.
What do you mean, non-countries?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who is still officially a citizen of the Soviet Union, I must vehemently disagree with your classification!
Re:The Soviet Union exists no more (Score:5, Interesting)
The Uzbek state issues them an "residence permit for persons without citizenship". In Russian it's called "vid na zhitelstvo". This is a little gray book that looks like a passport but isn't one. Regardless of the name, it has an entry called "citizenship", where it officially says "Citizen of the Soviet Union", because that's the last regular passport these persons happened to be holding.
Apatrides (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that the 'nationality' field says "Soviet Union"... Well, it should be treated as a
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That's not entirely true. Although I am a Soviet citizen, I am also eligible (by birth) for the Russian citizenship, so all I would have to do is go to the embassy and apply for it. The reason I haven't is that it costs a lot of money.
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Absolutely not.
You want to take it away from the silly US Department of COMmerce and give it to the UN?
Isn't that kind of like saying "I don't like this splinter in my foot so I'll drive a bloody big nai
The Palestinian Occupied Territories /have/ a TLD (Score:5, Informative)
Pardon me for interrupting your rant, but Palestine was allocated the .ps country code in October 1999.
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Re:Sure! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem of sharing a forum with all the nations like the UN, is that until world peace is achieved, necessarily you will find nations there that are not friendly to each other.
The alternative is no forum, no talks and almost certainly more wars. The trouble with cheapshot armchair UN critics is that they never propose anything constructive or useful as a replacement.
Yes Syria is a nation with a poor record over many issues, too bad it's on the IAEA, but so what. It's not running the thing. Come to think of it, there are very few nations with a clean record on just about anything. AFAIK Israel got its nukes on the sly as well, and the USA is the only nation who has ever used them in anger, killing tens of thousands instantly and to this day.
Sweep your own front door, as some say.
Re:Sure! (Score:5, Informative)
The reason I mentioned Taiwan and not Israel (besides the fact that bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict never does anything but stir up a mindless flamefest) is that the country that makes pretty much everything inside your computer and much of what connects it to my computer does *not* share a "forum with all the nations". It's excluded from the ITU and would be similarly excluded from any UN-run Internet bodies and structures.
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Re:Sure! (Score:5, Interesting)
Taiwan to do this day has complete sovereignty over its territories, which include the island of Taiwan and several other islands, including Jinmen, less than 1 mile from China's mainland at its closest point. It has on its own managed to create and establish a mature democracy with its own currency, stock market, universal health care system, the previously tallest building in the world, a strong education system, has a fairly powerful defensive standing army (with a lot of US hardware - by he way the US still sells hardware to Taiwan and still maintains military ties with them) etc. Not to mention it's also considered one of the economic tigers, is a developed nation, and oh yeah, used to have a seat not only on the UN, but held veto-power in the Security Council.
As an open and free democracy there is indeed considerable debate today regarding the issue of reunification with China or actually declaring independence (there are still some elements of the constitution which declare it the rightful government of China dating back to the civil war). Much of the concern with angering China relates to China having over 1000 short-range missiles, plus several hundred aircraft, sitting just across the Taiwan Straight pointed directly at Taiwan, and people are also very aware of their continuing diminished presence in the world due to political and economic pressure from China. They also often look at the rapid economic growth China is currently experiencing and feel left behind (in truth Taiwan already experienced almost identical growth and their economy is far ahead of China's), and point to the continued pseudo-independence Hong Kong still enjoys to suggest that Taiwan could still maintain its own independence but gain greater access to the world if they choose reunification with China. Many of the people who strongly support this are descendants of people who come over from China in 1949 after the civil war. In comparison, the aborigines living in Taiwan much more strongly identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese and strongly support independence (btw, Taiwan also has its own language, Taiwanese, although the official language is Mandarin Chinese). These two positions can be seen very clearly amongst the two major political parties in Taiwan (split between green and blue).
And to the point, if you took away the .tw domain, I guarantee you Taiwanese would universally be pissed off and support for independence would probably at least in the short-term increase pretty dramatically. Almost everyone in Taiwan has access to the internet, and the .tw domain is often a way of identifying a web site that uses Traditional Chinese characters, as opposed to the Simplified Chinese that China itself uses.
Oh, come off it. (Score:3, Informative)
However, 'independence' in Taiwan is complicated, and means many things to many people: some Taiwanese reject 'independence' because they consider the ROC to be, if not the actual legitimate government of all China generally, at least its cultural heir. And others simply avoid
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Re:Sure! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure why not? I mean if you criticize the US, you get called anti-American.
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Yes - that's how their loony right wing operates with accusations like that just like loony right wings in other countries. Don't worry about it.
Re:Sure! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not in anger. In a declared war. There's a difference. We didn't hate the Japanese, didn't question their right to exist, would much rather not have dropped Fatman and Littleboy. We just wanted them to stop, and the fire raids (which caused more total destruction than both atom bombs combined) weren't enough.
Most people seem to forget that, and believe that we skipped conventional warfare and went straight to nukes because, well, we just couldn't wait to murder thousands of innocent Japanese. As it happens, an absolutely incredible amount of firebombing was done before we even considered nuclear weapons, and if you read about how much devastation that caused you wouldn't be slamming the U.S. because it used a couple of 20 kiloton nuclear devicess (had a modern weapon been used Japan would have ceased to exist.) I'd also like to point out that we haven't used another atomic weapon against any enemy, declared or otherwise, to this very day. Neither did the Soviets, although one has to wonder if they'd have behaved themselves without M.A.D. and the various associated treaties. Hard to know what would have happened, but either way I'd say we swept our front door pretty well, and the rest of the world's too, once the nuclear cat was out of the bag.
Regardless, look past any distaste you may have for the United States or the Bush Misadministration and ask yourself these questions: a. has U.S. management of the Internet (really, of DNS) been sufficiently inept that control should be removed on performance grounds alone, and b. do you really, in your heart of hearts, want the United Nations to run the show? I mean
I mean, DARPA started the ball rolling, and then we let it develop in a way that has worked out to the benefit of, well
Wise up. It's in our best interests that the Internet continue to work well, and right now it is. We need it. So does everyone else. Besides, the only aspect of the network that the U.S. could be consider to "control" is the Domain Name System, and that's just a bunch of distributed servers that any nation could duplicate and run in parallel. Nobody has, because then they would lose the benefits of being part of the global community. This is all politics and posturing, there's no substance here. Sure, some day you may get your wish: the root servers may get confiscated and someone else will be in "control" of the Internet.
Just be careful what you wish for, though
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Never mind that if I remember correctly, the entire Zionist movement
UN.. maybe. (Score:3, Interesting)
oh please let this become the next overdone meme (Score:3, Funny)
US or Canadian?
Re:oh please let this become the next overdone mem (Score:3, Informative)
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Goddammit, that's the point.
xD
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That happened because after WWII the vast majority of air traffic was carried by US and UK airlines.
"Lists (like ISO country codes),"
Which involves no money.
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The ISO country codes are done by a private company in Germany and have nothing to do with the UN.
The UN? Surely you jest... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, let's remove an organization whose competence is questioned and replace it with one whose corruption and incompetence is beyond question. That's like firing Kevin Kostner as a movie director and hiring Uwe Boll instead. Far better ICANN than the crooked, incompetent clowns at the UN. Hell, even the Mafia would be better; then at least the Internet would be run by competent criminals...
Re:The UN? Surely you jest... (Score:4, Insightful)
Refusing to rubber-stamp US wars of aggression doesn't make them corrupt or incompetent. Sure, they are impotent to stop these imperialistic rampages - but that is the the fault of their members, not the organisation itself
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Perhaps not, but do not completely discount the use of force. If there is a line in the sand that your enemies *know* you won't cross then they can always back you down for the price of some sanctions that will further oppress the people that they are already crushing under the heels of their boots while doing nothing to curb the luxuries that your enemies continue to enjoy. The UN is just about worthless at maintain
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All of which rests on a series of subjective definitions (enemies, oppress...) hence the need for international arbitration.
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Enemies: Those that call for the end of your existence and either possess the means to act on those words or are actively searching for the means to act on those words. In the above instance, they would either be the ruling party of a nation-state or possess similar resources as the ruling party of a nation-state.
Oppression: Either ending the existence, or making said existence extremely miserable, of the group of people that is not in control of aforementioned
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Re:The UN? Surely you jest... (Score:4, Insightful)
1- Yes the UN costs money, what a surprise. Nearly all the nations pay for it, though. The US likes not to [globalpolicy.org].
2- Have you never heard of US soldiers [bbc.co.uk] raping [cnn.com] local [www.cbc.ca] women [palgrave-usa.com] ?
3- China, Cuba, etc on UN councils. Learn how they work, representative from every country get to be in them in turns. That doesn't mean they run them. At the UN, you are bound to find people from nations you disagree with in various commissions. The #1 rule of diplomacy is that you keep talking to these people anyway.
4- The UN suck, have never done anything good, etc. The UN weapons inspectors in Iraq got rid of all the WMDs. You are aware the US troops have found none left [msn.com], are you? Speak of the devil, this particular engagement really showcases the skill and competence the USA shows in dealing with world matters when unhindered by useless international bodies, doesn't it ?
Given a choice of labeling you hypocrite or ignorant, I'm afraid I'll have to go with the former.
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Nope. I'm from Texas. And down here in the Republic, we know how to use apostrophes.
I don't think I bitched about the UN costing money, I bitched about the fact that so much of that money gets siphoned off into someone else's pockets. See, for example
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Hello Mr Righteous, I'll assume your from the USA
Nope. I'm from Texas. And down here in the Republic, we know how to use apostrophes.
The apostrophe in the line you quoted is correct - it is an abbreviation of 'I will'. To the vast majority of the world, Texas is only a part of the USA. You might think it a magical place with its own important standing in the world - but to everyone else, it isn't so.
Now, could you try to rewrite your piece without using expletives?/p>
I think that the post that you responded to made some very good points. He didn't say that there was not corruption in the UN. But, as you quite rightly pointed ou
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The US Government?
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What about .tv? (Score:5, Funny)
And what are they going to do when Tuvalu goes under water? Will they discontinue .tv? All its going to take is a foot or so rise in sea level and tuvalu goes glug glug glug ...
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Re:What about .tv? (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, .su is not discontinued even if the country has gone gulag gulag gulag ...
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Why ever retire TLDs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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None of that makes any sense. A domain name system is nothing more than a way of turning a string humans can read into an address a machine can use. There's already lots of alternatives [wikipedia.org] that have sprung up because the TLD situation is an entirely manufactured problem; it's not like there's a critical shortage of letter sequences in the world. Show me the legitimate technical problem with letting some guy
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Now, if the controlling entity becomes defunct, it would be a good choice to leave existing sites alone but disallow new registrations. Otherwise sites might imply legitimacy
unreasonable editorial remark (Score:5, Insightful)
The little bit of editorializing in this submission is a little bit too much. I fail to see how making countries directly responsible will depoliticize the process. ICANN, is a flawed organization, but it is an effort to make management of the domain name system independent of governments and technically driven.
The IEEE is not a UN body; Its voting membership, and its activities are a combination of academics and engineers employed by major technology companies. Given this, I find it hard to see how the "surely" remark in the story summary can even be regarded as reasonable.
I for one would prefer a more technical, more independent ICANN--not a less technical, more political ICANN such as is embodied by the sluggish and highly politicized ITU.
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Very insightful post. I think it's one thing to say the control should somehow be "international", but "international" doesn't necessarily mean the UN. I think you're right to look at successful and effective international standards bodies as the model for how these things should be handled.
One thing is clear: technical standards should be kept away from politics as much as possible.
.sue? (Score:4, Informative)
HAHAHAHAHA (Score:2)
and he says, "surely"
as if anybody listens to what u.n. orders about anything.
So .su me. (Score:4, Funny)
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What did Montenegro ever do to
UN? Don't make me laugh! (Score:4, Insightful)
What idiot would write such a thing in 2007? A century ago such naive faith in International organizations to settle disputes was commonplace, fifty years ago diehards still believed the inherent contradiction inherent in such organizations could be handwaved away. But now? Now that we have seen each and every International organization fall into disrepute, chaos, corruption or outright evil?
Even previously unquestioned organizations like ISO are proving to be all too easily corrupted. Others, like the UN you wish to hand the greatest achievement of Western Civilization over to, were so flawed in their design they became failed instituitions before the ink was dry on their charters.
Seriously, this isn't a troll or flamebait. Name three achivements of the UN since it's founding. Ok, you in the back that remembered the Korean War being fought under UN auspices. Yea, because the Soviets were off in a sulk for a brief period the UN managed to allow the US (with our usual allies of the UK and the Aussies along with token support from the usual suspects) to fight to a tie, but under no circumstances actually win. And we are STILL mired down there to this day.
Same for the first Gulf War, the UN grudgingly allowed the US to lead our usual allies to solve a problem for everyone else. But I don't seem to recall the UN spearheading either of those efforts, only being convinced to get the hell out of the way.
Just how many more mass graves do we need before you misty eyed 'citizens of the world' realize the US is the leading cause of mass death today. Ask the survivers in Rwanda or Darfur if they believe the UN is a capable fo being a force for good.
No, the UN is a Parliment of Tyrants. Because it was DESIGNED that way. Shocked the new UN "Human Rights" body is as corrupt as the old one? I'm not. Because Tyrants have more votes in both the General Assembly and Security Council, all works of the UN are going to be geared to aid tyranny. Hand the Internet over to China, Cuba, Iran and their ilk? Are you barking mad?
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> is the leading cause of mass death today. Ask the survivers in Rwanda or Darfur if they believe the UN
> is a capable fo being a force for good.
And I even previewed once.... sigh. Of course that should be UN at the end of both lines but with the slashkos crowd it is probably best to make it clear.... especially in light of 25 Democrat Party Senators voting to endorse Move On's notion of the US
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Please explain. Or do you mean the UN?
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Re:UN? Don't make me laugh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:UN? Don't make me laugh! (Score:4, Funny)
Here's another, more complete, list of the useful things the UN has achieved [un.org]
I'll go back to my armchair in my cave now...
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Puerto Rico (.pr) TLD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Puerto Rico (.pr) TLD (Score:4, Insightful)
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The same could be said of any area with a political body representing it, eg each of the states, the counties in England, each of the cities, most of the towns, hell even *parts* of London (the Boroughs) have councils. I don't see a lot of reason to give the London Borough of Havering a tld of its own...
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u.n. for sure, yeah (Score:2, Insightful)
im turkish, and im fine with an international company backed by u.s. controlling the domain name registrations, thank you.
Especially since (Score:2)
Well, get the UN involved and now we are movi
Looking for "Soviet Russia" jokes? (Score:4, Funny)
Finally, the best of /.'s "In Soviet Russia..." comments all in one place.
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Pretty Funny Article (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some perfectly valid reasons to be suspicious of any one country administering the TLD list. Retiring zombie TLDs isn't one of them. Just set up a grace period. After 3 years don't process any more new domain applications. After 5 years no domain renewals. After 15 years no TLD.
Very few domains will have a lifetime longer than that, and if they do chances are they are run by clueful people who will have aliases set up long before the tits up date.
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I really don't understand the problem at all. What is the problem? Is there something inherently evil about sites using outdated TLDs? Have the UN take over the TLDs for this? Is this a joke? Some people must have it real
A better group? my two cents worth... (Score:3, Insightful)
The working groups in the W3C seem to do a good job defining standards we can all live with, why not make them the custodians of the standards as well. That way TLDs have some semblance of order and a deprecated TLD can be selectively migrated, etc. with technically competent standards as opposed to politically appointed or "corporate overlorded" individuals as in the current processes.
?? Thoughts ??
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Time for a .CSA TLD (Score:2, Funny)
.su (Score:2)
Which registrars are offering the mad discounts on them?
.su is popular among lawyers.... (Score:2)
So what's the point?
Get Rid of TLDs (Score:2, Insightful)
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Because we tried that, and it didn't work. When ARPANet was starting, the namespace was flat. Every host had a name, there wasn't any hierarchical organization. When the network was less than 0.01% the size it is today, it was already too hard to handle name conflicts in that flat namespace. The hierarchical namespace with dot seperators that we use in DNS today was introduced to solve the problem, segregating the namespace so you only had to worry about conflicts between names in a single domain and not wi
Who cares and why? (Score:2)
It might be worthwhile to keep .su active (Score:3, Insightful)
The overall problem of who is really in control of these things is a curious one. Does a registrar have the ability to sell anything they want once they get on the train as a registrar. What's to keep a registrar from selling domains with any
The UN? (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, absolutely! (Score:2)
REsponse from .yu on page f..k.yu (Score:2, Funny)
listen.to.us
Response to ICANN from
f..k.yu
From
try.and.su
The UN (Score:3, Interesting)
How does more bureaucracy solve the problem, it seems like it just creates more problems. What we need is a Philosopher-king [wikipedia.org] of Top Level Domains. So far it has been ICANN, and they have not been doing a bad job.
If ICANN were actually doing a bad job, we could open up alternative root name servers without them. And with public and industry support supplant them. But the internationalization arguments against ICANN are just empty rhetoric. Nothing about the way DNS or the Internet is structures prevents us from running domain services in parallel to ICANN's, if the EU wanted they could invent their own bureaucratic organization to handle all TLDs, setup root servers and run with it. And users could choose to use the EU ones or ICANNs or both.
That hasn't happened, and I am arguing that there is no technical barrier. Therefor I assume the only barrier is that nobody is serious enough in their objections of ICANN to do so.
The Soviet Union Will Never Die! (Score:3, Interesting)
Our mighty republics will ever endure.
The great Soviet Union will live through the ages.
The dream of a people their fortress secure.
Long live our Soviet Motherland, built by the people's mighty hand.
Long live our People, united and free.
Strong in our friendship tried by fire. Long may our crimson flag inspire,
Shining in glory for all men to see.
Music [marxists.org]
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*forcechoke*
"In Soviet Union, you accepted apology."
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In Soviet Union, TLD Owners Snub ICANN!
Works much better for this article.
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