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The Internet

Random Domain Name Surfing 93

Posted by CmdrTaco from the little-bit-of-chaos dept.
Dilbert_ writes "Since most dot com domains of the form www.[common english word].com are taken today, you could theoretically surf around using just a dictionary. Now you can search the web from a page that will will automatically generate a fresh load of links, based on a dictionnary. " For some reason this amuses me greatly.
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Random Domain Name Surfing More

Random Domain Name Surfing

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  • Heh, apparantly they don't know how to block access to a dir without removing it.
    Not exactly a good way to solve the problem. They could have turned it into good publicity instead.
    Url to the ISP [onepine.com]
  • Silly? Apparently not [highview.com]. :)
  • File Not Found
    The requested URL /toys/WordURL.cgi was not found on this server.

    There was also some additional information available about the error:
    [Sat Sep 18 14:24:34 1999] access to /u2/www/users/chess/davidchess/toys/WordURL.cgi failed for nwhn-sh13-port78.snet.net, reason: File does not exist

    Additionally, a 404 File Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
  • > What the hell is an "iydkydg" supposed to be?


    It supposed to stand for:

    If You Don't Know, You Don't Go.

  • This is funny. I remember a similar filter based on Zippy the Pinhead -- anyone know where that is? I can't find it anymore. Is there any open source code to do a filter like this using different words?
  • >On another note, don't chimps have sex with themselves

    You know, if I could do that, I'd never... ah, forget it. You've heard it.

    Joe
  • It's not working now, but perhaps the cgi checks that the url it is giving out at least has a valid hostname.
  • If you're curious where the page went, ask the ISP hosting it:

    www.onepine.com [onepine.com]

    I checked the description of their hosting services and I see no usage cap specified...

  • Because we all apparently bugged the hell out of someone, and that someone took it down.

  • Domain Name Generator (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Funny, I wrote a stupid tool last week to randomly generate domain names for my boss, then I put it up on twisted.com [twisted.com]. Although it doesn't grab the names from a dictionary, mine lets you use specify which words to use.

    Sorry for the plug, but like I had anything else to do on a Saturday afternoon. :)
    -Mike

  • Actually, www.circumcision.org [circumcision.org] is full with interesting information. Makes me feel glad I'm an uncut Dutchman :)

  • Incorrect (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Straight from networksolutions.com:

    A Web Address can be up to 26 characters long including the four characters used to identify the top-level domain .COM, .NET, .ORG or .EDU.

  • I always wanted to surf all the websites in an a-z fashion in excessive boredom. This seems to be the way to do it.

    Fortunately, I know the person has acess to the domain name of vaginalcream.com. that'd make a perfect email addy
  • Of course with Netscape Smart Surfing, you can type in what you're looking for in your title bar and get it (usually) ... like "gnome bugs" (for the bugs.gnome.org site) or "ford mustang" if you want a new car ... ;)

    Available for IE as a plug-in ...
  • Hmm, spunkymonkey.com...Curious George is a monkey, and he has spunk, so...Hey, he's not supposed to have a clitoris!
    Who would have thought www.*monkey*.com sites would be pornographic?

    --

  • I remember being in the library where a guy was trying to download IDE cd-rom drivers for his laptop. Typing in "CD-Rom Drivers" sent him to one of those aforementioned pr0n sites. I recommended that he try the manufacturer's web site at http://www.nec.com [nec.com].
  • It might be interesting to put together a "dictionary of domains" (each entry is www.{whatever}.com. I'm sure you wouldn't have trouble with most of it - the Xs, Qs, Ys, and Zs might be trouble, though.
  • The label length limit of 63 characters is a definite limitation of the protocol, since the length of a label is marked by a single byte, and the two high bits are used to signify a pointer to another location, leaving only six bits for defining the length.

    Making the labels longer than 63 characters would require serious re-writing of the protocol.
  • And there is www.yupi.com [yupi.com] (in spanish) and www.ozu.com [ozu.com] (pronounced in spanish the same way you pronounce Yahoo in english). Check out the similarities. Lame, lame, LAME people. :)

    Alejo.
  • try

    [a-zA-Z0-9\.]+.really.fuckingsucks.net

    eg.

    Bill Gates [fuckingsucks.net]
  • I would be more interested in a site that generated actual domains names that don't appear in any dictionary, such as fojar.com [fojar.com] and grack.com [grack.com] - they aren't words, and they aren't combinations of words. :)
  • that of the 10 real word URLs it generated, all 10 were taken (although only a few had web pages).

    I'm just off to register IndoorSticklebacker.com now. What a great domain!

    rOD.


    --

  • Hey... (Score:3)

    by Bobort ( 289 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @03:42AM (#1675192) Homepage
    I wrote a silly cgi script to do the same thing last year. Didn't think it worthy of being on slashdot. It's not quite as cool, but it does do .com .org and .net.

    http://www.stack.portland.or.us/cgi-bin/dict
  • "These days, www.[adjective][noun].com can provide useful sites, as can www.[verb][noun].com . Of course if the verb is 'blow' and the noun is 'job', it's probably not that employment site for meteorologists that you were looking for, but that's a risk you've got to take.

    Reminds me of something that happened at my old job once.

    A girl I worked with decided to browse online for beauty tips. So she went to altavista and did a search for "facial".

    She recieved some rather interesting matches, that could possibly have gotten her fired if managment had ever spotted it.
  • A couple of years ago, before it turned into a total waste of paper, Wired's Jargon File mentioned 'domain dipping' as the practice of typing www.[whatever].com into your favourite browser (or IE). It's a practice I've enjoyed for quite a while, but as the web takes off it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
    These days, www.[adjective][noun].com can provide useful sites, as can www.[verb][noun].com . Of course if the verb is 'blow' and the noun is 'job', it's probably not that employment site for meteorologists that you were looking for, but that's a risk you've got to take.
  • how about using it to generate interesting names?

    one (available) URL it spewed: www.ClayClitoris.com

    that's a keeper.
    --
  • this is a complete and total waste of bandwidth that i will no doubt find myself using several times. i was surprised that it worked so well. i had expected many, *many* more 'site not found' errors. out of the 30 it generated for me, all worked. it's kind of scary when you think about it. unfortunately all of the sites that came up were places i have absolutely *no* interest in visiting whatsoever.
  • Domain names with the word "monkey" in them.

    http://www.zone8.com/monkey/list/index.html

    I'm not sure whom this helps, but more power to you.
  • 3 of 5 domains i tried didn't work, maybe they could make the cgi test the domains before it printed them?
    char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";

  • ok, so this may be a little far off, but is it not theoretically possible to run out of words? Then what??

    www."randomtext".com
    www.18sxksaw4.com

    so easy to remember, huh?....
    or will this cause us to just add to Webster's?
  • yeah. probability of hitting a site related to sex is very high using this [ www..{com,org,net,...} ] technique.
  • yeah. probability of hitting a site related to sex is very high using this [ www.>random word<.{com,org,net,...} ] technique.

  • e-gineer Domainator (Score:4)

    by synop ( 50546 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @05:50AM (#1675206) Homepage
    I wrote a similar service for my site that checks for domain availability, US trademarks, definitions, synonyms, related words and more. Just enter a couple of search words and it will check .com, .net and .org after combining them in different ways...

    http://domainator.e-gineer.com [e-gineer.com]

  • Re:Non-dictionary words (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @04:08AM (#1675207)
    I would be more interested in a site that generated actual domains names that don't appear in any dictionary, such as fojar.com and grack.com - they aren't words, and they aren't combinations of words. :)
    Once again, the shocking standard of american education shouts to the masses. I realise that we can't all have a gracking vocabulary, but I fojar on a regular basis; it's a perfectly cromulent activity.
  • It appears that the ISP didn't like the amount of traffic to that particular website and pulled the plug.. but that's a big guess considering most ISP's don't know how to edit apache without a geek around.

    Anyway, if it was up, I would visit it.. I find these highly amusing not only because it is so true, but also because it gives another reason to initiate those 3 new TLD's sooner.. but maybe under a different name, I personally would not buy mrplabs.web or something along those lines - it's just not sane.

    But definitley the fight for domain names is becoming more and more heard of, as I have mentioned previously, due to the extreme lack of domain names that are actually available to the general public. Of course, if you have an extra couple thousand laying between your mattress you can surely get a good domain name on eBay or something equivelent.

    Anyway, something definitley has to be done about the lack of domain names and especially the Slashdot Effect :)

    Matthew


    _____________________________________

  • Sweet. (Score:1)

    by j_d ( 26865 )

    More complex; perhaps taken, perhaps not

    http://www.spawn.org
    http://www.ProfanePolonaise.com
    http://www.FlaxerNet.org
    http://www.HypochloriteNorm.com
    http://www.roentgen.org http://www.PhosphorCentroider.com http://www.InsolventDeals.com http://www.RealProtactinium.com http://www.OpenIncriminate.com http://www.FritzOnline.com


    ---
    What a great list! I'm not sure that a squatter would get big bucks for InsolventDeals.com, but Roentogen seems to be free, and who can deny the appeal of FritzOnline, or for the literary fetishist, ProfanePolonaise? Hot damn-- I love this.

  • So we're all in a rush to buy up every last word and phrase in the English language, for later resale to highest bidders. Gag me with snake-oil! Are we forever stuck with ASCII-ONLY DNS?

    The fastest growth on the web now, finally, is non-English [glreach.com] . Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the HTTP:// protocol works only with ASCII-ONLY URL's. When will the web outgrow ascii and into UniCode [unicode.org]? We need URL's in Czech, Chinese, Cyrillic. etc. Anybody know of specific initiatives?

    ask slashdot: are any MultiLingual URL Protocols being developed to allow us to record and browse the world in more of its many languages? Where are they?

    "ever tried. ever failed. no matter. try again. fail again. fail better." - s. beckett

  • but I fojar on a regular basis; it's a perfectly cromulent activity

    It's Okay, a quick visit to your neighborhood medical clinic will take care that. Those modern treatments are wonderful. You'll know you ever fojared in a cromulent way. Or even in a non-cromulent way.

  • I've seen other people report this as a limit as well, but I don't believe it's true.

    From RFC 1034 [ohio-state.edu]:

    The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less.

    Then, again, we know this isn't quite right either, since we have, for instance, www.3com.com
  • at least not for major web hosting services. They've gone to name-based virtual hosts for eons now, so you can't find every domain on the net by just accessing every IP address.

    D

    ----
  • Yeah, I got one of those warning pages when I clicked on a link to http://www.suck.com without thinking.

    You gotta be careful at work.

  • This is surely a huge waste of time - unless they find some way of forcing it on a significant proportion of the user community (examples: a deal with AOL, a built-in feature in IE) then it is doomed to failure. It's also somewhat unscaleable in its present form.

    Basically, for Joe Public, the web is the Internet, and he knows that all website URL's start with www. and end in .com and that is the driving force. Don't expect to see any volumes of eCommerce websites with .shop any time soon.
  • Is that limit for the hole path, or just for a single domainname? If not for the hole path, why not just create sub-domains? foo.bar.gazonk.com?
  • It's a limitation on a "tag", which is the stuff between the dots.

    Sure, you can keep adding tags (subdomains), up to 1024 characters (including the dots). But, the question had to do with the length of the second-level domain portion.

    As to why NetSol limits to 26 characters? I cannot answer that. There's no limitation I can find in the protocol that would cause this. Several other registries also have this limitation. A limit of the root-server software? A limit of the registration database? International conspiracy?
  • Dilbert_ [dilbert.com] writes [writes.com] "Since most [most.com] dot [dot.com] com [com.org] domains [domains.com] of [of.org] the [the.com] form [form.net] www [www.com].[common [common.org] english [english.com] word [word.com]].com [com.com] are [are.com] taken [taken.com] today, [today.com] you [you.org] could [could.com] theoretically surf [surf.com] around [around.com] using [using.com] just [just.org] a dictionary [dictionary.com]. Now [now.com] you [you.org] can [can.com] search [search.com] the [the.com] web [web.com] from [from.org] a page [page.org] that [that.com] will [will.org] will [will.org] automatically generate [generate.com] a fresh [fresh.com] load [load.com] of [of.org] links, [links.org] based [based.com] on [on.com] a dictionnary. " For [for.com] some [some.com] reason [reason.com] this [this.com] amuses [amuses.net] me [me.com] greatly [greatly.net].
  • CmdrTaco writes :
    For some reason this amuses me greatly.

    Hmmmm. My guess is this "reason" involves a significant amount of eSAB (extreme Saturday Afternoon Boredom).


    By the way, now that DN registration goes international (with France Telecom, among others), it might be interesting to port this script over other languages.

    www.BarreObliquePoint.org (French version for SlashDot - zis maighte bi véry interestinge)

    www.FrischFleisch.net (German Freshmeat - no comment)

    www.AltaVista.com (Spanish for High View - but this would be rather silly since there nobody would give a web site such a ridiculously vain name as "high view", would they ?)

    www.Youpi.com (French for Yahoo - and the worst is, it actually exists ! Check it out [youpi.com], it's worth the click :o))


    Possible extension : add a speech-synthetisis program to pronounce each word - loud and with a Relic-like southern american accent. You might not see the point, but believe me this would be great fun for us little eurokids :o)

  • URouLette (Score:3)

    by jpatters ( 883 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @04:25AM (#1675226)
    Check out URouLette [uroulette.com]

    I don't know if there is any connection between this and the URouLette that was around back when there were just a few thousand web sites out there, but it is pretty cool, and doesn't seem to be limited to what is in the dictionary, and will send you to url's that are more complex then www.foo.com.
  • Remember the story that was mentioned about some black holes being pink that was mentioned here a while ago? For some reason, the phrase 'pink hole dripping cum' is remarkably popular with porn writers. So much so that I began to suspect that it was a wacky american in-joke, and there was a really popular band I hadn't heard of with that name.
  • Another suggestion would be OrgasmStreet.com, haha.
  • Hurry! pasteboard.com is still free.
  • Or at least the cgi script has been removed.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'm getting errors now when I try to reload, but
    I got a few choice responses so far:

    http://www.IneradicableOnline.com/ A perfect replacement for AOL in case they ever get bored with the name.

    http://www.FetusStreet.com/ I'm not sure I even WANT to know about the possibilities of this one.

    Doesn't look like the site was slashdotted as there was practically no load time, I'll bet that whoever was admining the server took the script offline due to excessive load.

    Maybe it will be back.

    -Restil
  • LOL!
    this one gave me a good laugh :-)
    (i happen to be swedish, not that it matters)
    ________________________________________ ___________________
  • The only way I could see how non-ASCII/non-English URLs could be useful is if you truly wished to restrict content-viewing to a single language based audience. I, for one, would have no idea how to spell let alone type any URL in cyrillic, chinese or kanji. Even languages using the ASCII character set are often difficult and/or annoying to type. I do not see the net moving towards any sort of Unicode structure in the near future.

    However, I do agree that non-English languages do have a disadvantage when it comes to communicating on the 'net. The purpose of the internet has been and hopefully will continue to be open and rapid communication and information exchange. Although, people who speak little-used languages (less that 3 million, in my opinion)must realize that readership *will* decline if people restrict their comments to their preferred native tongue.

    Can't we all just use the same language? I'm partial to English. ;)
  • 4,294,967,296 is a lot of addresses and a *lot* of traffic to wade through. Assuming it took 1 second to detect if a web server is present and download the main text, it would take 136 *years* to accomplish. Assuming we could cut that to 1/100th the time, it would *still* take over 16 months to accomplish (definitely not something you'd want to do on that crappy 56k modem. ;)

  • I've spent many an hour just randomly picking words and adding the ol' dot-com to them. This site should be cool (Once it recovers from the Slashdot effect . . ). That is provided it it used for the purposes of good and not evil (porn anyone?)

  • Actually, I think the "randomtext" part is already happening. Coca-Cola used http://www.iydkydg.com/ [iydkydg.com] for its "Coke Card" promotion this summer. What the hell is an "iydkydg" supposed to be? (I checked -- "iydkydg" isn't in Merriam-Webster [m-w.com].)

    Of course, all loyal kibologists know that Kibo's HappyNet [kibo.com] will include all newsgroup names from "*.aaaaa.aaaaa.aaaaa.aaaaa to *.zzzzz.zzzzz.zzzzz.zzzzz". We should probably just put Kibo in charge of the Web while we're at it. He makes more sense than any of Al Gore's plans.

  • well, at least www.DrippySinuses.com is still available. That's a relief!

  • 404 (Score:1)

    by ZxCv ( 6138 )
    clicking the link gives a 404. anyone know what happened to it?
  • No problem; as far as I know, there is no limit to the length of a domainname (OK, so maybe it's 1024 chars or something). Maybe we'll start seeing domains like

    www.theflowershopon54mainstreet.com

    www.weputtheuinusedcars.com

    www.ohmygodimanagedtoregisteradomainnamebeforeso meoneelsetookit.com

  • question (Score:2)

    by nd ( 20186 )
    Wouldn't it be more effective to try random numeric IP addresses? This way you would find sites without common words in them. You could just take 4 random numbers between 0 and 255 and check it for port 80. You would at least get a real IP address one out of every, say 10 times. :)

    Of course, then you have to worry about paranoid system administrators reporting you for attempting to connect to port 80 on "private" boxes (??), not to mention you'd also get a bunch of non-servers. I guess if your goal is finding EVERYTHING this would work better, but slower.
  • Sometimes, though, what you get doesn't necessarly jive with the [verb][noun] combination you use. For example, instead of getting gory pictures of a dead little girl, I got a nerd site instead.

    [slash dot, get it? Slash Dot... badbumpum!]

    Okay, okay, I'll shut up now...

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