About first national top level domains in Europe - dns

I have read that some of the first TLD where registered back in 90s, including .cz, .pl and other. So domain .SU was. That was domains for national needs.
But who have rights to become a maintainer of national domain? How that procedure looks like?
I also read that .SU TLD was proposed by Finnish student. But how can a student register national domain that supposed represent country?
I couldn't find information about that on Google.

You can find all data on the IANA webpage at https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db or just query it with whois.
.CZ is listed as created on 1993-01-12 and .PL on 1990-07-30
You can go back with some in 1985 like .UK or .US.
.SU had a complicated life because, as a ccTLD it should not exist anymore as the country it represented does not exist anymore. However for non technical reason, it subsists. You can find some discussions there : https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2006-12-05-en
But who have rights to become a maintainer of national domain?
This is a complicated question, and not a technical one nor a programming one.
In short, IANA uses the ISO list on country codes (with some exceptions, like .UK and .EU) and takes input from the relevant government. Now the problem is that some countries are not stable, and also change. So there are a lot of complicated cases. Some ccTLDs are also marketed as non ccTLDs (like .CO or .TV) because the government decided to give its management to some external companies, for some financial agreement.
"Mistakes" happen also, see for example https://medium.com/#Oskar456/stolen-sk-domain-717e070f6735
You can find more about the IANA process at https://www.iana.org/help/cctld-delegation
Each IANA decision to delegate a ccTLD to a country is associated with a "IANA report" listing the justifications. You can read them for whatever country you wish at https://www.iana.org/reports, like a recent one for .TD for example at https://www.iana.org/reports/2018/td-report-20180227.html
The core business is codified, before ICANN even existed in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1591
IANA adheres to that, and you can find further documentation at https://www.iana.org/domains/root/help
For more details in general, I would recommend you to read my extensive reply to a related question about TLDs and wars: https://superuser.com/questions/1332236/what-happens-to-country-specific-tlds-in-a-war-involving-that-country/1332238#1332238

Related

How to find popular Google search terms for a particular demographic/location/interest group?

I'm starting an online business targeted at a particular demographic and interests so I would like to produce content targeted at what this particular target market are actually searching for.
Google Ads allowed me to refine my target audience to the exact categories (demographics and interests) I needed but I couldn't tell me what that category of people tend to search for except for the tiny subset that happens to click on one of my ads which is very rare given I am just starting with a small budget. I would like to know the most popular search terms for everyone in the categories I specified not just those who happened to click on my ads.
I tried Google Trends, that told me the popularity of a particular search term for a given country but that's too broad - I need to narrow it down to a particular city, age group, parental status and interests. Google Trends also helped me find popular related search terms given a particular search term so I could try using that to see if there are any common popular related search terms related to my guesses but I could miss terms related to terms I never thought of.
I could try producing content across a rage of topics which I think my target audience might be interested in and then analyse the results using Google Ads but that could be a very expensive trial and error process and I might miss more popular topics which I never thought of.
Of course I could try to ask my target market in person directly (by interrupting people in the street!) but that would be very expensive for me because I would have to travel to and stay at the location where my online business is targeted, hoping to meet people with the exact same demographic and interests that I am looking.
I'm sure there must be a way to figure this out using the the Google search analytics. Essentially, all I need is a list of most popular recent Google search terms for a particular location, demographic and interests group in Google Analytics. Could anyone help me understand how to get this list?
Here are a few considerations, even if you found an answer.
Take a look at the AdRoll platform. Here's a potentially helpful article from them about target audience and demographics.
A recent article about AdWords demographic targeting. An older looking article, connecting demographics to search queries, but page's source code suggests an update this year.
Last but not least, you're probably eligible to talk with a Google Small Business Advisor.

How to get about.myname top level domain?

Sorry if this question sounds weird but I would like to learn about this more and searching this on google gives me results about other keywords after coming to the word about. I think that's how Google is designed to work, so it gives me no information about https://about.
What is this domain about.*? Examples:
https://about.me
https://about.google
I understand that I can have about.mydomain.com but how come the above 2 domains do not have any extension at the end?
Is it possible for a normal user like us to have https://about.myname? i.e. https://about.kelsey?
TLDs are set up by ICANN, which, after approval, designates a registry that can assign domains under that TLD. So if you're influential enough to get ICANN to approve .kelsey, you're good to go; Google managed to do exactly that, hence the about.google URL. In many other cases, people use TLDs that have been assigned for a particular country as if they were generic (i.e., non-country-based) TLDs simply because they coincidentally look like one. .me, for instance, is the country TLD for the European country of Montenegro, it was originally not designed to have anything to do with the English pronoun "me". Similarly, TV stations like to use the TLD .tv, which was assigned to the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. And that country specifically markets its domain names to TV stations.

SSIS Split String address

I have a column which is made up of addresses as show below.
Address
1 Reid Street, Manchester, M1 2DF
12 Borough Road, London, E12,2FH
15 Jones Street, Newcastle, Tyne & Wear, NE1 3DN
etc .. etc....
I am wanting to split this into different columns to import into my SQL database. I have been trying to use Findstring to seperate by the comma but am having trouble when some addresses have more "sections" than others. ANy ideas whats the best way to go about this?
Many THanks
This is a requirements specification problem, not an implementation problem. The more you can afford to assume about the format of the addresses, the more detailed parsing you will be able to do; the other side of the same coin is that the less you will assume about the structure of the address, the fewer incorrect parses you will be blamed for.
It is crucial to determine whether you will only need to process UK postal emails, or whether worldwide addresses may occur.
Based on your examples, certain parts of the address seem to be always present, but please check this resource to determine whether they are really required in all UK email addresses.
If you find a match between the depth of parsing that you need, and the assumptions that you can safely make, you should be able to keep parsing by comma indexes (FINDSTRING); determine some components starting from the left, and some starting from the right of the string; and keep all that remains as an unparsed body.
It may also well happen that you will find that your current task is a mission impossible, especially in connection with international postal addresses. This is why most websites and other data collectors require the entry of postal address in an already parsed form by the user.
Excellent points raised by Hanika. Some of your parsing will depend on what your target destination looks like. As an ignorant yank, based on Hanika's link, I'd think your output would look something like
Addressee
Organisation
BuildingName
BuildingAddress
Locality
PostTown
Postcode
BasicsMet (boolean indicating whether minimum criteria for a good address has been met.)
In the US, just because an address could not be properly CASSed doesn't mean it couldn't be delivered - cip, my grandparent-in-laws live in enough small town that specifying their name and city is sufficient for delivery as local postal officials know who they are. For bulk mailings though, their address would not qualify for the bulk mailing rate and would default to first class mailing. I assume a similar scenario exists for UK mail
The general idea is for each row flowing through, you'll want to do your best to parse the data out into those buckets. The optimal solution for getting it "right" is to change the data entry method to validate and capture data into those discrete buckets. Since optimal never happens, it becomes your task to sort through the dross to find your gold.
Whilst you can write some fantastic expressions with FINDSTRING, I'd advise against it in this case as maintenance alone will drive you mad. Instead, add a Script Transformation and build your parsing logic in .NET (vb or c#). There will then be a cycle of running data through your transformation and having someone eyeball the results. If you find a new scenario, you go back and adjust your business rules. It's ugly, it's iterative and it's prone to producing results that a human wouldn't have.
Alternatives to rolling your address standardisation logic
buy it. Eventually your business needs outpace your ability to cope with constantly changing business rules. There are plenty of vendors out there but I'm only familiar with US based ones
upgrade to SQL Server 2012 to use DQS (Data Quality Services). You'll probably still need to buy a product to build out your knowledge base but you could offload the business rule making task to a domain expert ("Hey you, you make peanuts an hour. Make sure all the addresses coming out of this look like addresses" was how they covered this in the beginning of one of my jobs).

Original Domain Names VS Generic Ones ? (seo)

We've currently a debate here about original domain names versus generic domain names in term of seo efficiency.
We mean by generic domain names, domains like :
- buy-hifi.com
- game-news.com
- easy-meet.com
We mean by original domain names, domains like :
- hifihot.com
- gamesmaniac.com
- lovein.com
What is your opinion ? (actually it's more a poll than a actual question but developments are welcome)
I remember reading an article about AccuWeather being offered the chance to buy weather.com. They passed on it because it didn't reflect their image, The Weather Channel snatched it afterwards, and AccuWeather ended up regretting their decision. While a generic name won't sing your brand, and a brand is important, it's hard to say which is better. I couldn't imagine generic domain names for companies like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, etc., so I suppose it depends. What a lousy answer. How about this: both. Why not have both name types and offer redirection?

Privacy laws and the Azure platform

While privacy laws are normally outside the domain of us developers, I do think it's an important topic to keep here at SO because we developers should take the responsibility to warn our employers if they want something that would break some laws... In this case, privacy-laws... Normally, we developers don't have to think much about legal stuff, but this seems to become a much bigger issue these days. It's too easy for employers to forget about these things but the consequences of these laws could be very harmful for future developments...
Many countries dictate limitations on how companies are allowed to store privacy-sensitive data in databases. For example, social security numbers, bank account numbers, criminal pasts, former employees, birthdate, relatives, sexual orientation and whatever more. Such data is limited to certain restrictions that could differ from country to country...
The Azure platform makes it even more complex since Azure is owned by an US company (Microsoft) and the US law dictates that Microsoft needs to hand over data if the Feds need it for some research. (This article highlights it.) Thus, this could put Azure in conflict with specific laws in certain areas of this world.
What I need to know is which countries would have such a restriction that I cannot offer customers in those areas an Azure-based solution that would process privacy-sensitive data? (Thus, those countries would need a non-azure, localized solution!)
This is important because I need to display a disclaimer warning those users, making it clear that they might be in violation. Users will tell from which country they are so basically the disclaimer is just limited to those users. (Each user will be maintaining data for possible hundreds of their customers each, so it's a lot of sensitive data.)
There are too many different sets of laws for you to be able to give or even keep up to date that kind of information on your web site.
What you could do is make them aware of the problem and say that users must take in to consideration laws in their country before signing up.

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