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Show HN: A DNS server that removes the top million domains
- garretruh 14y agoI can only imagine malicious uses for this. "Sorry, you're no longer allowed to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Wikipedia." Not that that is entirely a bad thing.
- stephengillie 14y agoSomeone will use it for one of their anti-distraction productivity tools. Is changing DNS easier or more difficult than editing a HOSTS file?
- ikawe 14y agoedit your /etc/resolve.conf nameserver 1.2.3.4
- samwillis 14y agoThis is by the same guys as the million short search engine (Google minus the top million). Probably good to use this in combination with the dns to find things that are not just broken links. http://www.millionshort.com/ http://www.millionshort.com/ The search engine was discussed on HN before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304
- znowi 14y agoYes, it's not very useful without the search engine. Which I have tried just now and the experience was... frustrating. Why? Cause it did not return any results for any of my queries (e.g. "hello"). I thought, no, it can't be broken - must be something on my end. I opened it in Chrome incognito window and it worked! Aha, "location based", I thought. And I was right - they use IP location by default to localize results. I know it is a common practice now, sadly, popularized by Google, et al - but it sucks! I deal with this each time I travel. Can you, please, prioritize this and first look into my actual request header, which explicitly says that I prefer response in English? Thank you very much.
- furyofantares 14y agoWhy would an incognito window prevent them from customizing results based on your IP?
- s353 14y agoIf you use these servers you may see a lot less advertising. That's because more than a few of the top 100/1000/10000/1000000 sites are actually just ad servers, assuming Million Short is using Alexa as the source. And because they appear in the top Alexa list one might guess those particular ad servers serve a significant share of the internet's advertising. Another thought is you could potentially use these as general purpose DNS servers; e.g. they are all Amazon EC2 I believe so with respect to the DNS-based geolocation efforts of many websites, you'd be treated as if coming from the location of whatever region the datacenter is in. Just add the top 100/1000/10000/1000000 sites to your HOSTS file.
- andrewcooke 14y agoso with respect to the DNS-based geolocation efforts of many websites, you'd be treated as if coming from the location of whatever region the datacenter is in wut? how does dns based geolocation work? you seem to be saying that sites assume you share the physical location of your dns server?
- s353 14y agoNo. What sites assume is that you are located (at least in a regional sense) near the (recursive) DNS servers you use. For example, that's how many CDN's work. Note: It's certainly possible to share the exact same location (or interface, to be more precise) as your DNS server. I run my own personal DNS cache on localhost. It's not unheard of. I'd guess there would be a few other readers of HN who do this as well.
- andrewcooke 14y agoah, thanks. sure, i understand that - i just never realised it was called geo-location (i have never worked with cdns).
- gojomo 14y agoI think that's wrong: there's no way for a site to know what DNS servers I use. Instead, they use a reverse lookup from the apparent IP I'm connecting from... that is available to them, and is unrelated to my DNS servers. Or can you supply a reference/explanation for how'd they'd know my DNS servers?
- petercooper 14y agoYou can get into the top million on Alexa with a minuscule amount of traffic so you'd be extremely limited. Losing the top 1000 would probably be a more interesting experiment for mid/long term purposes.
- cfn 14y agoThey also have that (and 100k, 10k and 100).
- measure2xcut1x 14y agoSo what's the criteria for removal? I.e. how does a domain get in the top 1m?
- rb2k_ 14y agothey probably just grab the alexa top 1 million csv file that they provide.
- smudgymcscmudge 14y agoI don't get it. What's the point of this?
- dumbfounder 14y agoHow did they do their ranking? Is it based on a web crawl, dns stats, other? Is their list of the top million domains public? I would love to see the data.
- dumbfounder 14y agoI haven't seen confirmation, but they probably use Alexa given they make it easy to download their top 1 million list: http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip
- dumbfounder 14y agoIf millionshort.com made it into the top 1 million domains would it cease to exist?
- robotmlg 14y agoDoes the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contain itself?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bmmayer1 14y agoWhy is this useful in any way, shape or form?
- gojomo 14y agoA great refinement would be: on the error page, suggest alternate sites with similar content that are still reachable. Or even: for the exact URL visited, suggest the one page in the remaining long tail that's most like (by some text/semantic measure) the originally-requested page. (Or even: redirect automatically to that page.)
- makmanalp 14y agoThis could work as a pretty neat anti-procrastination tool. HN is ranked 2.9k and reddit is 100-something.
- ChikkaChiChi 14y agoWhat I think would be more interesting is a proxy that only uses the first 1k, 100k, 1m sites. I might be wrong, but it might be an easy way to keep users on the "bright streets" of the Internet instead of wandering down malware-ridden alleys.