Basel has to buy domain name in the Bahamas after mishap (opens in new tab)

Ahh unchecked websites in print. Two of my favourites are:

- The recent (Nov '24) mishap from Mattel printing a p*rn site on their Wicked dolls: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz91pp5llo

- Or the numerous 'Click Here' or unreasonable long (e.g. https://example.gov.uk/some/sub/site/dGhlbi9hL3JlYWxseS9sb25...) that have appeared in UK government or NHS leaflets.

A firm here in my city once got all of their signage printed and installed _before_ securing the social media handles they’d put on them. The Instagram username they’d opted for was actually literally impossible to register as it contained a special character. That was about six years ago. The signs are still up.

With country code TLDs, there is a key aspect that can be good to know. The process, technology and registration can literally be anything. It can be like what most people expect with normal digital registration where you send them your contact information and a small fee. It could also be a government department where you send envelopes with proof of ownership, cash bribe, and a process where the documents need to be stamped and re-stamped, and where registration can be first-to-apply or an most-deserving kind of thing. Fairly common requirement is also local presence, as in a local citizen or legal firm that operate in that country.

Thus, availability and price are somewhat undefined when dealing with ccTLD's. As a customer you may also be fairly protected from knowing the why or how.

Still better than putting porn site address on children’s product (wicked). And they were able to buy the redirect. They should feel very lucky indeed.

> Users do not have to worry about security, SRF quotes Weber: "No data is transferred. There is only a link to the correct page."

Yes but how do you know you've resolved the right thing, it's still vulnerable to a compromise of another TLD.

They were lucky: Not all Cantons can do it at all, and the domain is not necessarily free (e.g. eSteuern.be may be taken for German-speaking part of Belgium?)

I need to FIRE, so that I can spend my time making informative `<topic>.bs` Web sites, in the public interest.

`.bs` is the best TLD since the one that made `jabber.at` possible.

"Basel has to buy internet address in the Bahamas after mishap"

I don't get it. http://www.esteuern.bs/ is not opening.

In which sense 'has to buy'?

It should be possible to geofence it such that requests from within Switzerland are redirected to the correct address.

according to gandi eSteuern.BS is still free and cheaper (around 600 usd)... hn do the magic pls (I would definitely do it myself but I don't have 600 usd to spend on a practical joke unfortunately)

.co.uk solved this looong ago

> There is not much time left: taxpayers will be able to complete their tax return for 2024 online as early as next week - probably with a slight detour via the Caribbean.

A "detour"? It's just a lookup in a database to resolve a name to an IP address. Unlikely that any person or any piece of technology in the Bahamas has anything to do with a Swiss person going to that website.

Maybe the article should have clarified that a little better. Now people will actually worry about their data, while none of it will even leave the country, if the server is domestic.