[162410] in North American Network Operators' Group
What do people use public suffix for?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Levine)
Mon Apr 15 09:10:57 2013
Date: 15 Apr 2013 13:10:17 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
The public suffix list contains points in the DNS where (roughly
speaking) names below that point are under different management from
each other and from that name. It's here: http://publicsuffix.org/
The idea is that abc.foo.com and xyz.foo.com have the same management,
but abc.co.uk and xyz.co.uk do not.
You don't have to tell me that it's a gross crock, but it seems to
be a useful one. What do people use it for? Here's what I know of:
* Web browsers use it to manage cookies to keep a site from putting
cookies that will affect other sites, e.g. abc.foo.co.uk can set a
cookie for foo.co.uk but not for co.uk.
* DMARC (www.dmarc.org) uses it to find a policy record in the DNS
that describes a subtree, e.g., if you get mail that purports to be
from eBay@reply1.ebay.com it checks the policy at ebay.com.
What other current applications are there?
R's,
John
PS: Really, you don't have to tell me what a crock it is.
