DynDNS reports a DDoS attack against their Webhop services. This also affects xyzzy.webhop.info and xn--80akhbyknj4f.boldlygoingnowhere.org. The first address used to be a HTTP redirection to my mirror site, at the moment it is a redundant redirection to xyzzy.
The second address is used in some IDNAbis experiments with IRIs; the actual content are now subpages of xyzzy/home/googlets.
Instead of a thank you to the news.t-online.de team in RFC 5538 I added the historic videotex: URI scheme to the IANA registry.
When the WWW with http: and https: started to replace gopher: and various videotex: systems (BTX, minitel, Prestel) this URI scheme allowed links to videotex: resources for browsers supporting it. It was a nice system for limited clients including DOS boxes, but the software to create videotex: pages was very expensive.
Is it only me, or do we really invent the wheel again and again ? Now we have WAP and a .mobi TLD, but what was wrong with telnet: and gopher: ? At least ftp: is still alive and kicking. And maybe news: survives.
If you know a public specification for an unregistered URI scheme, please submit it to IANA following the rules in RFC 4395 — in a nutshell this is a public review on an expert mailing list.
The famous son-of-1036 Internet Draft about the Netnews article format was published as historic
Son-of-1036 (also known as 1036bis) was the first Internet Draft I've ever seen 15 years ago. Admittedly I didn't know the exact difference between draft and RFC at this time, let alone the various RFC series and status flags.
RFC 1849 was immediately obsoleted by the work of the IETF USEFOR WG:
Folks interested in Usenet & Netnews can be rather stubborn, one of the reasons why this WG needed more than a decade to finish its work (presumably a new IETF record). Thanks to Charles Lindsey, Russ Allberry, Ken Murchinson, Henry Spencer, Alexey Melnikov, Harald Alvestrand, Lisa Dusseault, and many other contributors on the USEFOR mailing list.
Thanks also to anybody helping to publish…
… while I was offline for more than two years. That this RFC took so long was clearly my fault. Anonymous credits I coludn't add in this RFC: The news.t-online.de team triggered my interest in an Internet Draft by A. Gilman about news:, nntp:, and snews: URLs. Later Paul Hoffman started the work to obsolete all old URL schemes in RFC 1738 by new RFCs based on the Internet Standard for URLs (STD 66, RFC 3986).
There are still some schemes in RFC 1738 not yet obsoleted by fresh RFCs, notably file:. Maybe Martin Dürst could finish his work on the awfully complex mailto: scheme, I have not yet checked this. If you find no old URL scheme to work on try dict:.
