At 11:09 AM 5/26/98 -0400, Judith Hopkins wrote: >This question is purely a matter of personal interest, not really >listowner related. > >Does anyone know how the two letter geographical domains at the end of >all non-US and some US e-mail addresses are assigned? The reason I ask >is that I recently did a REVIEW BY COUNTRY for a list to which I >subscribe. Among the country codes listed was NU which expanded to Niue. >That turns out to be an island in the South Pacific, population 4,200, >about 1,500 miles NE of New Zealand. These country codes are an ISO-standard : ISO 3166 to be exact. The complete list is at http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/country-codes : IANA is the organization which keeps this and other registries. > >However, when I checked the specific address of the one subscriber in that >domain, it was [log in to unmask] Sure enough, when I wrote to the >individual, she lives in Vermont and her ISP is headquartered in Stowe, >Vermont. So how on earth did it get the address STOWE.NU ? Soms DNS authorities in 3th world countries seem to accept almost any domain name for cash. Several of those country codes can be useful to some people. For example : come.to and move.to use the 'to' country, which is the island of Tonga. I've also seen TM (Turkmenistan), which is pretty funny when combined with your company-name. I don't see the advantage of STOWE.NU, but you can pronounce 'NU' as 'NEW' (at least native English speakers do that :) > >~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >Judith Hopkins, Listowner of Autocat > [log in to unmask] > My home page: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~ulcjh > AUTOCAT home page: > http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/cts/autocat/ > > --- Jo Hermans, System Administrator DINF, VUB University, Brussels [log in to unmask] http://dinf.vub.ac.be/~jo/ Tel : +32-2-629.38.19 Fax : +32-2-629.35.25 Co-listmom (sic) of Blues-L news:bit.listserv.blues-l Maintains the Benelux Blues Scene http://blues.vub.ac.be/