Done.

Thanks, the email came through. Hopefully the rest of the process works now...

FFS! Resetting the password worked, but logging in doesn't. :@

Oh, and the expiry date is tomorrow - I thought it renewed one month in advance - and I don't have valid payment details stored. :(

To make it more fun, this domain is the one all my email goes through...

I managed to get in, and it does have my new card details, despite me not providing them. :/

It also says transfer would take 5-7 days which is bullshit, but since expiry/renewal date is sooner than I thought I guess I'll have to let it renew (at twice the price I would otherwise pay), and then do the transfer afterwards.

Trying to look on the bright side, it could be worse, but still fucking frustrating.

The Domain system should be administered by an international non-profit NGO and not farmed out for ISPs to abuse at will.

Yeah, I've just been pondering the absurdity of paying so much for essentially a fraction of a kilobyte.

And using complex bloated buggy JS interfaces for something that underneath is relatively simple.

An international non-profit that provided a lightweight flexible API would be great, although perhaps only a partial solution.

I've been thinking about just using an IP address. We barely ever type them in anyway.

A month ago I had a half-formed response to that, and decided to let it to coagulate before responding.

Except it didn't.

My thoughts were in the region of...
* Kinda cool as a protest against DNS, so long as a provider can guarantee a static address.
* There's still enough offline/verbal interaction for it to be impractical for many.
* I might have had a third point, but if so I forgot it. :(

I've since had a "better" idea. We stop using DNS and, instead, just maintain a hosts file that we all share.

I was thinking about when websites didn't need their own domains, and instead we joined neighbourhoods, and had curated directories which were more useful than searching.

Then I followed a rabbit hole and discovered NeoCities.

Aware of Neocities! A friend uses it for his website.

Also, what I suggested is pretty much how name resolution worked on the early internet. And this woman was responsible for maintaining the hosts file.

Also there are still tilde servers. Where you get a home directory and can serve pages from ~/username/ like back in the olden days.

There might be a bandwidth issue because everything is super lofi. Only use case I can come up with is under the radar stuff.

I'll allow it has a certain janky charm.