User talk:Jmccormac

Welcome!

Hello, Jmccormac, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! 

Djegan 23:44, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Satellite television

Just a headsup, that I changed the external link to a reference here. --GraemeL ^(talk) 22:52, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

That's a better way of doing it. The site is listed in the reference URLs (the Lyngemark one) at the end of the article but everyone tends to call it Lyngsat. Jmccormac (talk) 23:21, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Your edit to the article Galaxy 19

Why in the world would you remove the {{Reflist}} template?? Debresser (talk) 13:53, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Slight overkill. I was removing link spam at the time and I must have removed it by accident. A spammer had hit a lot of the satellite related pages around 1241 today. Jmccormac (talk) 15:03, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

County Waterford

Hi there, I notice you undid my removal of links. I had removed two of three links to sites maintained by Waterford County Council and one of two links to Waterford County Museum. The other one was to the Catholic Diocese of Waterford and Lismore. While it could be argued that the Invest in Waterford link might be worth keeping, I can't see a justification for the others? What do you think? Nelson50^T 11:26, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

The photo exhibition is quite unique as it covers the history of Waterford city and county. I consider the links to be important. The link to the Diocese website is also relevant to the article. Jmccormac (talk) 01:40, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

:)

May 2010

You currently appear to be engaged in an edit war according to the reverts you have made on List of domain name registrars. Note that the three-revert rule prohibits making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24-hour period. Additionally, users who perform several reversions in content disputes may be blocked for edit warring even if they do not technically violate the three-revert rule. When in dispute with another editor you should first try to discuss controversial changes to work towards wording and content that gains a consensus among editors. Should that prove unsuccessful, you are encouraged to seek dispute resolution, and in some cases it may be appropriate to request page protection. Please stop the disruption, otherwise you may be blocked from editing. Me-123567-Me (talk) 14:50, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Be that as it may, that's what the article talk page is for. Perhaps others would like to change the over-all structure of the list. So you need to try to reach a consensus. --Me-123567-Me (talk) 16:20, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I submitted your request for page semi-protection to the proper place. --Me-123567-Me (talk) 16:23, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. The page has had problems in the past but this was a different attempt to dump 500 registrars into a top 30 list. This went far beyond fair use of registrarstats.com's data. If others want to change the format then this is fine and it can be worked out on the talk page. Jmccormac (talk) 16:31, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Domain Hacks / .am / ccTLD

Hey, first of all, why are you on purposely destroying my productive work and “flag” as “spam” which is nothing more than an insult on another person in your case. Second, what makes you an expert on these topics?

If the majority of all other ccTLD domain hacks given on a particular page show good examples, why don’t you allow Armenia to give some precise samples as well (it used to before). Do you have a problem with that country or are you just trying to annoy other people for self-satisfied fun? AND if you you do not like 1 out of 3 corrected procedures on one particular page, don't mark all of the work as spam (at the same time) if you disagree with just one sample (out of 3 edits) but mis-judge the other 2. Your corr-work is extremely biased and inconsistent. Peace! Racingfanq 22:50, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Because your work largely involves placing a reference to the domain s.am which you appear to own into the ccTLD page and also on the .am ccTLD page. The domain s.am is a domain hack and not exactly notable enough to be included on the .am ccTLD page or the Country Code Top Level Domain page. You have also done something similar with fa.st - another domain that you appear to own. Repeatedly placing links to your own domains in Wikipedia is considered spamming. Wikipedia is not a links directory. Jmccormac (talk) 12:07, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

you "appear" to be wrong. If I'd own any of these domains, do you think I'd be farten around wiki, instead of making money off of them? But how many ccTLDs throughout the globe do you know that allow single letter domain registrations? And if I'd own them, why would I go through the hazzle of interlinking them with another wiki-page, instead of ext.??? HELLOO! Many people just do not know that single letter registrations are even possible e.g. gTLD .pro doesn't allow 3-letter domains underneath first level (.at has a 3 letter minimum criteria). I just find them pretty cool and meaningful domains and you apparently are the only person on wiki who "appears" to not like these examples. Instead of correcting the other mistakes on that particular page (and there are many), you are on a personal vendetta (envious) over nothing and just target what you believe is obvious (even if I'd own these domains, or if I knew the people owning them - which would be nice, too). Again, you are mistaken. But your actions are some of the reasons, why wiki becomes less popular with people. Too many wanna-be admins and their holier-than-thou correctional manouvers. Oh, and btw. how about looking up the textbook definition of "Spamming" and not what some 15 years olds wrote on wiki. Cheers, Racingfanq 18:15, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Putting domain hacks on the ccTLD page entry for a ccTLD is a bit much. There is a whole page on domain hacks were people seem to add as many domain hacks as they like. The .pro is not a ccTLD. It originally started out as a TLD for professionals but it got overtaken by .com and the rise of the ccTLDs to such an extent that it had to diversify. The whole issue of one letter and two letter domains in ccTLDs is problematic. Because the ccTLD registries are effectively self-governing, they can set their own policies on these domains. With the gTLDs, there is an ICANN consultation process that has to be undertaken before any such change can be made. Some of the smaller ccTLDs use one letter and two letter domains to build registration volume. Sometimes these short domains are used for url shortners, bit.ly or t.co being the more notable for their widespread use. That's the real test for inclusion - notability. While s.am might be cool and interesting to you, is it notable to others for some reason? The s.am page is just a holding page for the domain with no content. Now you may think that is notable but there are millions of holding page websites on the web. If you really want to do something worthwhile for the ccTLD page then make a list of all ccTLDs where one letter domain name registrations are permitted. Jmccormac (talk) 00:05, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's not like I started with it. The "Commercial and vanity use" section of the same ccTLD info page is full of domain hacks! And although www.i.am is not even a working domain name with a functional website behind it, you leave it on wiki while you just don't seem to like me personally putting s.am as an example on there ;-) (which at least shows something). Though, I see your point and acknowledge your very professional answer! Good Luck! Racingfanq 07:51, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I believe homebuy.in is both notable and useful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Certifiedpublic (talk • contribs) 11:41, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

But it is not really a domain hack and has been removed a few times before now. A domain hack would be more of the form buyhome.in as it has a more obvious word order. Jmccormac (talk) 12:35, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

You have removed few samples of domain hacks from .gs. Many ccTLD pages have "hack" sections. For many of them, for instance, .ly or .me that is a bragging point. Domain hacks are part of the game, why would you remove them? Disclaimer: blo.gs, hu.gs, thedo.gs - are all popular sites, not owned by me. Wikipidyst (talk) 4:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Because ccTLD pages should be for the ccTLD data. It is ok to say that the ccTLD is used for domain hacks but Domain hacks have their own page and it enough just to cite that link rather than adding examples. Otherwise everyone with a domain hack in a particular ccTLD will want it listed on that ccTLD's page and Wikipedia is not a links directory. Jmccormac (talk) 03:54, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Not vandalism

Please do not call my edits "persistent vandalism" unless you are ready to report me and ask for page protection. You must provide a source for text added to an article and my removal of your unsourced opinion is NOT vandalism. —danhash (talk) 15:50, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

You are not an expert in analogue TV encryption systems. Your persistent removal of the comment that the scrambling system used in the image was possibly VideoCipher II or ORION was unhelpful and lessened the usefulness of the article. Both these systems have a very precise appearance in their scrambled format and this would have been obvious to people familiar with the subject and the systems. The references cited do tend to settle the issue. Jmccormac (talk) 16:17, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

WP:V. —danhash (talk) 16:27, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Removing the mentions of VideoCipher II and ORION was one thing but when you removed the small technical explanation, that was quite another. It crossed the boundary, in my opinion, between a good faith edit and petty vandalism. Jmccormac (talk) 16:41, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

What lessens the usefulness of the article is an ambiguous, unsourced statement that appears unprofessional and unencyclopedic. It is true that I am not an expert an analog TV encryption systems, but that is irrelevant. Your statement was not verifiable; it wasn't even a specific statement. If you are such an expert then you should be able to find a source. Besides, it does not matter how much of an expert you are if you do not follow policy, especially verifiability. This should not be news to you. I removed the statement with an edit summary of rm "(possibly VideoCipher II or Oak ORION)" as speculative and unsourced. You reverted my edit with the comment "Not speculative when an expert said so!" BUT there was no source, so no expert was cited as saying it, which I pointed out. You evensaid in an edit summary "I think that the image is that of a VideoCipher II signal", but an edit summary is NOT a citation. You typed an ISBN number as an edit summary when you again added the information back, but again, an edit summary is NOT a citation. After my second (very justified!) revert youcalled me a vandal. There is no point in trying to justify your accusation; don't do it again. —danhash (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

You reverted the technical explanation as well as the VideoCipher II/ORION mention. That's why it was petty vandalism. As I stated earlier, you are not an expert on analogue TV encryption systems. While Wikipedia encourages people to edit boldy, there is a line between ignorance and knowledge. Your edit removed that knowledge and that was unacceptable. Now kindly go back to finding Oxford commas to bother. Jmccormac (talk) 16:59, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Your "explanation" was (possibly VideoCipher II or Oak ORION and the horizontal and vertical synch signal has been replaced by digital data with the effect that the picture is not properly displayed on the TV screen.) which is simply more unsourced information. Take a look at WP:V; it does NOT matter if the information you add is "true". There is a lot of true information not on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is verifiable. Perhaps you should read WP:Expert editors, particularly No editor is exempt from fundamental Wikipedia policies concerning acceptability of contributions; in particular, the policies of no original research and verifiability along with guidelines such as reliable sources still apply. Unsourced "expert opinion" and unpublished conjecture have no place in an encyclopedia. (emphasis added) You can argue all day long that your edits should stay just because they are "true" or "valuable", but you will hit a brick wall here at Wikipedia. Good luck. —danhash (talk) 17:31, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

They were accurate and verifiable. They even had citations to back them up. There are even patents that can be cited too but that would be overkill. What you don't seem to understand is that Wikipedia depends on the contributions of people. It is not there for you to get some sense of "power" in editing grammar or punctuation, or citing rules like some jobsworth bureaucrat. As the work is voluntary, the timelines are not those of ordinary publishing and people aperiodically edit articles. This means that content will appear before citations. The proper Wikipedia approach, from what I remember, would have been to flag the image for discussion on the article's talk page instead of wading in to delete information. Had you demonstrated this elementary Wikipedian politeness, then this problem would not have arisen. Jmccormac (talk) 10:03, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Minor edits

You have marked almost every one of your last 500 edits as minor, including every single edit to Television encryption. Please see Help:Minor edit for correct use of the minor edit check box. Thanks. —danhash (talk) 17:39, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

It is my natural sense of humility. Jmccormac (talk) 17:55, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Nobody can physically force you to follow policy; I just wanted to inform you since you do not seem familiar with our policies here. —danhash (talk) 18:00, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Invitation to wikiFeed

Hi Jmccormac,

I'm part of a team that is researching ways to help Wikipedia editors find interesting content to contribute to Wikipedia. More specifically, we are investigating whether content from news sources can be used to enhance Wikipedia editing. We have created a tool, called wikiFeed, that allows you to specify Twitter and/or RSS feeds from news sources that are interesting to you. wikiFeed then helps you make connections between those feeds and Wikipedia articles. We believe that using this tool may be a lot of fun, and may help you come up with some ideas on how to contribute to Wikipedia in ways that interest you. Please participate! To do so, complete this survey and follow this link to our website. Once you're there, click the "create an account" link to get started.

For more information about wikiFeed, visit our project page. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask via my talk page, or by email at wikifeedcc@gmail.com. We appreciate your time and hope you enjoy playing with wikiFeed!

Thanks! RachulAdmas (talk) 21:37, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

URL Shortening wiki

Hey Jmccormac, why did you undo my edit? It was a minor edit that did not and will not affect the page in any way shape or form. I'm going to undo what you did and I hope you don't ruin it for me, please. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shrtin (talk • contribs) 09:00, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a links directory and only notable examples are used in that article. The examples are marked as no-follow for search engines anyway. The rules on adding links are listed here: WP:NOTDIR , WP:EL and WP:LINKFARM. Somebody else has already reverted your change to the page. Jmccormac (talk) 12:47, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Domain Tasting

You've already reverted that article twice. Please don't do it a third time or I will report you. I've added substantial references and I invite you to discuss on the Domain Tasting Talk page. Corwin8 (talk) 04:11, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I did reply on the Domain Tasting talk page - you obviously didn't read the reply. You are simply wrong that Domain Tasting's primary use has been for spam. ICANN, Google and all the references disagree with your opinion. The main use of Domain Tasting was for monetisation of tasted domains with PPC adverts. Spamresource.com is just a blog and is not considered, in Wikipedia terms, a reliable source WP:RS. The reality is that ICANN had to stop Domain Tasting by making it financially non-viable for domain tasters who were registering and dropping millions of domains each month within the Add Grace Period and thus not having to pay for the registrations. Jmccormac (talk) 06:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

TLDs and ccTLDs

As a matter of interest, how long have you been involved with internet technology? Were you around for the browser wars? when html was invented? when the ccTLDs were introduced? the OSI stack v TSP/IP war? Packet switching v circuit switching? Smart v dumb terminals? --Red King (talk) 22:49, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Too damned long. :) In real life, I work with domain names and domain name statistics almost every day and that would include working with sets of approximately 20 million ccTLD domains (eu/uk/ie/de/fr and some other EU tlds along with co and us) and most of the main TLDs and gTLDs. Jmccormac (talk) 23:01, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Pirate decryption/card sharing

I reverted your edit the Pirate decryption article and added an explanation. There is a limit to the number of possible receivers due to the latency of the network (the time taken for the data from the server to travel to the receiver) and the period between the updated keys. If the latency is greater than the period between the updated keys, the receiver/decoder will miss a key and the signal may become encoded again. With large cable ISP networks, it may work well but on high-latency connections, it will not be as effective. Still though, it is not bad for a hack that's over twenty years old. Jmccormac (talk) 12:02, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Keys are broadcast on the internet, just like a radio station broadcasts over the airwaves there is no limit to how many radios can be tuned in to the station, there is no limit as to how many card sharing devices can be subscribed to the feed. Latency, period between updates are all irrelevant to as to how many can receive the key. It is not a "request/response" type system like getting a webpage, it is a broadcast subscription, they key is "always steaming" to an authorized receiver. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Notwillywanka (talk • contribs) 23:26, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

No. There are limitations. The card client has to receive the decryption key with in a specific timeframe or the decoder stops decrypting the signal. If the latency is an issue because if it is high, then the card client might miss a key. Therefore it works better on networks where the card server and the card client are on the same ISP or are, in network terms, close. This can localise the card sharing networks. Naturally it works well on larger ISPs but even then, the number of clients on a card sharing network will be limited by another factor - the probability of detection. If the number of clients on a card sharing network grows too large, then the probability of that network being detected increases. Thus it is far more effective for anyone operating a card sharing network to maintain limited numbers per card server as it reduces the risk of detection and, should it be detected, the time it would take to recover from the detection. I am familiar with this hack and the issues surrounding its effectiveness. Jmccormac (talk) 00:54, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

July 2014

Hello, I'm Qxukhgiels. I noticed that you recently removed some content from Satellite television without explaining why. In the future, it would be helpful to others if you described your changes to Wikipedia with an accurate edit summary. If this was a mistake, don't worry; I restored the removed content. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. read the sources and you will see that the text in the article has been significantly modified from that of the sources Qxukhgiels (talk) 22:38, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

I removed and reverted it because you have scraped content from other websites, some of which have themselves taken content from other sources. Scraping content from websites and pasting it in an article is not what Wikipedia is about. Some of the references are just blogs and low quality content farms with no expertise in the field and some are just even using the same text in order to drop their links on Wikipedia. They are not considered reliable sources (WP:RS). Some of the newspaper refs are ok but they are out of place. Merely scraping content and changing a few words while leaving the much of the content the same is still plagiarism. Jmccormac (talk) 07:27, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for adding better sources at Satellite television- in case you haven't already figured out, when it comes to STV in the US, I do not have access to some of the better sources. But I noticed in some edits such as [1] [2] [3] you removed some content and references in the article without explaining why in the edit summary. If you remove a reference, please replace it with a better one. Having not explained your changes, your edits look rather pointy. Also, please use proper citation templates for references.Qxukhgiels (talk) 18:52, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Actually it looks like you only have access to web based sources. Satellite TV developed in the US, Europe, the USSR, Asia and Africa at different rates. In the early days it was a far more global business and a lot of the key players knew each other. Having web only access is a serious disadvantage when writing about such a topic as Satellite TV as there is the technological angle and the human angle. When one writes about the history, it is the human angle that becomes important. Some of the terms used (noise abatement) were clearly wrong as it was a technologically specific term (noise reduction) being misunderstood. In a system, the device will add its own noise to a signal so the less noise added by the device processing the signal the better. Some of the references I removed were bland, non-expert blog posts or barely disguised advertising. Some of the other references are solid enough. The madehow reference was wrong and the content seems to have been copied from a print book from the early 1990s. Some of the references that you are using are not reliable and are from content farms or similar. The stuff from that UKessays site as regards broadcast and programming is wrong and seems to have been written by someone with no knowledge or understanding of the process. It needs to be rewritten with proper references. Jmccormac (talk) 20:25, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

You are claiming that some material is wrong without verifying it with a source. For instance, UK Essays is a professional encyclopedic site- it is recommended as a resource by educational institutions in the UK and is written by professionals. It is also commonly used as a source in Wikipedia articles. I doubt that the material in the essays is actually wrong. You claim that the material is wrong, but haven't yet made an effort to verify this. Like I've already said, if you have any better sources, please add them to the article, but if you think (or know) that an encyclopedic source does not meet WP:V, do not remove it unless you can prove your claim with another verifiable source. Also, it appears that you may be owning this article, as many of your past actions and statements about this topic resemble ownership behaviour.Qxukhgiels (talk) 21:14, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

The bibliography of one of the UKEssays articles lists WP articles, but the bulk of that essay obviously did not come from WP, as content that extensive about the subject has never existed here.Qxukhgiels (talk) 21:18, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

:: Obviously you missed the part where the UKessays reference you used cited the Wikipedia pages that it scraped for its content. You seem to think that it is ok to throw in "references" that have basically scraped Wikipedia. It is not. Intelsat is a better reference on the satellite broadcast chain than some content farmer who wouldn't know one end of a feedhorn from the other. I've used Intelsat as one of the references. I'll also add a few other bluechip references in the next hour or two as some of the non-expert content needs rewriting and referencing. I don't own the article and a few people got it to the stage that it is in at the moment. However it helps when people who are writing about the subject actually know something about it and are not just cut and pasting content without understanding it. Jmccormac (talk) 21:30, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

No, it's obvious that most of that material in the essays did not come from WP, as even a paraphrased version of the bulk of the material in that article does not exist on WP; it was not "scraped" from WP as you say. You can deny me all you want, but the content I added was not cut and pasted; the content in an article should be similar to that of its reference for it to be verifiable, but not exactly alike. Any changes you make, esp. to referenced content, you must reference. Qxukhgiels (talk) 21:40, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

The UKessays article scraped Wikipedia for its content and even references the specific Wikipedia pages that it scraped for the essay. That is not a reliable source as it is basically feeding Wikipedia back to Wikipedia. You may think that is acceptable but it is not. Now please stop disruptively editing that page when I am trying to add reliable references. Jmccormac (talk) 21:50, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

Scorpion (TV series)

Hi. Looking at this page, notice the long list of articles in other languages (left side of page). This strongly suggests the series is airing in other countries/languages. This would also suggest the controversy about O'Brien's history has followed him around the world. Which would suggest there are probably non-English reliable sources that discuss the controversy. Are you familiar with using Google's "site:.br" to narrow a search to a country-code (Brazil in this case), and Google Translate? It will take some time and work but I suspect a fishing expedition might come up with good results. -- GreenC 20:22, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Apart from the usual dog and pony show promoting the series, it seems to have sunk without trace. There is an interview of O'Brien on the main Irish TV channel chat show being asked about the supposed NASA hacking incident. [4]. This is an inteview of Gary McKinnon, a chap who really was facing extradition from the UK for hacking NASA and the US military. [5]. Apart from the initial press promotion of the TV show in Ireland and the UK, its subsequent coverage has been nil. There were three Irish Times articles. The first was the usual promotion piece. The second (mentioned in the article) was the more skeptical one and it seemed to have brought up the claims. The third one was a rather sarcastic and funny review of the show by a TV critic. It is also possible to see how those press releases are propagated almost verbatim by entertainment sites by Googling for the phrase, in quotation marks, "SCORPION, inspired by a true story, is a high-octane drama". CorporateM's rewrite does go a lot of the way towards solving the problems with the article. Jmccormac (talk) 11:38, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Jmccormac. I wanted to post here to encourage you to keep in mind Wikipedia's policies about civility. Wikipedia needs to be an open space for thoughtful discussion, which requires focusing on the content, not the editors. I brought this up in particular because of your comment about a "random Wikipedia editor quibbling" which is obviously targeted at a specific editor and is demeaning in tone. We need to show fellow editors respect and participate in a calm and civil manner, even on controversial issues. I've posted a similar message on Wink's Talk page. Just something to keep in mind, please. CorporateM (Talk) 19:42, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Langton, if it is the same individual, has a rather strong CV and his comments on the matter do have more credibility than those of a Wikipedia editor without any such expertise or qualifications. People in the IT business tend to use the phrase "random" in the manner above to illustrate the difference between reliability of provable and known expertise, and opinion of unknown reliability or provenance. It is not demeaning. The article is quite problematic and has serious issues over various claims. The problem with technology based claims is that many editors don't have the background knowledge or expertise to distinguish between the dubious and the accurate. The NASA story sounds like a combination of various stories from the Hacker mythos of that time along with various movie scenes. It is very sparse on technical details. Autocad shipped with a demo copy of a drawing of the space shuttle Columbia. Autocad had its own file format for drawings and the software ran on IBM compatible PCs. The computer that O'Brien supposedly used for the hack was either an Amstrad 464 or a Commodore 64. Both of these computers, from what I remember, had around 64K of RAM and operating systems that were not compatible with that of the IBM PC. They also typically used audio tape as storage with floppy drives being rather expensive for the time. Even getting on to the Packet Switched Network that would have been required to access the NASA servers over Arpanet was problematic. It would have involved going through a local connection which would have been the Telecom Eireann Eirpac X.25 network. The connection speed at the time would have been low (probably maxing out around 2400 Baud as 9600 Baud and higher only became available in the early 1990s). Eirpac charged by the packet of data and it was quite expensive. Downloading large files would have taken hours as the the rate would be about 240 bytes a second on a clean line. The commonest printer type at the time was Dot Matrix Printers as laser printers were extremely expensive (they cost over a thousand Pounds/Dollars). Thus you have the file format incompatibility, the memory size and operating system of the computers, file sizes potentially larger than the available memory size of the computer being used, storage issues, printer issues and line quality issues (phoneline quality in rural areas of Ireland at the time was patchy at best). This is why people in the IT business are rather skeptical of O'Brien's claimed hack. The way that other claims did not stand up to fact checking means that the article is a highly problematic one because of the way editors rely on non-technical sources about technical claims. The way that these claims do not stand up to fact checking demonstrates that Wikipedia should be wary of relying upon non-technical sources such as entertainment sites and puff pieces as reliable sources. Jmccormac (talk) 20:41, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

While there's no explicit rule against it, it's generally not helpful to pounce on every comment made by another editor you disagree with, especially when so many of the comments are essentially the same thing and are often long or perpetuate bickering. It would be best to let each editor speak their mind, just as you are allowed to speak yours. In some cases, consensus may go your way, and in others it won't, but yelling at everyone over and over actually diminishes, not increases, your chances of getting your way and is just more rude and disruptive than I think you may have realized. I'd encourage you to be patient, give other editors' time to chime in, and allow people to speak their mind without being pounced on. There's no need to get the last word in. Generally it's best practice to give editors a week to register their viewpoint, knowing that many editors are only available to contribute during a certain day they have off work. CorporateM (Talk) 17:54, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Actually that kind of interaction encourages participation in Wikipedia. It lets people know that there are others out there who care enough to agree or disagree with their viewpoints. The big problem for Wikipedia, compared to the early days, is that the number of articles being created seems to be declining. Some of this is down to people having their work reverted by random editors of varying or no expertise. They just give up and stop editing. The number of people reading an article is always going to be massively larger than the numbers editing or commenting. Waiting for a week or so is, in my opinion a classic PR type move that slows down or kills the development of an article or story. Articles tend to develop faster and are generally more reliable when a number of people are working on them and doing so actively rather than waiting days for a reply. The main problem with that particular article is the gullible acceptance of technical claims by journalists who may not have the technolgical knowledge to gauge the technical accuracy of the claims being made. This technological gullibility, or otherwise, was the main factor for the disquiet from the IT community getting Fast Company and Cnet to reevalute their initial stories. When there are editors who have the technological (or other professional) backgrounds and knowledge commenting on an article and editors who have no such exertise upon which to draw, the talk pages, and unfortunately the articles, can quickly become a mess. Waiting around for a week or so in the vain hope that other editors will saunter by to give their opinion exacerbates the problem. Jmccormac (talk) 18:44, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:19, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Elyes Gabel vs Fenton

J, why not include Elyes quote? We just established that it was rare for someone that knows Walter O'Brien to talk about him. The original is just from Fenton. We should include the actual quote.DavidWestT (talk) 18:34, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

It is the context of the quote, David. Without the piece of text that explains the context, the quote can appear misleading. "But even Elyes Gabel, who plays O’Brien in the show, admits he has some concerns over the veracity of the story. He says that to find the character he had to push those doubts to one side and just accept O’Brien’s story as gospel. “That meant everything that he was saying I believe rather than kind of questioning,” he says. “That becomes a very dangerous, treacherous area if you don’t really fully commit or believe in what somebody is saying. So once I got rid of that, the balance became: ‘How do I make this guy? How do I create vulnerability in a character?” ” " Without that establishing context, Gabel's truncated quote loses meaning in that it becomes unclear if he is talking about believing the real O'Brien or the fictional O'Brien. Jmccormac (talk) 22:44, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

400 baud

I did some research and have found other users reporting connecting to Compuserve at 400 baud in the early days.[6] Maybe they are mis-memories etc but there are enough reports it is a possibility such a thing existed on Compuserve weirdly. It would be difficult to to deny so many first hand accounts. -- GreenC 16:41, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Confirmed here.[7] -- GreenC 16:45, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Looks more like some random factoid being thrown in to add credence. The hint in the story was that it was Compuserve in the UK rather than Ireland. O'Brien claims to have connected to Compuserve in the UK but the problem was that any call to a UK number back in the 1980s was very expensive and the line quality was poor. The low quality of Telecom Eireann's phonelines in rural area was legendary for all the wrong reasons. Connections used to drop quite frequently even when the call was to local and Irish data numbers. The breakout from Compuserve would have been more expensive as Compuserve was, from what I seem to remember, a pay per connection sytem with a range of higher payment tiers for different services. So you had a connection from a farm in rural Ireland to the UK phone number of a US service which charged by the minute and had a far more expensive breakout service and required a credit card for subscription. The 450 Baud connection seem to have been between modems of the same type. The other aspect is that the modem apparently connected to the Atari joystick port. Jmccormac (talk) 21:01, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

BUD

"Big Ugly Dish" has "always" been mostly to those who do not like looking at them. Various owners and other proponents OTOH consider them "Big Useful Dish" and "Big Utilitarian Dish". See e.g. https://www.allacronyms.com/BUD/Big_Useful_Dish and http://rickcaylor.websitetoolbox.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1272378663&postcount=8&forum=98821 . Please undo the reversion you made at http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Satellite_television&oldid=prev&diff=667581754 . Mrmazda (talk) 20:18, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia requires reliable sources and Big Ugly Dish has been widely used in the literature about Satellite TV. Self-edited dictionaries and forum posts are not reliable sources and this does seem to be an attempt to recoin the phrase which, as far as I remember, goes back to the mid 1990s when the smaller dishes from services like Primestar and DirecTV started to become more popular than the C-Band dishes. It might be worth trying to find a reliable source (book, trade/technical magazine) for "Big Useful Dish". Jmccormac (talk) 22:14, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Registra.rs

You have reverted my edit of Domain name registrar. The registration, renewal and transfer prices are major pivots of the business, yet not discussed in the article. On contrary, links to DomainTools.com etc are present in the Registrar rankings section. So why not Registra.rs which is the biggest data provider in this field? The service is well known in the industry dnw.com. Would you please kindly agree that the edit has a merit and can be put back? Thank you. Landain (talk) 12:44, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Basically the reversion was because it was a promotional link. The article is about the domain name registrars and their history rather than pricing. In terms of data volume, ICANN would be the biggest publisher of data on registrars (in the gTLDs rather than the ccTLDs) but it does not publish registration/transfer fee prices. There are some other sites that publish registration/transfer fees on a daily basis but they seem to be small sites running some scripts to update their databases. Adding Registra.rs would also have these other sites trying to add their service to the article. Wikipedia is not a web directory and links to sites generally require Reliable Sources and notability. While DNW is well known in the domain name business, there's no other supporting Reliable Source for its inclusion. While a lot of work has gone into the site, references to it properly belong in the DNpric.es article on Wikipedia rather than on the domain name registrars. Jmccormac (talk) 12:11, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for the quick response. To answer your question about references to DNPric.es. Please check dozens of top publishers listed here http://dnpric.es/about/in-the-news/ . If you know any larger database, please share the reference. To my best knowledge, DNPric.es is the biggest in the world. Registrar rankings section in Domain name registrar directly links back to sites domaintools.com and dotandco.net. The latter is not resolving at all. The former is not the industry leader. There are few competitors in the field of zone file analysis. Shall we list them too? Let us be consistent. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal to broadly present the subjects from multiple levels. I still believe that the article on Domain name registrar should include the discussion of registration, renewal and transfer prices and how they differ between various registrars. This topic was a hot potato at the recent ICANN GDD meeting last month. I know that ICANN has joint-ventured with DNPric.es to use their pricing data to run the study currently in making, as ICANN has no such knowledge inhouse. If you attend at the coming ICANN56 I propose we meet and discuss the matter in more details. So if you don't mind, I would refine the Registrar rankings section in Domain name registrar and let you review it again. Looking forward to our co-operation on this article. Landain (talk) 12:44, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Namebio is referred to a lot in the industry. However I am not sure of the size of its database of sales. Sedo may have a large set of sales but it would only be the sales of domains via Sedo. The registrar rankings in the article was based on the information published by ICANN. Domaintools used to publish some information on registrar numbers but it stopped doing that. (It has changed the focus of its business from domainers to cybersecurity and IP protection along with increasing the subscription fees dramatically.) Registrarstats also published information on registrar rankings but it disappeared for about a year and then reappeared. The registrar ranking page on Registrarstats is now private. However it does publish a daily domain name count of the gTLD zones. Outside the legacy gTLDs, getting an accurate count each day for the new gTLDs is difficult because of the zone file blackouts caused by having to reapply for access to a zone file (this was not in the original specification for the CZDS and was added by someone who really didn't understand the damage it would do to tracking) and the sometimes erratic updates of the zone files on the CZDS. The ccTLD registrars form a completely different problem as ccTLD registries, in addition to typically not allowing access to their zone files, do not generally publish registrar rankings. At the zone file level, it is difficult to reliably link the nameservers of each registrar and its resellers. ICANN does publish the number of linked nameservers for each registrar in its registry reports but it does not actually list those nameservers. I won't be attending ICANN56. I think that the economics of registrar pricing may be have enough information for a separate article as the Domain name registrar article is essentially just about their history and function. The rankings, pricing and its effects would be better in that separate article than the Domain name registrar one. A report from ICANN would be a reliable source for such an article and I think that there have been some papers on the pricing of registration fees and their renewals published in the run up to the launch of the new gTLDs but they had been somewhat optimistic on their projections of the demand for new gTLDs. With pricing and renewal rates is that some registrars have a different customer base (the brand protection registrars) and the client is not just paying for the renewal of the domain name. Other registrars may be diversified (having resellers and its own retail registrations business) or purely retail. Without understanding the position of the registrar in its market and its customerbase, the registration and renewal fees will only provide part of the story. Jmccormac (talk) 10:55, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Reverts relating to copyright infringement

For someone with an obvious passion for this topic, I'm surprised that you didn't comment in the VPP discussion which grew out of a thread that involved you and two other users. The non-consensus there was about 2/3 in favour of removing "piracy". Would you like me to make another one?

In any case, the two articles you just reverted contain 9 instances of "piracy" between them. If you are interested in finding a middle ground, it might be good to rank them according to how immutable you think the choice of words is in each case. E.g. the speech might be a case in which any change of wording reduces the information conveyed. I can't imagine that the "anti-piracy" speech shied away from saying "piracy". The line about FACT's mission to "combat all forms of piracy" seems to be a different sort of line where it can be said equally well in another way. You can't tell me that it doesn't combat copyright infringement... copyright is in the organization's name! Connor Behan (talk) 06:12, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Edit I see that you made the latter change to Federation Against Copyright Theft. Thanks. Connor Behan (talk) 06:15, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello sir

Why you changed that link. i just remove and updated the dead links — Preceding unsigned comment added by BuchiManno (talk • contribs) 20:10, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Because there was no explanation for the change. The Eurid IDN links changed when Eurid updated their websites. The cited documents are still on the Eurid website but with a different URL. Jmccormac (talk) 21:29, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

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.xyz

Hi,

If the statement "hooli.xyz, from the television series Silicon Valley,[11] is a parody website on the domain." is not an advert then what is it? Its a simple promotion of the site hooli.xyz just because it has a .xyz domain.

As a corollary what to you think about "abc.com is a site on the .com domain". --Sandyiit (talk) 20:03, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

It is a notable use of the .xyz TLD in the media (in a major television series). There were not many notable, as in supported by citations and Reliable Sources, sites in .xyz TLD at that time as it was a relatively new gTLD. The .com TLD is a mature TLD and has many notable sites. The abc.com one is just one of many. Jmccormac (talk) 21:20, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

November 2017

Hello, I'm Stesmo. I wanted to let you know that I removed one or more external links you added to the main body of Domain name registrar. Generally, any relevant external links should be listed in an "External links" section at the end of the article and meet the external links guidelines. Links within the body of an article should be internal Wikilinks. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. Stesmo (talk) 08:07, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

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Talk:.eu

Jmccormac, your most recent revert edit summary refers to "see talk page" yet you did not respond at all there. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 19:39, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Was responding while reverting. I've posted the PDF link to the Eurid 2013 report to the European Parliament where it mentions the termination of the Ovidio case with Ovidio paying 45K Euro to Eurid. Godaddy was instrumental in how Eurid was forced into taking action against the cyberwarehousing problem and the cybersquatting problem in the .eu ccTLD. Eurid had tried to spin its way out of things with its PR flack claiming that these were all legitimate companies. Parsons demolished this "explanation" showing that the companies were just cheap paper Delaware LLCs and it was this and complaints to members of the European Parliament that led to Eurid being forced into taking action against the Ovidio group. The effect of cyberwarehousing, where thousands of domain names would be registered by these registrars/registrants (something prohibited in the regulations) effectively killed the .eu ccTLD in the Irish/UK market. Some brand owners also recovered their brand domain names from Ovidio and others via the dispute mechanism and there should be links to the cases on the ADR website. Though .eu is the ccTLD for the EU, it really is not a first choice TLD for European businesses and registrants. The real ccTLDs like .de, .uk etc dominate their local markets and the cyberwarehousing and cybersquatting in .eu actually helped kickstart the growth of many of these ccTLDs which had been, up to the launch of .eu in 2005, being competing with .com. Godaddy's intervention, as the largest registrar on the web, was a very important part of what followed and this is why it should remain. Jmccormac (talk) 19:54, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. I suggest we continue this conversation on the article talk. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:01, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

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Why You Delete My WebSite Info?

wogteam.xyz is exsits Try Search In GooGle WoG Team You Will Be Redirect In WoGTeam Inc Website I Will Report Your Acc  — Preceding unsigned comment added by WoGPromotions (talk • contribs) 10:51, 6 March 2021 (UTC) 

Wikipedia is not a collection of links or a web directory. The link was promotional in nature and had previously been removed from the article. Jmccormac (talk) 11:03, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

I Dont Care Its Not Ads Website I Will Report You — Preceding unsigned comment added by WoGPromotions (talk • contribs) 11:25, 6 March 2021 (UTC)

I thought it was a valid reference

Thanks for the feedback. I'm wondering what is promotional in the reference about PDF file format. GrowthApache (talk) 13:05, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

User:GrowthApache It needs to be what is known in Wikipedia terms as a Reliable Source WP:RS. Blogs, even when the author is an expert on the subject, can be problematic. The URL of the reference was that of a how-to or what-is blog entry. Much of the material in the blog post is already covered in the Wikipedia article. It looked promotional because a blog post mentioned as a Wikipedia reference, even though Wikipedia uses nofollow tags on links, makes it look more impressive in terms of backlinks to the website. Some search engine optimisation metrics include the number of times a website was mentioned in Wikipedia as a metric of the website's importance. It can be a bit of a minefield but a source used for a reference should be notable and reliable. Jmccormac (talk) 18:24, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! The article adds value by explaining that PDF "has an inbuilt accessibility checker which makes it accessible for people with disabilities." Readers need to know how. I don't agree that a promotional activity is referencing to a reliable and "expert on the topic" webpage. Need more elaboration here please. Curiously, the result was found in search engines. I would be rather more worried for the 404 errors found on the same page. GrowthApache (talk) 09:54, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

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Revert for .com

Hi, you reverted me at .com. I found the trivia interesting, but want to discuss the more general issue of your edit summary.

"The W3techs data is based on the Alexa top 10 million websites list" yes, thought so, not familiar with "Tranco 1 million list", but that's I guess not too important. "rather than .com." Surveys are commonly done, and good ones need to sample randomly, something like 3000 cases. I suppose it could be done, but I couldn't do it (WP:OR?) and I don't know of such stats available so I just don't want to dismiss W3tech; also for other reasons, e.g. for stats at UTF-8. Top 10 million sites seems plenty. Is your argument there's a bias? I suppose there could be (unlikely?), but I believe most stats, we seemingly allow so far, have such a problem. "Approx 71% of .com websites are on US hosting." How would you know, and do you have it backwards? W3Techs has 70.3% of US hosting being .com domains (plausible and close enough to your number), but 54.4% of .com being hosted by US. That would be a rather large error... Still I'm only arguing the ranking, and German next at 9.3% is a far enough gap that even a large bias would be ok; and then Turkey at 4.2%. "misses large language groups like Chinese", W3Techs track Chinese. Is it just your argument it should rank higher? I could see that, given China has the largest population, or simply they don't have to many .com domains. They do have .cn and and e.g. com.cn and actually also ".中国 (China in simplified Chinese characters, DNS name xn--fiqs8s) and .中國". It's just very plausible they have no interest in .com. Why Turkey however... your guess is as good as mine, .com cheap, and their .tr maybe not or censored or whatever? comp.arch (talk) 22:56, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

The Alexa top 10M list is based on Alexa's methodology and tracking. Some of it is based on web browser plugins and Javascript links on websites. It is a set of sites from gTLDs, like .com, and from ccTLDs. The problem with the 10M list, apart from Alexa shutting it down in May, is that it is based on the most popular websites and their ranks. The majority of websites will not get into the list and the search engine optimisation business works hard to promote a lot of these sites. The Tranco list ( https://tranco-list.eu/ ) tries to reduce some of the effects of promotion and SEO to give a more trustworthy ranking. The W3Techs list is limited to the Alexa and Tranco lists (they overlap) so it misses the rest of the .com websites which may not be optimised or even developed as websites. The web usage rates or development rates for TLDs vary with the ccTLDs having high development rates that are often a function of their geographically specific market and the economics of that market. For some ccTLDs, they will have web usage rates between 30% and 50%. The .com is best thought of as a set of country level markets along with a smaller global one.

The biggest market in .com is actually that of the US because the .com is the de facto US ccTLD. The official US ccTLD, the .us, only has around 1.8 million registrations and it is not as widely used as .com in the US. Some of the DDoS prevention services like Cloudflare use US IP addresses so that may skew things slightly but many of the large US hosters and registrars are using US IP addresses. Godaddy, the largest gTLD registar with over 25% of the gTLD market is a US based registrar though it also owns registrars in other countries.

Some of the large Chinese hosters have US IP ranges. What was missing from the list was the sites from Canada, the Seychelles and China. The Seychelles IP addresses have effectively been grabbed by Chinese operators and they used them to host Chinese/Hong Kong websites. There were some court cases about it recently. That means that Chinese websites are effectively split over Chinese, US, Seychelles, Hong Kong and Macau IPs. The top .com countries by IP are US, Germany, Canada, Seychelles, China, France, Japan, UK, Netherlands, Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands IPs are often domain names parked on Pay Per Click parking and sales operations. As the majority of domain names in TLDs often have no developed website, they will not make it into a list like the Alexa 10M list.

The other issue with the 10M list is that the .com, like most TLDs, is not a static set of domain names. The renewal rate for first year registrations is around 56%. The registry, Verisign, publishes a blended renewal rate (first year renewals and renewals of older domain names) that's typically around 72%. It also publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief. ( https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/dnib/index.xhtml )

Germany has some of the largest web hosting companies in Europe and some of the largest registars. This is where it can get complicated. (I think that W3Techs makes some attempt to clarify matters with the DNS information.) A site can be hosted on the IP space of one country but the DNS can be associated with another country and the registrant/site owner can even be in yet another country. As the infrastructure of countries improves, more of that country's websites will be hosted locally. That is why there is a difference between DNS or registrar based counts or estimates and IP address based counts or estimates.

Turkey has around 1.5 million gTLD registrations. There is a considerable Turkish speaking population in Germany but Germany also has one of the largest datacentre/hosting industries in Europe. In terms of IP addresses, Turkey has just under a million .com websites on Turkish IPs. Not all of these are developed and it is possible for web hosting companies to assign ranges of IP addresses to customers that will have the ownership details of the customer even though the servers may be physically hosted outside of Turkey or other countries. And countries like Turkey may end up hosting websites for customers from adjacent countries.

Again, countries that have well developed hosting businesses and datacentres will host domain names from other countries. France, the UK, Finland and Ireland have large data centre operations. With Amazon and Micosoft using Irish IPs, it can sometimes give a misleadingly high view of the number of Irish hosted sites if the resolution on the IP address to country is not precise enough. W3Techs is measuring the attributes of the sites in the Alexa 10M list, including non .com websites rather than a random sample of the .com domain names/websites (Approximately 159.6 million domain names). CENTR, the European ccTLD registry organisation has been trying to estimate the usage in various TLDs. I think that it was using a 100K sample size for some of its work but most industry surveys will either check all domain names in a TLD or will use a sample of between 100K and 200K for larger TLDs. Jmccormac (talk) 00:54, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the very long [much longer than my question] answer. You really know your stuff. Would you not trust W3Techs for anything (because of only 10 (11?) million sites, or would you trust them for some info, and maybe not other, e.g. server country)? Or even StatCounter (for same reason[s])? And Netcraft etc. I'm a but obsessed with following stats, and updating in Wikipedia.

About "A site can be hosted on the IP space of one country", I know that was historically correct/accurate. I.e. the US has some "ranges", basically needed for routers. Then "Some of the large Chinese hosters have US IP ranges." yes, they and others bought up IPv4 (I don't think they need for IPv6, no demand), but it seems it wouldn't work if those addresses are routed to the US (unless you then tunnel to China, which I think you wouldn't want to do). So I think the ranges were officially changed to refer to China (in routers). Do you know if you can and would look up the right country, or would you look up some other non-official data?

I track by hosted country, but also by language (i.e. W3Techs does). I'm not up to-speed on the later, I think you can tag the language used in the HTML. But I find it likely it could be way off. I.e. you could also skip tagging, but it's likely reliable when done. I'm just assuming W3Techs does something sensible, at least not assuming all non-tagged as English. On the other hand, if most sites are not tagged, and only those with tags looked at, that might also be a bias... Because of UTF-8 you can just write e.g. Chinese (and even more languages in the same html document, besides different pages on same host), so there's no huge need to tag as such? I at least assume they look at the tag only, not the document itself (while plausible to detect language from the text, not just encoding), or maybe they do both... comp.arch (talk) 11:18, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

W3Techs list is the problem in that it limits its accuracy to that data set rather than to all TLDs. It isn't representative like a random sample of domain names from all TLDs or even from a single TLD like .com because it is based on promoted websites. Detecting some technologies by parsing HTML isn't difficult. StatCounter is based on metrics from websites running their Javascript and is based on, according to their FAQ, about 2 million sites. Some of the larger players like Google Analytics may have more data. Netcraft is a major player and continually runs surveys each month. Its data is probably some of the best that is openly available. The big problem that a lot of surveys have is in getting an accurate list of domain names in a TLD. Some of the ccTLD registries no longer release their zone files to the public but a few do allow access. The zone files for the gTLDs, including .com, are available from the ICANN czds.icann.org site but access is approved by the registries. There are sites like domainnamestats.com that provide daily updates on counts from the gTLDs and from some of the ccTLDs and from the websites of ccTLDs.

The ownership of an IP range and its routing can be different things. It is possible to do a whois lookup from the command line with Linux or to use the ripe.net, arin.net or the other regional IP registry websites. There are also some IP geolocation websites of varying accuracy. Some of them are quite good and use algorithms as well as the published IP ranges. Each of the IP registries publishes, via their FTP sites, a daily list of assigned IP ranges and their countries. It is often not as reliable as individual whois lookups. Most of the IP lookup websites use these lists. The smallest range in these lists for IPv4 is 256 or a Class C or /24.

Tagging works when the tags are included in the HTML. That's one of the problems that W3Techs has to deal with and why it may be a problematic method without checking the site's language. The other obvious issue, as you mentioned, is the shared languages. English could cover the UK, Ireland, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Geman will be used by German sites and Austrian sites. English may also be used on websites from other countries for their internationalised websites (often on a .com with their main site being on a ccTLD). With the optimised sites that appear in the Alexa list, the owners typically have an incentive to get their sites to rank better by including tags for search engine purposes. Tracking by hosted countries is reliable where a country has a good local Internet infastructure and hosts most of its websites locally. It will not work well for countries that are still developing their local infrastructures because a lot of businesses will use foreign web hosting and gTLD registrars. The use of Cloud hosting has also changed things somewhat but most web hosting is still on shared hosting rather than dedicated servers or Cloud. The transnational web hosters will also skew the country hosting figures. A few years ago, the load balancers for one of the DIY website builders changed to Irish IPs That meant that approximately 3 million websites appeared to be Irish hosted. A few months later, the IP country of the load balancers changed again. Something similar happens with the ISP ranges used by the large cable TV companies in Europe when a new IP range is added. Zooknic.com has been doing a lot of excellent research on this topic for years and has used samples of domain name whois records to try measure the geographical coverage of gTLDs. The GDPR issue has caused problems for the whois approach. W3Techs may get some of the server location and DNS right but things get even more complex at that level in that the web hosting and domain name registrations business has seen a lot of takeovers and acquisitions. This means that some of the large web hosters or registrars in one country might not be locally owned. Most of their customers will still be local. Jmccormac (talk) 23:37, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Question about a deleted reference

Hello! I wanted to follow up regarding one of my edits you recently reverted. I am relatively new to Wikipedia and still need to learn a lot about proper referencing. The edit I made on 06.21.2022 does not seem to be going against the guidelines I found on WP:RS. The website I referenced produces original content and seems to specialize in the exact subject discussed in the "Web scraping" article, so I considered it to be an authoritative source. In contrast, among other sources in the said article you can also find content from Medium which is a 'free for all' platform, accepting user-generated content with no moderation. Despite seemingly going against Wikipedia's guidelines, this source has not been removed by anyone. I'd be very thankful if you could elaborate further on the edit you made, so I could be certain about all the proper referencing criteria in the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kkaimee (talk • contribs) 13:25, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Some of the articles like Web Scraping tend to be targets for promotional links. A promotional link is one added to the article that promotes a website rather than makes the article more useful. Some promotional links are typically to blogs which are promoting the services of the companies. That's why they tend to be removed quickly. Links to blogs, even if the author is an expert on the subject, can be especially problematic and sometimes it is a judgement call on their status as an RS. A blog post is often considered as an opinion. I'm not sure about that article on Medium as it seems to be discussing the impact of legislation on scraping rather than simply promoting a service. In some respects, it is borderline but because it focused on the legislation but it provides some useful and relevant information. Jmccormac (talk) 13:51, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for a detailed response. The only reason I mentioned that Medium article wasn't because it seemed promotional, but because of the sort of platform Medium is. It will accept any piece of content without anyone checking it beforehand, so in my opinion, it hardly qualifies as an authoritative source of information. The links I added originate from websites run by actual experts whose contributions must be peer-checked before going live and should therefore be worth consideration. The template message at the beginning of the article even states that the piece lacks references, so why should users be prevented from trying to change that. Kkaimee (talk

The links you added were from sites selling or promoting web scraping as a service. The people running them may well be experts but the problem is that they are not peer-checked and blog posts are typically considered, in RS terms, as opinions. If you think that the Medium link is not a reliable source then it can be moved to the article's talk page for discussion or removed. With an article that's targeted for promotional links, it is often better to use links to academic papers, published books (there is a lot on the subject of web scraping) and other reliable sources rather than direct links to websites that are promoting their service or product. Jmccormac (talk) 09:52, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

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GoDaddy PS3Xploit revision

Could you please tell me what source I am missing seeing as I have already given a primary source, the domain holder themself? <IP removed> 19:34, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

The domain name owner would be considered a Primary Source. In Wikipedia terms it would need to be a Reliable Source ( http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources ) from a third party website like an industry news website. Jmccormac (talk) 21:17, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't understand how that's more reliable than the Primary Source themselves. Why would a news website need to report it when we already have the information straight from the origin? Not all communities and industries have news sites that report on them, and yet are still affected by controversies as specified in my revision. Noxillio (talk) 21:36, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

(My apologies, by the way, when I was reading the revisions on my phone I misread and thought you were the one who reverted my revision. I'm new to editing here, if you think I should reach out to User:Apparition11 please let me know.) Noxillio (talk) 21:38, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

The sources issue can be confusing. The problem with primary sources, in Wikipedia terms, is that they might only be the only source for something. Without a reliable source (RS), tbere is no independent verification and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. A reliable source is effectively independent verification that something happened. The Reliable Sources link above explains it in more depth. A reliable source in this case might be one of the domain name industry news sites or one of the gaming news sites if they've covered it. It may also be worth asking Apparition11 for advice. Jmccormac (talk) 21:55, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

what's the deal?

what is the problem The domain name will be redirected to the website of the buyer's company. Also, a domain can be put up for sale again after purchase! 2600:1700:1144:1080:8548:C0BC:73BA:FDD1 (talk) 02:59, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

There are no reliable source for the initial sale. The initial source, the Deccan Herald, was merely recycling a press release from Luxury Richland LLC in which it also claimed to have bought Britishtoday.com for $400 million. Press releases are not considered reliable sources in Wikipedia terms. Jmccormac (talk) 03:38, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Holq 201.162.246.247 (talk) 07:05, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

How do you expect a press release when the deal happened privately?!!

Also there is many link for lottery.xyz they provided but looks like you are .com fan! Luxuryrichland (talk) 05:09, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Anyway, it doesn't matter, when business comes up on the domain, you will create a page for it yourself, there is no need for us to try. Luxuryrichland (talk) 05:12, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Cloud computing

Hello, thanks for highlighting that my edit on the Cloud computing page was too biased towards the New Dark Age book by James Bridle. I will have another go adding to the challenges and limitations of cloud computing, this time with less emphasis on the book and also using other reliable third-party sources. Thanks! Vcbcastro (talk) 06:47, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

It can be hard to get the balance right with some of these sources. The more technical ones can be difficult to understand and the more popular can over-simplify things. There's a lot of promotion of Cloud Computing but most of the Web is still on shared hosting. This is because shared hosting is one of the most efficient models for hosting in that the majority of websites get very little traffic. The Cloud Computing model is geared towards usage. The biggest challenge for Cloud Computing is that it isn't a general solution and share hosting, dedicated hosting and DIY website services all have their place. Jmccormac (talk) 12:40, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

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Nomination for merger of Template:Domain parking

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