In Defense of the .zip TLD

6 pointsposted 13 days ago
by yathern

5 Comments

mmonaghan

13 days ago

Love the article and agree with you but the normal persons take is exactly right - "isn't .zip a file extension and couldn't the average person think that it just leads to downloading a zip file or something like that? Aren't zip files kinda weird?"

However I would read luke's articles anytime, no matter the tld.

8organicbits

12 days ago

> you try to tell your friend “hey I sent weddingpictures.zip to your email” and your friend clicks the resulting link, thereby being redirected to a trick site that steals your SSN.

Information theft seems possible, SSN less so, but I was more concerned about downloads.

Clicking on an auto-linkified weddingpictures.zip could autodownload a zip file containing malware. You may trust your friend but the zip file is not from them.

I think the lack of auto-linkification has a lot to due with why we aren't seeing real phishing attacks using the ZIP TLD. So I feel like we warned, the industry reacted by not autolinkifying, and disaster was averted.

direwolf20

13 days ago

Luke defends all the problems with .zip but doesn't present a case why .zip is good.

yathern

13 days ago

I'm okay with it being neutral, neither good nor bad.

direwolf20

13 days ago

Raymond Chen says that every feature starts at -100 points.