Oldest uk domains list

Jason said:
Elon said they are training them to lie.
Click to expand...
They train them to lie when the answer is inconvenient. Like if you ask about historical events, or if the answer might be "offensive".

They also either detect the problematic questions before allowing the model to formulate an answer, ensure during training that the source material in question doesn't get in there, or they detect such content before the API spits it out and return nothing.

The reason that the "AI" spits out rubbish, in the main, however, is because they are releasing something that they are pretending can answer every question based on the texts available that it has grabbed hold of for training purposes. It can't. It doesn't know right from wrong. It's guessing the next word based on what is statistically most likely and nobody on Earth can control how it will output, in terms of accuracy. That's why it's both amazing, initially, but also so shit once you realise these facts.
 
It occured to me last night that in the absence of any official list of very early .co.uk domain registrations, the old Usenet posts would be a fine source for unearthing them since it was the main means of communication in the early days of the net and most early .co.uk registrants would have registered the domains purely for communications purposes. After all, this was before the www.

For example if we search for bt.co.uk - which is bound to be the first or one of the first domains - we should be able to see the earliest post containing that domain, so we would know the domain is at least that old, but also looking at other early posts containing that we would find other domains participating in the thread.

The trouble is that AFAIK there are just 2 main hosted dumps of the old Usenet and both have big problems when interfacing with them. Usenetarchives.com is blatantly under-resourced, if you try to search for e.g. bt.co.uk it just hangs indefinitely. You can navigate through the various groups linked on the home page (probably cached pages), but who knows which groups the domain owners would have been posting in. The Google Groups Usenet has a fast search facility but although you can order results by date it is restricted to newest first! Worse still the pagination of the results has limits preventing you from going beyond about the first 1000 results. A search for bt.co.uk yields 60792 results so you can't get anywhere near the early results. You have to add additional search terms to narrow the search down, but this will also omit many of the earliest posts that would have contained the domain but not the additional search terms.

Anyway, with a bit of trial and error I managed to unearth some very early .co.uk domains in use as early as 1986 and 1987. Of course they will have been registered before the below dates but we don't know when.

"USENET READERSHIP SUMMARY REPORT FOR AUG 86"

USENET READERSHIP SUMMARY REPORT FOR AUG 86

groups.google.com groups.google.com
Posted 1 Sept 1986

Mentions:

stc.co.uk
concurrent.co.uk


"UUCP map for u.gbr.1 u.gbr.2 u.grc.1"

UUCP map for u.gbr.1 u.gbr.2 u.grc.1

groups.google.com groups.google.com
Posted 29 Apr 1987

Mentions the following:

concurrent.co.uk
datlog.co.uk
gec-erc.co.uk
hlh.co.uk
gec-rl-hrc.co.uk
stc.co.uk
inset.co.uk
ist.co.uk
latlog.co.uk
gec-mrc.co.uk
plessey.co.uk
sphinx.co.uk
root.co.uk
smb.co.uk
ssl-farn.co.uk
ssl-macc.co.uk
zen.co.uk

Of the above, hlh.co.uk, ist.co.uk and zen.co.uk have remained registered since Nominet's launch in 1996 so probably since they were originally registered around a decade before so are nearly 40 year old .co.uks!
 
Also interesting to note is that only 2 of that list of 17 domains from 1987 were in the 1993 list of 124 domains, either suggesting that the 1993 list is incomplete or that it was common for early domains to be cancelled soon after being registered even though they were free. One reason domains may have been cancelled is because back then these kinds of cutting edge telecom services were very expensive, so if the ongoing cost couldn't be justified by a business they would have cancelled the service and either the service provider or the staff at the fledgling unofficial .uk registry may have cancelled the domain.
 
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