Hacker News Reader

Comment by germanier | Hacker News Reader

There is the Public Suffix List but it doesn't seem to contain those domains. Does HN use that list? https://publicsuffix.org

View on HN

I was warned to not use it by it's maintainers because it would make the root of our domain potentially unusable. If I understand it correctly, it's designed for things like domain roots (.com), not domains with subdomains.

It is useful for some security protections in such a hosted subdomain scenario which is why herokuapp.com, herokussl.com, github.io, gitlab.io, etc are on the list, but yes, you would not be able to use your primary domain there, you'd need a dedicated domain for your customers and their subdomains.

Namely, having your hosting domain on the public suffix list means that browsers will not allow setting cookies on the suffix (similar to how you cannot set a cookie for ".com"), which prevents rogue websites on the same root domain from stealing sensitive cookie values from other subdomains.

At any rate, wordpress.com is not on the public suffix list either, so that doesn't appear to be the issue here.

Surge is not notable enough to be on that list. I think it only applies to institutions, museums, and things like that. Judging from this anyways: https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat

You didn't read through far enough (or, more likely, you didn't ctrl-F well enough). After the "ICANN DOMAINS" section is the "PRIVATE DOMAINS" section. It contains entries like:

- s3.amazonaws.com

- blogspot.com

- githubusercontent.com

but there are many other sites in the list which are less notable.

Indeed, it doesn't really have anything to do with notability. You'll notice none of those root domains you just provided have sites attempting to use cookies on them.

Oh okay thanks for clarifying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com