At a place I used to work, a guy in the office next door got a phishing e-mail that purported to be from Amazon.com.  Now, admittedly, I have a perverse enjoyment of oddly engaging spam (like the ones from addresses like “Spinning U. Slowly”), but I hadn’t previously found anything remotely amusing about phishing.  This one was different.

Oh sure, the e-mail itself was a fairly run-of-the-mill, unimaginative phishing attempt, but tracking down the actual origin turned into more fun than expected.  It came from a domain that ended in “.hm”.  For those of you who, like me, have not spent your lives memorizing obscure top-level-domain assignments, you may find that guessing the country associated with that country code might be a tad challenging.  Higher Mongolia?  Hawaii Maui?  Hi-tech Mennonites?  This one eluded even a hastily assembled Geek Court of Inquiry around the office.  Eventually, we grudgingly admitted defeat and actually looked it up.  However, we found that knowing the answer wasn’t the same thing as understanding the answer.

It turns out that this is the official domain of “Heard and McDonald Islands.”  I know, you’re saying to yourself, “Oh yeah, I hitchhiked around there my senior year in college.”  Or maybe not.  If you’re like me, you can’t find even the tiniest sense of “I should know that” anywhere in your brain… you know, even those synapses that fire dimly when someone mentions the date of the Magna Carta or when you see that character actor again – the one whose name you’ve looked up before, but still can’t remember.

So once we knew what .hm stood for, the hastily convened Geek Corps then had to guess where this place is and who lives there who would be launching fraudulent e-mails, apparently desperate to get their hands on American credit card numbers.  (Is it possible that there’s anywhere in Heard and McDonald Islands that even accepts credit cards?)

It turns out that “Heard and McDonald Islands” is a little misleading.  It isn’t really “Heard and McDonald” islands, but “Heard” and “McDonald Islands,” Heard being an island itself.  We also discovered that you don’t actually have to be a country to have your own “ccTLD” (country code Top Level Domain).  It turns out that territories can have “country” codes, too.  For instance, Guam has its own “country” code (.gu, for those keeping score), as do Puerto Rico (.pr) and the US Virgin Islands (.vi).

Aggregations of small, otherwise insignificant land masses aren’t left out, either.  For instance, it seems that the “.um” code identifies a domain registered for the “United States Minor Outlying Islands.”  Further investigation shows that the registrar for the .um domain has the same address as the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Ray.  So I suspect that this domain actually allows the “country” of Catalina Island to issue its own Internet names.  Oh, those zany Californians….

Anyway, Heard Island and McDonald Islands are actually a territory of Australia.  But you knew that, right?  No?  Surely, you remember the Really Big News about this territory back in 2001, right?  No?  Really?  That was when a boatload of tourists discovered that the McDonald Islands had doubled in size due to the local volcanic activity.

Let me repeat:  a boatload of tourists were the first humans to notice that the islands looked different somehow.  It does beg the question of how desperate tourists are for grins that they go to a place so remote that no scientists and no satellites even notice massive volcanic activity.

The CIA Fact Book (of course I have one… why?) doesn’t exactly use Chamber-of-Commerce, travel-brochure language to describe HIMI (as the Aussies call it):  “… uninhabited, barren, sub-Antarctic islands” with “large numbers of seal and bird species.”  However, that description is brazen boosterism compared to a description by the Australian government:  “one of the world’s wildest, most remote” places, “frequently buffeted by hurricane force winds.”  They go on to observe, “Both Heard and the McDonald Islands have Australia’s only active volcanoes.”  Ah yes, that would explain that sudden growth in land mass reported by the hopelessly bored tourists.

If you haven’t yet made up your mind on a HIMI vacation, the Aussies add, “Due to the extreme isolation of Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI), together with the persistently severe weather and sea conditions, human activities in the region have been, and remain, limited.”  You’ve got to admire really professional understatement, huh?  That sort of description is probably how they got a boatload of tourists close enough to notice that the islands were glowing and growing.  I’m surprised they didn’t also mention the keen windsurfing opportunities afforded by hurricane force winds in unspoiled sub-Antarctic islands.

Now, put these lovely descriptions together with the idea that a small group of glaciated volcanic islands is somehow associated with e-mails being received in West-by-God-Virginia.  For that matter, imagine this territory in the same sentence with “Internet.”  Or even in the same geologic era as the Internet.

So of course, in my head, I’m now seeing a bunch of seals and sea birds huddled around some PCs generating fraudulent e-mails.  I see them gathered at the seashore where the lava slowly cools into the sea, bracing themselves against the hurricane force winds, snuffling and chortling about what they’ll be able to do with stolen credit card information.

“Mr. Brown?  This is Diners Club.  Did you recently place an order for six tons of herring?   From a Web site on Catalina?”

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re an elephant seal.

What’s in a Dot-Name? by Ed Ward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.