What do you do if a web address you printed on a physical flyer contains a typo, and you send that flyer to more than 100,000 households? Well, if you’re the Swiss canton (“state”) of Basel-Stadt, you buy the domain that contains the typo, and create a redirect to the correct URL.
As Swiss news outlet SRF reports, the Basel tax administration printed fliers that were supposed to include a URL to file taxes online. However, the Swiss country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of “.ch” was omitted, leaving just the Basel-Stadt suffix of “.bs” — which just happens to be the ccTLD of the Bahamas.
A spokesperson for Basel-Stadt’s department of finance told SRF that it would cost the equivalent of around $100,000 to print and send out a batch of new flyers, so it was a no-brainer to fork out $1,000 to administer the new domain instead.
The new URL with redirect isn’t live yet, as it will apparently take a little time for the registration process to conclude.
Chinese marketplace DHgate becomes a top US app as trade war intensifies
The Trump trade war has gone viral on TikTok, pushing a Chinese e-commerce app, DHgate, to the top of the...
Hertz says customers’ personal data and driver’s licenses stolen in data breach
Car rental giant Hertz has begun notifying its customers of a data breach that included their personal information and driver’s...
OpenAI plans to phase out GPT-4.5, its largest-ever AI model, from its API
OpenAI said on Monday that it would soon wind down the availability of GPT-4.5, its largest-ever AI model, via its...
Google’s newest AI model is designed to help study dolphin ‘speech’
Google’s AI research lab, Google DeepMind, says that it has created an AI model that can help decipher dolphin vocalizations,...
