Yes. It was even the suggested practice at one time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local

Cool, I didn't know that. But the article also says hey recommend against it now. I see the "Microsoft recommendations" section of the wikipedia article indicates they changed their mind on this several times.

On the other hand almost nothing uses mDNS.

In my experience mDNS seems ubiquitous; almost every network connected device I've seen in the last couple decades has it enabled by default.

Fucking bootcampers istg I’m so glad I don’t have to work with y’all and only interact when you deliver my fucking takeaway.

Huh? What are "bootcampers"? It used to refer to people running windows on intel macs (because apple's boot loader to allow that was called BootCamp), but that wouldn't make any sense in this context. Unless you are having your food delivered by people who run Windows on old Apple hardware?

Implementers MAY choose to look up such names concurrently via other mechanisms (e.g., Unicast DNS) and coalesce the results in some fashion

So actually the RFC does not limit whatsoever the resolution of .local domains to mDNS. Implementers, apart from Android do indeed always do look up via both unicast and multicast (if not disabled). Only android limits this to multicast-only.

I see. Sorry I missed that part of the RFC.

But, FYI, it is really not only Android that doesn't send unicast queries for .local names; GNU/Linux distributions running avahi (most of them) also don't. I don't have a mac or iphone nearby to check but I would assume they are probably also resolving .local exclusively via mDNS too. edit: this "Apple devices might not open your internal network’s ‘.local’ domain" support article indicates my assumption is probably correct.

Also, please don't tell people to KYS :(

Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.

• Audrey Tang confirms https://bsky.app/profile/audreyt.org/post/3lfn56wzdf22n
• Bill S. Preston Esq confirms https://bsky.app/profile/alexwinter.com/post/3lfmzjpszsc25
• Vox Media confirms https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342799/free-our-feeds-social-media-ecosystem-at-protocol-bluesky

username checks out

Having some distrust in Wikipedia is healthy; you certainly shouldn't take it as the final word about facts you're depending on the accuracy of. But, it is very often a good starting point for learning about a new subject.

Spending a minute or two reading that "source code" article (or another version of it which is likely available in your first language) would give you a much better understanding of the concept of source code (which is a prerequisite for understanding what "closed source" means) than any of the answers in this thread so far.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.

some of the privacy messengers here (like Briar) have blogging/forum features

many people incorrectly assume briar aims to provide some sort of anonymity, because it uses tor onion services and is a self-described "secure messenger". however, that is not the case:

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#does-briar-provide-anonymity (answer: no)

tldr: briar contacts, even when only actually using onions, exchange their bluetoooth MAC addresses and their most recent IPv6 link-local address and last five IPv4 addresses briar has seen bound to their wlan interfaces, just in case you're ever physically near a contact and want to automatically connect to them locally.

This is an excerpt of OP's post in question:

Last android piece of garbage I buy. Is there even a single good reason it restricts .local, as is commonly used for local domains in LAN DNS to some hellish nonsense no one’s ever used called multicast DNS?

Is .local actually "commonly used for local domains in LAN DNS" or did you just see .local somewhere else (probably using mDNS) and decide to cargo cult it? I've never seen someone use it outside the context of zero-configuration networking.

fyi, besides Android, most Linux distros also ship with mDNS enabled by default, as do all Apple operating systems since the feature was first introduced in an update to Mac OS 9 in 2001. It's mostly just Windows that doesn't.

And before someone says “uhmm but m-muh RFC says so” - no. That RFC only suggests that some people MAY implement it as such, which yeah, sucks, because the RFC if it did it’s job right should forbid it altogether [...]

Which RFC says that? I just checked, and RFC6762 (Multicast DNS) says:

This document specifies that the DNS top-level domain ".local." is a special domain with special semantics, namely that any fully qualified name ending in ".local." is link-local, and names within this domain are meaningful only on the link where they originate. This is analogous to IPv4 addresses in the 169.254/16 prefix or IPv6 addresses in the FE80::/10 prefix, which are link-local and meaningful only on the link where they originate.

Any DNS query for a name ending with ".local." MUST be sent to the mDNS IPv4 link-local multicast address 224.0.0.251 (or its IPv6 equivalent FF02::FB).

Also, as per (the immediately prior) RFC6761 ("Special-Use Domain Names"), RFC6762 explicitly adds .local to the IANA registry of special-use domain names.

HTH!

CuriousMarc:

Videos documenting restorations of exceptional vintage electronics and early computers, space hardware and the odd mechanical calculator or Teletype. It often showcases my Hewlett-Packard test equipment collection and, from time to time, my R2-D2 robot build. Things rarely work when I start, but almost always do when I end. A nerdy place for your inner engineer, to celebrate engineering exploits of our predecessors, and learn a lot from it.

The campaign hasn't made any progress since 2011 when Wolfram Alpha added support for it, a year after Google did. Google's calculator still does support it, though, so you can write queries like like "1Zbit/s * 1 year in hellabytes" (3.9 hellabytes), or "mass of the earth in hellagrams" (5.9 hellagrams).

I asked this question the other day if I could somehow input my handwritten notes into programs like Trilium (or logseq whatever) and memos. OCR/HCR seems to far behind still so I am unsure.

I just left this comment on your post.