Great to see these sorts of services springing out. Digital government services is definitely a place where the UK seems to be leading. Now how do I integrate this into Home Assistant...

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/access-the-latest-fuel-prices-and-forecourt-data-via-api-or-email

#govuk #gds #api #homeassistant #homeautomation

Anthropic (@AnthropicAI)

영국 정부의 공식 웹사이트 GOV.UK를 위한 AI 어시스턴트 구축을 위해 영국 정부의 과학혁신기술부(Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)와 파트너십을 체결한다는 발표입니다. 해당 어시스턴트는 영국 시민들이 정부 서비스를 보다 쉽게 찾고 이용할 수 있도록 맞춤형 안내를 제공할 예정입니다.

https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2016102835092427080

#govuk #publicsector #govtech #ai

"If you already have an internet connection, the change may be as simple as plugging your phone into your broadband router rather than the socket on the wall. In some cases, an engineer visit may be required to ensure devices are functioning correctly."

This is quite laughable compared to what happened to me. #voip #gov #uk #govuk

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/moving-landlines-to-digital-technologies

I didn't realise gov.uk already had a web page that told you what day of the week it is… nice!

#Tuesday #govuk #ukgov

A busy week at GFR to round off the year!

* New client project at #gdsteam working on #govuk publishing 💼
* Value propositions for #jamcoop 🍓
* Mocha library release ☕️
* CoTech website revamp 🎨
* #codeclub up and running 🤖
* Mission Patch bug fix 🚀
* Dotfiles on a new laptop 💻

🎄Merry Christmas🎄 and a 🍾Happy New Year🍾!

https://gofreerange.com/week-883

#weeknotes #ruby #rubyonrails #cooperative

A Complete List of Every UK Government Domain Name

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/a-complete-list-of-every-uk-government-domain-name/

Eight years after I published this blog post, I helped officially release all these domain names as open data! Funny how life works out, eh?

Would you like to know every domain name the UK Government had registered? Of course you would! There could be all sorts of interesting tit-bits hidden in there (ProtectAndSurvive.gov.uk? EbolaOutbreak2017.nhs.uk? MinistryOfTruth.police.uk?)

Rather than relying on Freedom of Information requests, or Open Data, we can go straight to the source of domain names - the DNS!

Shut Up And Give Me The Codez!

Download all UK Government host names.gov.uk 15,436 records.nhs.uk 4,877 records.police.uk 466 records.mod.uk 268 records.parliament.uk 91 records

That's... quite a lot! The majority are host names - only around 2,247 of the GOV.UK ones are domain names. Many of them are not currently live.

Still, I wonder how many are new?

The Gov.UK file is a CSV which also show when the domain was first registered (if available).

Geeky Details

The Domain Name System (DNS) lists every single domain name (example.com). It tells your computer which IP Address is associated with a Domain Name. If your local DNS doesn't know where example.gov.uk lives, it goes to the ISP's DNS. If they don't know, they ask an upstream provider's DNS. And so on, until someone asks the .gov.uk nameserver for an authoritative response.

So, can you download every domain name in existence? No, not easily. It usually involves filling out lots of forms and giving some compelling reason why you want it.

However, Rapid7's sonar project provides a sort of "best guess" for all the domain names which it can see.

To download the entire file is 12GB. That's the zipped version.

Once unzipped, it's a whopping 67GB

A quick look at the file shows it contains 1,408,097,159 records. Youch! That's a lot of domain names!

This is what the file looks like

As a brief primer, a CNAME points to another domain name. An A Record points to an IP address. There are lots of different domain records.

Ok, so let's get all the *.gov.uk records out of there...

Ah! Ok, we're picking up some websites which are pointing to a gov.uk site (potentially useful) and some false positives like "019186.gov.ukpfl.cn". Let's just look at records where the first column ends with .gov.uk":

OK, so how do we de-duplicate these? The first thing to do is manipulate the data. We only want the first column. There are an number of ways to do this in Linux, I prefer to use the Python tool CSVfilter.

To install sudo pip install csvfilter.

To grab only the first (zeroth) column
cat 20150926_dnsrecords_all | csvfilter -f 0 > out.csv

Now, this doesn't quite work. Why? Because some DNS records contain incredibly strange data! You can manually clean up the data, but that's a bit boring and utterly impossible to load into Excel or any other normal editor.

Here's what I did...

Hey presto! A more-or-less complete list of every .gov.uk website which is registered. The same can be performed for .NHS.uk, .police.uk, .MOD.uk etc.

Getting The Dates

Time to crack out the Ruby!

Using the WHOIS library, I wrote a simple script to parse the text records and query when the domain name was created.

This isn't perfect - there are only records for the third level of gov.uk - and no records at all for Parliament, MOD, Police, and NHS. It is also a bit slow to run through the thousands of records - but we can see a few interesting bits and bobs.

Created in 2015

I suspect some of these are merely renewals, rather than brand new domains.

Oldest

Sadly, clacks.gov.uk has very little to do with Terry Pratchett!

That's all folks!

Spotted anything unusual? Found a better way to do things? Stick a comment in the box!

If you've enjoyed this post, you can buy me something from my Amazon Wishlist.

#data #govUk #NaBloPoMo