Comment by jeroenhd
5 months ago
The PSL is something you find out about after it goes wrong.
It's a weird thing, to be honest, a Github repo mentioned nowhere in any standards that browsers use to treat some subdomains differently.
Information like this doesn't just manifest itself into your brain once you start hosting stuff, and if I hadn't known about its existence I wouldn't have thought to look for a project like this either. I certainly wouldn't have expected it to be both open for everyone and built into every modern internet-capable computer or anti malware service.
To be pedantic, the GitHub repo is not the source of truth, this is:
https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
It even says so in the file itself. If Microsoft goes up in flames, they can switch to another repository provider without affecting the SoT.
If you don't know what you're doing and as a result bad things happen, that's on you.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who allow phishing sites suffering reputational consequences.