People keep making the assertion that top-level domains that have the same strings as popular file extensions will be a 'security disaster', but I've yet to see an explanation of the potential exploits. I could maybe see a problem with ".LOCAL" due to mdns or llmnr or ".1" due to the risk of someone registering "127.0.0.1", but I've yet to see any significant risk increase if (say) the .EXE TLD were created. Can someone explain (this is a serious question)?
Many years ago there was a wonderful web browser named Lynx. It could do all kinds of nifty things and you could build an entire information systems interface with it, including things like a menu that allowed you to select an executable program that would be run on the same remote system that was running Lynx. People who lived through this era have a vague memory that executables and URLs are in sort of the same namespace. Of course that's not true because executable files are referred to as lynxexec:script.pl instead of http://script.pl
Seeing as a certain popular operating system confounds local file access via Explorer with internet access...
I gather you're implying MS Windows does this?
Not mine. --Michael Dillon