[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“The domain appears to have been registered back in 2001, when
Australia’s internet was in its infancy and
much of the nation’s domain name registration control was still
handled by Melbourne University technician Robert Elz. At that
point, it was envisaged that conferences would use the .conf.au
extension to host their own web sites, much as companies used
.com.au and educational institutiions .edu.au.“However, although much of the domain responsibilities were
transferred over the years to organisations such as AusRegistry and
.au Domain Administration (auDA), as late as 2008, the .conf.au
space was still controlled by Elz, and the first outage hit the
conference’s site.”