Defense Language Institute Dips Into Dot-Edu Domain

The Defense Language Institute has launched a dot-edu website for a handful of Dari students because the dot-mil sites it normally works with are too "hampered by security and bandwidth restrictions," according to a Defense Department press release.

The Naval Postgraduate School, one of the few military institutions with real estate in the dot-edu domain, made the site available to the foreign language institute as part of a pilot program, according to the agency.

The dot-mil network has some of the most stringent security features on the Web, which makes it ill-suited for the needs of a language course, the institute's Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Russell said.

The dot-mil domain, for example, made it difficult to upload foreign media broadcasts and prohibited students from pulling information off the site onto a thumb drive or smartphone.

While dot-edus aren't common among military agencies, the military has by no means hunkered down in the dot-mil domain. All of the services, for example, have dot-com-based recruiting sites.