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Libya Takes Hard Line On Link Shortening Domains
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Libyan government has removed an adult-friendly link-shortening service from the web, saying that it fell afoul of local laws in a crackdown that could come as a blow to other url shortening services such as bit.ly, which is particularly popular on Twitter where all messages have to be limited to 140 characters. 'Other ly domains are being deregistered and removed without warning,' says Co-founder of vb.ly Ben Metcalfe. 'We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.' Alaeddin ElSharif from NIC.ly, the body that controls Libyan web addresses, told vb.ly co-founder Violet Blue that a picture of her on the website had sparked the removal. 'I think you'll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn't what most would consider decent or family friendly,' says ElSharif. 'While letters "vb" are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves, they're being used as a domain name for an openly admitted "adult-friendly url shortener." It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses ... that we as a Libyan registry have an issue.'"
Seems fine to me. You don't have to play on their turf
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Won't anybody stop this insanity and think of the adults who crave link-shortened pictures of "a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand"?
I wouldn't even call her 'scantily clad' but you can judge for yourself here.
My work here is dung.
http://5z8.info/refugee-murder_g6m3x_cockfights
Depends on what you consider moral or immoral in your culture.
A lot of folk howled with laughter in Europe when middle America made a fuss about Janet Jackson showing off her body during Superbowl one year, in mainland Europe you'll see advertising hoardings promoting perfume, moisturisers etc with half naked models and nobody even blinks. While on the other hand a lot of Europeans freak out at aspects of US gun culture that pass without comment across the Atlantic. All over the world people have different opinions on what is right and what is wrong.
You want to use a Libyan DNS, I guess you have to abide by Libyan rules.... A classic case of a global economy confronting local norms and attitudes. Who is right and who is wrong? how do you decide? (wish I had the answer but alas I don't.....)
dastard.ly
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Short domain names can be had on any TLD.
I fail to see what's so special about an URL ending in .ly, apart from the smug cleverness that some punsters might conceive.
No one is going to type in such an URL, and clicking works just the same across TLD's. And if you are complaining about 'all the good domains are taken' perhaps you could lobby for the squaters to be rounded up and shot.
While letters 'vb' are quite generic and bear no offensive meaning in themselves
He's obviously not a software developer.
If US states had top-level domains under their control, I can imagine quite a few that would try to do the same thing.
It's just conservative cultural mores, which come in all religious flavors. Libya doesn't want its domain used for sexual matters, Texas won't let you buy or sell vibrators, and I think some places still enforce the sabbath so that few businesses are open on Sunday. Connecticut doesn't allow take-out sales of alcohol on Sundays. Various localities in the US ban alcohol sales altogether. John Ashcroft covered up a public statue's boob with a curtain when he was AG.
Talking about sharia just puts it into "oooh, scary muslims! They're so alien and different!" territory.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Ah, good, thanks for the link, you'd think it would be something that would be incredibly obvious to include in the story, but apparently not.
I included it in my summary that I submitted a half hour before pickens but they selected his instead because mine was voted down to purple in firehose for some reason. Guess I wrote the wrong headline as I've got the same quotes he does plus the picture.
My work here is dung.
Wait, why the hell are people registering domains in Libya to shorten URLs?
They don't exactly have a history as a nice place and they have been suspected in supporting terrorism.
WTF is Twitter doing running stuff through a domain registered in friggin' Libya?? Why not just run a couple through Iran or Myanmar while we're at it?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This type stuff has been going on for years. It is nothing new! I used to own xg.nu, on it I ran a large anon server averaging 3.5 million unique hits a month and 500,000 messages a day. .nu domain notified me that Anonymity was not permitted and took the domain back. Point is, this happens a lot more than it is reported. There is no real recourse for this, you live, learn, and move on.
The island state of Niue Who owns the
It troubles me to no end the lengths people will go today in the name of religion. It's actually becoming common place for someone to have an extreme view and use the blanket of religion to protect them.
I have no problem with someone having beliefs, I too have them, but I base them off common sense, not because some book says I should do things. Questioning the institution is essential for growth. The middle east seems stuck in eternal infancy.
Goatse
A better question is why is this country even allowed to own a tld. Time to centralize control of DNS in a locale with better (nobody's perfect) free speech and neutrality laws. Libya can build their own internet if they want a sharia compliant experience.
It troubles me to no end the lengths people will go today in the name of religion. It's actually becoming common place for someone to have an extreme view and use the blanket of religion to protect them.
It was always this way. Hell, arguably the USA was founded by a bunch of people who wanted to practise religion in their own way and didn't see how it was the governments' business.
If you think people will go to extreme lengths today..... emigrating on a sail boat two hundred and fifty years ago was no picnic. A journey that took months, a bunk not much longer (and rather narrower) than the desk I'm sitting at now, any disease had nowhere to go but infect everyone on board. And the food had to be stuff that would keep, being as there was no refrigeration. Precious little idea of what you had to look forward to at the other end, being as the most you'd have heard would have been the odd letter from friends or relatives who'd already gone over. You'd have to be really hacked off to go to that kind of extreme.
Classic example of why URL shorteners should be considered harmful. Twitter is mostly to blame, I've had to shorten URLs for tweets before, but Twitter could employ better tactics than using the full url as the anchor text too.
So, the US and NL and BE and DE etc governments have NOT sought out such control over the domains for their countries BUT this means nothing to you. That LY HAS sought out the control and uses it, is just the same as western countries NOT seeking such control and not using it.
An Islam-apologist, you are doing it great.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So, you think you should get free speech but not Libya?
LY is the code for Libya, it's for them to decide how to administer it, just like it's for my country to decide how to administer .UK and for North Korea to handle .KP (which stopped working last month).
they are taking down a website which violated their TOS. Maybe we don't agree with their subjectivity but they are taking much more appropriate measures instead of getting all fundamental extremist over it.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
That's damned funny. Though, some of the suggestions around "Bite.me" the parking page suggests are a little disturbing (AnimalBite.me).
Of course, I had to look to see what TLD .me was, and found this humorous bit:
I'm sure someone thought long and hard to come up with that bit of wit. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Would you want your neighbor to act as a "central authority" telling you when to paint your house & mow your lawn?
Spoken like someone who's never heard of a homeowner's association.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Libya has shown that they do not deserve to be in charge of a tld that happens to be a common English suffix. They have no inherent right to it, so this is just an issue of expedience and user experience for English speakers.
Okay, Libya has no inherent right to the TLD that most closely denotes the name of their country ... but "we" (the US? the English-speaking world? the United Nations?) have the inherent right to take it away from them ... because it "happens to be a common English suffix"?
Are you actually listening to yourself?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
No, its not "more useful" to us. It's a stupid grammar hack that people think is funny. It's the FIPS 10-4 code for Libya -- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_FIPS_country_codes -- and I'd argue that keeping with in FIPS and ISO standards is more "useful" than being able to have the domain going-swimming.ly or whatever stupid shit the kids are doing these days in goatse.cx-like fashion.
Okay let's agree that neither of the groups have a right...
I don't think you're going to get much agreement on that either. The country TLD system wasn't created to create 200 or so TLDs which sound like the end of words because people don't like putting the whole word in the second level and having an appropriate TLD. It was created so that there would be no regional dispute over names. It was created to categorize sites regionally or, in the case of com, net, ord, edu, mil and the other TLDs, based on some other criteria.
Now the fact that countries have realized that they can make money off people who want TLDs that make the URL aesthetically pleasing doesn't change the fact that this is a perversion of the system of categorization. Now it's perfectly fine that when countries decide to allow this type of deviation from the intent...they've been given the domain to administer however they see fit. But it stops being fine when you start arguing that the perversion is more important than the original intent.
The intent is that .ly is the top-level code for Libya. Companies that made the foolish choice to base their business around a TLD from a repressive country at the whim of a dictator are not a reason to stray from that intent. It's their screw up and they have to live with it, as do the twits who decided to use their services.
Let's look at Germany. Germany is much less warlike than the USA because you beat that nonsense out of us. We won't need guns to invade another country because we won't invade another country*. A defensive army gets less of the ultra-cool high tech stuff so our equipment tends to be more on the ...rustic side. So we're a bit less enamored with army equipment.
Let's look at day to day gun ownership. What are the two main reasons for owning guns in the United States? Self defense and the ability to overthrow the government if neccessary. Self defense is actually something where guns are a self-fulfilling prophecy: If everyone has guns then everyone has guns. In a country where gun laws have always been strict (such as Germany) most criminals won't carry them because a) getting them legally means getting the police's attention, b) getting them illegally is expensive and/or difficult and c) if the cops notice you have a gun you can be sure of their full attention; if they notice you do so illegally you're screwed.
So yes, strong gun laws from the beginning do create a society where non-gun defense methods aren't automatically outclassed. Plus, people aren't as likely to shoot you if they don't assume that you're going to shoot them. I lose the ability to deal as much damage (unless I get a permit and even then it's heavily restricted) but so does everyone else. Yes, organized crime does have guns but they're dangerous primarily because they're organized crime, not because of the guns.
As for overthrowing the government: One of the things the allies have taught us when they built modern Germany is that overthrowing the government is evil. If you intend to do so you're evil. Well, and we are fully aware that any insurrection not involving most or all citizens will probably be squashed anyway as modern armies have equipment modern civilians can't even dream of owning, gun laws or not. It's unlikely that a sympathizing billionaire would just happen to have a hundred air superiority fighters or state-of-the-art surface-to-air missiles in his bike shed.
Plus, what can you use guns for besides killing (or at least maiming)? Not much. I mean, a knife can double as a useful tool but if you use a gun as a tool you fully deserve the accident that will likely happen to you. Oh yeah, and hunting, which is just killing again. Since "KILLING IS BAD" is deeply ingrained in our minds we're not too keen on doing it. We do play violent video games but that's comparing a shooting range to running amok.
I guess the answer in a nutshell is that we place a very high value on human life. Taking it is something you do when you have absolutely no other option**. Thus devices with the primary purpose of killing people are something that doesn't belong in the hands of anyone but trained professionals (= soldiers, the police and permit holders; you don't get a permit easily over here).
Of course that also means that any gun not inside secure storage is presumed to be out of storage because the wielder intends to use it. Outside of a shooting club or a forest that pretty much means that the wielder is ready to kill someone. Since we're generally not ready to kill someone we tend to get nervous around someone who is.
Note that I don't see the situation through rose-tinted glasses. Strict gun control isn't automatically good. I was present when a burglar shot my brother in the leg and the strict gun laws worked against us - the gun looked kinda fake and it was much more likely to be a blank pistol***, thus we assumed it wasn't a threat and tossed the guy out the front door. Had we handled that guy differently my brother wouldn't have a metal plate in his leg today.
Then again, the burglar ran away after we tossed him out and he only shot when my brother took up pursuit; had he assumed we were a threat, he might have shot sooner. Such as when his gun was pointed at me. I'm really glad he found me non-threatening.
Every stance has its up
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)