61–70 of 200 posts
So if someone posts a cartoon picture of muhammad, and shortens it through bit.ly, will Libya pull the domain, and in the process break millions of other shortened URLs? http://bit.ly/cartoon-muhammad
You don't put your business' fate in the hands of some third world countries legislation/semi governments whims.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't agree more. If the .com is not available DON'T DO IT! I heard about http://wordoid.com/ here on HN -- it's a wonderful little webapp that lets you generate domain names that "sound natural" in a select list of languages and that (optionally) contain specific words. In the "more options" you can filter out domains where both .com and .net are unavailable (it would be better to just filter unavailable .coms bu…
I think that this advice only applies to commercial sites. I have several personal domains such as Richard.sDoma.in and Richard.sMyNa.me which are far superior to any .com domain name. Personal users are only just starting to get into having a personal URL to hosting their own id and blog etc. and with over 2 billion internet users and only around 140million registered domains, I think attitudes will change quickly.…
I still love erica.biz and have no intentions of switching over to a .com, but there's no question that people assume you have a .com.
Search engines, however, don't care--my site happily gets tens of thousands of visitors per month from Google et.al. and the site ranks well for some very high-volume keywords.
While I'm as against Sharia law as the next privileged westerner/godless heathen, I found the complaint that the rules weren't in English really amusing. Why should a country's national ccTLD rules be in English? It's a domain space for that country, not for making convenient short URLs for Americans to use on Twitter. Why would a country run under Sharia law want to allow services like bit.ly and others to use their…
> 'it's our internet and we're just letting you weird foreigners use it' No, he's warning others that because Libya control this particular TLD, and police it using a set of laws that aren't available in English, it's to be considered unsafe for those who do not read Arabic.
So, when your government (assuming the entrepreneur in question is American) classifies Libya as a dangerous state, it might be prudent to avoid building your identity over the domain names provided by Libya... don't you think.
I remember this only because Oracle made me click a check box agreeing not to export any of their software to these "axis of evil" countries.
Culture clash... looking at the sites screenshot here: http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2010/10/official-vb-... (NSFW) I can see how under strict Islamic law that pic would be construed as "obscene, offensive and illegal". I have... minimal sympathy with these people - a lot of the fault lies with themselves for not understanding the rules, morals and society of the country they were buying from. I don't think…
Why did it take 13 months for libya to care enough to take it down?
Here is the post on it's launch (possibly nsfw in libya?): http://laughingsquid.com/vb-ly-the-internets-first-only-sex-... (NSFW??)
Culture clash... looking at the sites screenshot here: http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2010/10/official-vb-... (NSFW) I can see how under strict Islamic law that pic would be construed as "obscene, offensive and illegal". I have... minimal sympathy with these people - a lot of the fault lies with themselves for not understanding the rules, morals and society of the country they were buying from. I don't think…
agreed on the culture clash, however, there is something that is a little odd about this story in general. vb.ly launched in aug 2009 with the very overt subtag: "The Internet’s First & Only Sex-Positive URL Shortener" Why did it take 13 months for libya to care enough to take it down? Here is the post on it's launch (possibly nsfw in libya?): http://laughingsquid.com/vb-ly-the-internets-first-only-sex-... (NSFW??)
Non-alarmist explanation; they could have received a complaint (which, lets face it, is how such things usually works in the US too)
It does make it a little more interesting though, certainly :)
While I'm as against Sharia law as the next privileged westerner/godless heathen, I found the complaint that the rules weren't in English really amusing. Why should a country's national ccTLD rules be in English? It's a domain space for that country, not for making convenient short URLs for Americans to use on Twitter. Why would a country run under Sharia law want to allow services like bit.ly and others to use their…
All the Lybians did now was scare American and other Western entrepreneurs from getting anywhere near their domain. I was about to have my new startup set up with .ly domain, but now I will move to a much friendlier .it domain (in fact, I would stay away from any Muslim country domain, just in case, including .io). Those who say "oh, we don't own the Internet, how arrogant of us to even think we do..." I want to tell…
> We do OWN the internet, because it is us who create the Internet.
That's a pretty serious mis-statement of fact right there. You don't OWN the internet because it was 'you' (whoever that is) that created it.
The internet is a connection of networks, each of those networks could operate by itself, the fact that we've partitioned the address space in a way that allows us to route packets from 'sharia' ruled countries to the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and all of the EU is to our mutual benefit.
To suggest that you 'can shove those Sharia countries domains...' is to add insult to injury, nobody there asked for American and EU entrepreneurial types to buy these domains and use them, they are primarily intended for use by those countries nations. To muddy the intentions of TLDs is a questionable practice, how would you feel if Wallmart started to sell stuff under a .edu domain?
Those domains are not worthless, they just are what they are, regional TLDs, specifically with the intent to enable each country to govern their own TLD as they see fit.
Please also notice that .us is the regional domain for the United States, and not .com , and that it too has its own set of rules.
I don't understand why he is so upset about the rule that three letter domain names are blocked. He should move to Switzerland, here you can't register domain names shorter than 3 letters.