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The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

benmetcalfe.com

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Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#121

Post by endlessvoid94 »

seldo wrote: post #99
andybak wrote: post #75

Am I the only person hoping that a high profile URL shortener liky bit.ly get taken offline so people learn quickly that redirecting their content's URLs through a 3rd party is a bad idea?

Redirecting your content through a third party like Amazon Web Services? Or Akamai CDN? Or Rackspace? All small- to medium-size websites are the result of dozens of third party companies -- server farms, network backbones, DNS providers -- working together. Even the really gigantic sites like Google and Yahoo, who really do own their whole networks and all their hardware, use third party services extensively. In the…

I think he's talking about how URL shorteners undermine a bit of the effectiveness and utility of REST. All resources should be clear and readable, etc. URL shorteners remove useful information.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#122

Post by zeteo »

kloncks wrote: post #87
semanticist wrote: post #9

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…

I will only comment on your use of the term Sharia law. The term's widely misunderstood, especially after the events in NYC this summer. Just so that you know, Sharia "law" is just six principles: 1. The right to the protection of life. 2. The right to the protection of family. 3. The right to the protection of education. 4. The right to the protection of religion. 5. The right to the protection of property (access t…

As far as I can tell, there is a wide variety in people's interpretation of Sharia. In practice Sharia's introduction has been recently associated with very harsh punishments (amputation, stoning):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia#Contemporary_practice

There are definitely lots of people who choose to view Sharia this way, and invariably this kind of interpretation seems to have prevailed in practical settings. So what makes your view of Sharia the One True Interpretation? Do you even have some references, from the relevant religious authorities, to the effect that these six principles you enumerate are all of Sharia and nothing else?

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#123

Post by there »

ericabiz wrote: post #62
ucentric wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Totally disagree! I own a short .biz domain (erica.biz) and have had people mis-speak it when introducing me as "ericabiz.com"...so much so that I put in a backorder on ericabiz.com and when the previous registrant finally let it drop this year, I snagged it and 301'ed it to erica.biz. 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…

a lot of people see .biz as a really spammy-sounding tld. i wouldn't advise any company to use it as their primary domain name.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#124

Post by darklajid »

jacquesm wrote: post #108
darklajid wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add some more amusement: Why the hell would that be not safe for work? It's hard to state my question without ending up being dismissed as a troll, but I'm deeply amused by different viewpoints related to sex between western cultures. If I take a karma hit for that, so be it. Anecdote: During the football (yeah, or soccer..) worldcup in Germany images were all over the internet that showed a brochure, which w…

It's not safe for work because plenty of people reading HN do so from their work during breaks and if they happened to be showing a page which has full-frontal nudity on it, even by accident during work hours they could get fired for that. Your - or mine - morals don't enter in to it, it's just a fact of life. So it's common courtesy to label links that are not safe for work as such. It's no trouble at all and if it…

Oh well - sure. I didn't want to criticize (sp?) the habit at all. Nor did I want to mock anyone's morale or ask for the removal of NSFW tags.

What you just described is just - in my little world - a tiny, little version of the original problem discussed in the thread.

For a part of the world the service vb.ly was not safe for X (work, family, whatever).

For a part of the world (as explained by you) the blog entry and its sexual references/ads/etc are not safe for work.

I wanted to point out the parallels, which seem (mildly) funny to me.

I visited the link at work and I'm sure nobody would ever complain, let alone _think_ about bad consequences for me. Not that I imply that it should be that way or that this is in any way superior to different positions or morale standpoints. It is just - different.

NSFW is in that regard a kind of a lowest common denominator (sp?), tagged on links with good intentions for sure. But using the lowest common point means also that we put a label on something that might be excessive/overly protective to others. I guess I cannot explain my feeling about these similarities in judgement, inparticular around sex/nudity/pornography, any better, sorry.

Short version: I don't question the "NSFW". I want to remind the readers that the reasons why this is necessary in the first place are an interesting thought in light of this discussion.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#125

Post by btilly »

kloncks wrote: post #87
semanticist wrote: post #9

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…

I will only comment on your use of the term Sharia law. The term's widely misunderstood, especially after the events in NYC this summer. Just so that you know, Sharia "law" is just six principles: 1. The right to the protection of life. 2. The right to the protection of family. 3. The right to the protection of education. 4. The right to the protection of religion. 5. The right to the protection of property (access t…

What you say is true, but disingenuous. It is like saying that British common law is just adherence to the principle that judgments should be made in accordance with principles that were accepted in previous judgments, and it varies widely across different jurisdictions. This is true, but British common law means a lot more than just that.

The same is true of Sharia law. It has a lot of baggage. And it doesn't always read as a Westerner might naively like to read it. In particular when it comes to Sharia law, opposition tends to center on items 2 and 4 on your list.

On #2, Sharia law protects the family, but with different definitions and severity than Western society accepts. Consider the asymmetry between men and women for divorce. Consider the punishments for adultery. Both are widespread in Sharia law, and neither is palatable to Western audiences.

More problematic is item 4. It is not (as it is in the US constitution) the protection of freedom of religion. Instead it is the protection of the Islamic religion. (With limited protections for peoples of the book.) Thus we get anti-blasphemy rules, punishment for converting Muslims to another faith, etc. This is in direct conflict with core precepts of the US Constitution. This is not an accident of interpretation. It is a central feature of having a system of law whose purpose is to support a specific religion.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#126

Post by citricsquid »

pg wrote: post #93

I think what really happened here is that someone at the Libyan domain authority decided they wanted the name and made up a story in order to seize it. I've heard of other cases of .ly names being confiscated, and for this reason we advise YC startups not to depend on them.

Does this not apply to all ccTLDs though? My understanding was that the majority of ccTLDs are controlled in a way that they are able to easily "reclaim" any domain they want at any time without breaking any "rules"...

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#127

Post by there »

antileet wrote: post #23
ucentric wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Despite it being shorter, it seems more awkward to type and sometimes seems more prone to error. Not to mention how it might affect your standing with search engines. Remember when http://delicious.com was http://del.icio.us When I first saw the product, I thought the name was "icio".

for what it's worth, delicious was del.icio.us for 4 years and only became delicious.com 2 years after yahoo bought the site for many millions of dollars.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#128

Post by citricsquid »

andreross wrote: post #95
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a terribly shortsighted comment. > 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…

We own the internet in the sense that we create the content and value for those domains, that otherwise would be just a collection of useless characters. How many successful startups do you know that were created by Libyans? And as far as Sharia law goes – I don't care what they do in their own countries, as long as it doesn't touch me in any way. That also means that if touching their domains means risking to loose…

The majority of the content online is not created by startups, I would wager that the majority of the internet couldn't care less about your little startup circle jerk. To suggest that any single country "owns" or contributes most to the internet is laughable. I never use content created by china, that doesn't mean it's non-existant.

Re: The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe

#130

Post by andreross »

citricsquid wrote: post #128
andreross wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We own the internet in the sense that we create the content and value for those domains, that otherwise would be just a collection of useless characters. How many successful startups do you know that were created by Libyans? And as far as Sharia law goes – I don't care what they do in their own countries, as long as it doesn't touch me in any way. That also means that if touching their domains means risking to loose…

The majority of the content online is not created by startups, I would wager that the majority of the internet couldn't care less about your little startup circle jerk. To suggest that any single country "owns" or contributes most to the internet is laughable. I never use content created by china, that doesn't mean it's non-existant.

The majority of content on the internet is trash as far as I am concerned, but if you read carefully what I write you would see that I am talking about value. Chinese entrepreneurs create valuable resources, that allow Chinese users to use Internet for their benefit, which includes creating content that we might consider as trash. Without Chinese entrepreneurs there would be no Chinese internet, just a collection of Chinese government sites that nobody uses. Same goes for Russian, German, Israeli, British, etc. etc. and yes - AMERICAN entrepreneurs, who should be the first on this list, whether you like it or not.

Majority of the Internet IS what you called a startup circle, because that's who builds all the resources people like you use. And to claim that I claim that a "country" owns the Internet means you don't know how to read – I stress that Internet is essentially owned by those who create resources and supported by those who use those resources – not by the governments of countries who think they can make rules and do whatever they want. They can do it physically – and end up having no value left, because those who create value have departed.

And besides – I am not even American.

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