131–140 of 200 posts
I still don't get the recent trend of startups branding their businesses around .ly and .io. I suppose it's similar to any "hip" trend, such as gradients and rounded corners, but it always seemed legally risky to me.
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…
Not to let facts get in the way of a good rant: "I would stay away from any Muslim country domain, just in case, including .io" Are you aware that .io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is "an overseas territory of the United Kingtom?" The registry itself is maintained by two UK-based companies, Internet Computer Bureau PLC and Cable and Wireless.
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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 an…
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Is this at all representative of the way sharia exists in practice? Can you provide, say, 5 examples of Islamic countries practicing sharia according to this strict interpretation that aren't overwhelmed by the influence of religous and ethnic traditionalism? If not then aren't you just arguing semantics? If the way sharia is practiced conforms to a certain well delineated set of patterns and that differs from some i…
I disagree. If in fact, that's what the original text says, then I don't think it's just semantics to avoid slamming the original text. I think it's important to distinguish between a religion or ideal - say, Christianity, or democracy - and what people do under that name. If church X doesn't follow the clear teachings of Jesus, that doesn't reflect poorly on Jesus, but on church X. If nation Y has rigged elections,…
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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.
My point is, it sure didn't stop my company from getting hundreds of happy customers, some of whom paid us more than $10,000 per month.
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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 an…
In that the application of Sharia law makes a moral judgement on the content - censoring it for the promotion of, in their eyes, illegal content.
In a work environment many things are not appropriate; even in the most liberal of societies pornography is much more of a private thing, enjoyed by smaller groups of people rather than being shared with the world at large. There are also other issues; like, for example, that pornography is connected with sexual excitement and sexual acts - all of which are also socially inappropriate in most workplaces (and public). So rather than a moral judgement it is a practical limitation designed to avoid awkwardness, or offence or distraction.
That link, in particular, is a marginal case, where the pornography is incidental to the reason for being on the page. But within a corporate structure that doesn't matter.
For what it's worth, no one will blink an eyelid where I work either.
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.
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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…
You're correct that traditional content is routed through a ton of different companies, and that anyone of them can fail, but using bit.ly is essentially pointless, as it just tacts on another service that must be relied on. In 10 years when bit.ly is completely dead, 2/3rds of the tweets or other comments on the web will be rendered useless.
The problem is also overstated because nearly all URL shorteners (bit.ly included) are sending HTTP 301 responses. This means that the short link is never indexed; only the original link is. So shorteners have no effect on pagerank/search results, which is where the longevity of pages is important (since anything not published in the very recent past is mostly discovered by search).
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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…
You're correct that traditional content is routed through a ton of different companies, and that anyone of them can fail, but using bit.ly is essentially pointless, as it just tacts on another service that must be relied on. In 10 years when bit.ly is completely dead, 2/3rds of the tweets or other comments on the web will be rendered useless.
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=TinyURL
The project definitely needs more volunteers. Check out the website or join #archiveteam on EFNet if you are interested in helping save the future internet.
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If they go after the highest profile sites, they call attention to themselves and risk a backlash. Reclaiming from the bottom up establishes a precedent, and allows NIC.ly to own domains before they become too popular to grab. The moral/ethical stance is a complete pretext. If Libya was really worried about morality, they'd do something about their atrocious human rights record.
Except, of course, your idea of morality and their idea of morality is very different. The assumption that your morality is the only one that matters pretty much reinforces the point I was trying to make with my original comment. In any event, NIC.ly can take back any domains it wants to. You're playing under NIC.ly's rules, and if they change their rules that's their business. Who do you think they fear a backlash f…