Official: vb.ly Link Shortener Seized by Libyan Government | Hacker News Reader

Official: vb.ly Link Shortener Seized by Libyan Government

techyum.com

10 pointsukdm10 comments

Who cares? They bought a vanity name from a repressive crypto-Islamist dictatorship and built a company around it. Chickens roost. That's what they do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Libya

"We intended vb.ly to be a link shortener that celebrated tolerance [...]". And so you hosted it on a Libyan domain name!

I wouldn't panic yet as a .ly domain owner:

"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’. Now, had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it. It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses, or even state that you are ‘adult friendly’ to promote it that we as a Libyan Registry have an issue."

That said, the value of .ly domains definitely just dropped.

perhaps. where does the line get drawn though? if someone stumbles across an adult-oriented link in your url shortener, will the libyan government take this to be a violation? will they order you to police the links shortened? will they take down your domain? etc..

The line gets drawn wherever they want to draw it. This country banned political parties 40 years ago. Why would you give them money?

i wouldn't, but clearly people have. thats more my point -- if they're okay with doing this, they're probably going to be okay to pull arbitrary content.

There is definitely some risk, so mitigate it and buy the ly.com variant of a .ly domain to protect against this - much like ad.ly owns adly.com, embed.ly owns embedly.com.

Watch what bit.ly does - likely nothing right now. If they get warning like vb.ly says they did, we will hear about it, and then every .ly owner has a problem.

Or, they leave Bitly alone because they're the best-known .ly domain, but fuck with everyone else. Because: they can.

Looks like there is a crackdown on .ly domains. See also: http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-to-b...

Both posts are about the same domain.

To be honest, I'm just surprised they didn't see this coming.

Obviously, if you buy a domain from an old-school ultra-orthodox Islamic dictatorship, you should expect to follow an extra set of laws to please them. The fact that they then decided to build a "sex-positive link shortener" company around it is just astounding.

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