What will happen to Bit.ly links when Gaddafi shuts down the Internet in Libya? | Hacker News Reader

What will happen to Bit.ly links when Gaddafi shuts down the Internet in Libya?

quora.com

98 pointsandre3k130 comments

"For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative all have to be offline, or responding with empty responses. Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya."

So that's the case if they return no or invalid responses. Would do you expect to happen if they just return wrong responses (as in the case of the DHS domain seizures)?

Something tells me it won't come to that. Bit.ly will probably be fine

Curious what their backup plan is for when Gaddafi takes control of bit.ly.

Yes, this. I think the main concern would not be the DNS servers being lost, but the revocation of domains to raise money, or redistribution of the domains by the (potential) new regime.

Indeed.

Situation 1: Qaddafi's regime appropriates all .ly domains and redirects them to whatever the fuck they want (including clones of the originals).

Situation 2: Qaddafi's regime is overthrown by a coup, junta, popular uprising, or what-have-you, and then the new regime decides to repudiate business agreements made with the old regime, including domain names.

Neither is hugely unlikely. I cannot for the life of me understand why any business would sink the foundations of their brand into the sands of the questionably stable Libyan regime.

"I cannot for the life of me understand why any business would sink the foundations of their brand into the sands of the questionably stable Libyan regime."

Is that any more risky than a supposedly stable US Department of Justice and Homeland Security?

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-webs...

Uh, yes?

If Libyans start using bit.ly to get around censorship I could see bit.ly being seized, but I can't imagine all .ly domains being redirected.

What do you think the motivation for such an action would be?

Disabling the internet makes sense from a crowd control perspective, but what reason would Gaddafi have to take control of bit.ly?

Doing it for money reasons is ridiculous, the value of bit.ly is just a drop in the ocean for a country like Libya. Libya have far more lucrative options if they want money.

Unless Gaddafi's been hanging out on 4chan and wants to do a massive rickroll, I think you're over-estimating the chances of Gaddafi seizing bit.ly.

Just to taunt the US doesn't seem out of the question. He seems to enjoy being provocative.

He already seized vb.ly because it was used to serve porn. There's no way in hell that bit.ly isn't doing this as well.

vb.ly's slogan was “the internet's first and only sex-positive url shortener”

vb.ly was focused was on adult material.

Bit.ly specifically forbids adult material.

My question is if this explosion of LY domains has been financially lucrative for Libya.

I seriously don't want money flowing into Gaddafi's regime.

It can't be too much of money. Not enough to move the needle.

LY domains would have to be phenomenally lucrative to make any significant impact in an economy with billions of barrels of oil.

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

http://oil.ly is already taken, btw, but seems unresponsive. http://oi.ly is also taken. Alas.

I'm sure you'll manage to find other words to describe Gaddafi.

And they aren't. The nic.ly page says about 10k have been registered, meaning they make about $750k/year. The country's GDP is five orders of magnitude larger.

The CEO said:

For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative all have to be offline, or responding with empty responses. Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya.

This answer from the CEO is a bit of a garbage answer because it does not tell who control these 5 servers. You need at least one server outside of Libya and not in the direct control of Libya. If the 5 servers are controlled by Libya, they just need to SSH and run `shutdown -h now`. Then, even if in Oregon, .ly is dead.

So, the CEO answer is not enough.

This does point to at least a small downside to "wrap-around" urls like Bit.ly: you can ignore the semantics but who guarantees the semantics will ignore you.

I was always skeptical about using a .ly domain. They can start to feed wrong IPs over DNS replication and effectively shut down all servers.

Bit.ly started to require most of their API integrators to use the bitly.com domain.

I always use http://j.mp/ because it's shorter. =)

j.mp resolves to bit.ly -- same difference.

No it doesn't. Did you read the link?

    [mqudsi@iqudsi:~]$ dig j.mp                                       (02-19 04:08)
    
    ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> j.mp
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 59834
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
    
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;j.mp.              IN  A
    
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    j.mp.           1333    IN  A   168.143.172.53
    
    ;; Query time: 241 msec
    ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
    ;; WHEN: Sat Feb 19 04:08:47 2011
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 38

Or s.coop which although longer has the benefit of being run as a cooperative and currently the paths being generated are just 3 characters long

Why does it matter that it's a cooperative?

I hope people wake up and realize what contra productive nonsense those link shorteners are.

Somehow I image when coming up with a name, potential regional revolution never came up as a concern :)

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