The story of .io
citizen-ex.com
citizen-ex.com
I think it's pretty strange not to think of somebody as a permanent resident of the place they've lived since birth.
Would you be worried if the same argument and logic were applied to people who arrived in the US after Columbus, or people who arrived in Gaul after the Romans?
If a line can be blurred back to the beginnings of recorded history, then the line doesn't really exist.
>Should we all feel guilty when we visit national parks?
No, you should respect that the national park has a disturbing history, and accept that as part of your national history. Sweeping it under the rug, or using already spurious laws like "eminent domain seizures" to justify it is not going to lead to progress in these matters.
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en
.IO has only commercialized within the web developer and b2b communities. I'm not saying that in a negative way, it is however a billion dollar industry at least. I really appreciate the post from a historical standpoint and hope in some way the popularity of .io will some way contribute to this territory.
The latest stats I could find [1] put the total number of .io domains at around one million. Even if you assume $100 registration fee (you can get one for much less), it's still 900m shy of a billion.
[1] http://blog.park.io/articles/enormous-growth-of-io-domains/
"Invented" seems like the wrong word to use here.
The .AN top-level domain for the Netherlands Antilles is no longer eligible for
continued delegation, as it is no longer an ISO 3166-1 two-letter code. In
accordance with the code’s removal from the ISO 3166-1 standard, the ISO 3166
Maintenance Agency asks users of the standard to “stop using [the code] ASAP”†.
As discussed in detail in the consideration of a similar case of the .YU
top-level domain, ICANN’s role is to be an independent technical coordinator of
the domain name system. As such, the ISO 3166-1 standard was chosen as the
arbiter for what is, and what is not, a basis for country-code domains. In order
to retain consistency with the standard, ICANN coordinates the removal of the
.AN domain in conjunction with the transition to its successor domains. In such
cases, ICANN asks the current operator to perform an orderly wind-down and
transition process.
The proposed sponsoring organisation for .CW intends to continue to operate the
.AN domain while transitional arrangements are executed. These transitional
arrangements include provisions for registrants in Curaçao to transfer
registrations to .CW; and for registrants in Sint Maarten to transfer
registrations to .SX. The applicant calls for a phased transition to be
concluded over a period of three years, after which time the .AN domain will be
fully retired.
Phrasing it as if somehow .io belongs to these people is simple intellectual dishonesty.
> As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.
Why has every Silicon Valley leftist gotten it into their heads that this isn't a completely ridiculous statement? We're not superheros or magicians, in spite of the fact that the technical illiteracy of the rest of society may make us believe we are. We had some power a decade ago, but we've spent that. How did we spend it? What do humans historically do with power? They leverage it!
We pillage and rape the earth. Five million people are dead in the congo so that we can steal their minerals and ship them to China where a suicidal 9 year old makes it into an iPhone, which is sold at exorbitant prices to lower and middle class Americans who consume websites that act as Centrifugal Bumble-Puppies and Orgy-Porgies that we create.
But yeah, the real tragedy is that there's a TLD for an island of 2000 people who are losing their culture. Techies needs to be aware of THAT and stop THAT tragedy. Get real.
The only power of the Internet ever held any promise in was allowing fringe opinions to be heard. Anyone could publish and be heard and read about certain taboo subjects and not be publicly shamed for entertaining a certain thought. 4chan still holds this sentiment. Reddit did for a while until it decided it had to make more money. I grew up on that Internet.
It's long dead. Political correctness has killed everything. We had an opportunity to expose the masses to truly uncontrolled thought and discussion. We had an opportunity to embrace society-- ALL of society. We had an opportunity to create forums where we could all try to understand each other. Yes, that means racists and pedophiles and sexists and dickheads. But we instead created controlled environments like Facebook and reddit that represent nothing new and the world will flow on as it always has. We've created systems that encourage homogeneity in opinion and have marginalized the same people we always have.
Tech isn't special.
You're basically making a bandwagon argument that humans historically have abused power, so this frees anyone in tech from any obligation to try to not abuse power. This is an absurd argument because it precludes progress.
There's a fair criticism of bleeding heart syndrome in the article. It's not the job of "tech" to solve every problem. But this doesn't mean we should just say "fuck it" when confronted with moral ambiguity because millions of people died in the Congo. The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push. And if pushing veers into silliness sometimes, who cares.
Please provide a real-world example of when this has most recently happened in any situation important enough to actually "count". The abuse exists everywhere you look, and there is never, ever, any serious backlash against it. The problem is that 99.99% of the population can care, but it only takes 0.01% willing to take advantage of the remaining population.
There will never be a sense of justice in such things. People who want the power will always take it, and there is nothing that will change that. Cynicism is not a negative trait, it's the bloody goddamn truth of our species. It sucks, but that's how things work. There is no changing this. It's simply not in the cards. Anyone who disagrees is either full of themselves or totally blind to the way the world works.
It took time and victory had some false starts (i.e. Prop 8 in California), but now gay people are equally entitled to ruin their lives with marriage.
In all seriousness, legalizing gay marriage is clearly one that far more than 0.01% of the population cared to oppose the issue, and yet they still eventually lost to an informed and vocal majority.
So because big bad things happen, we must ignore the small things?
This is nihilistic and selfish.
That's exactly my point. I'm upset that the internet going mainstream meant that they're not on "my" internet. They're on the part of the internet accessible via facebook and maybe reddit if they're <25y/o males.
No, but we are the architects and general contractors of the internet. Sure as web developers and engineers at small companies we don't have vast decision making power, but as a whole especially in the open source community the distributed power we all possess is really something magical that will define the future of the web as a whole.
As a French, I hope some day we will have a brave enough government who:
* tells the British to refuse to have foreign troops occupying a full territory displacing their own people;
* says that the current situation is wrong, and that these territories are supposed to be French, with the same legitimacy as the Réunion. There is no need to go to war or alike for that, but I feel this is something which should be said.
I personally wish the article had gone a little further into being snarky, perhaps subtly, in recognizing how stupid, meaningless, unfunny, and unclever the idea of .io for "in/out" is for domains. Most websites and all computers do input/output and there's nothing interesting about that fact. I think it's a dumb trend, and I have an irrational, emotional dislike of the suggestion that it is good in any way for all these annoying startups and their dumb domains. end rant
.io is a good way to get a name that would otherwise be taken up by a squatter while still having some technological tie. The former is really what it's all about.
Um, strict TLDs like .gov are misused?? What's a .gov site that isn't a government site? That is actually regulated…
.io is a stupid TLD name (except for actual Indian Ocean sites). I think what bugs me is "some technological tie" — wut? It's not anything. Input/Output isn't a nifty technological idea even.
Re: squatters: they could squat on any TLD. The only reason they squat on .com or .net is because you want it. Now, they will start squatting on .io because people want that. I don't see the difference.
I don't know what davisut4health.gov was, but right now it just appears to be an alternative URL for the Davis County Library. (And oddly enough, your post appears to be the only reference to this domain on the Internet!)
Ha, let's be honest, they will always squat com and net first as long as they're the most popular TLDs, which I don't see changing anytime soon.
Any Chagossians complaining now are most likely looking for some sort of reparations, which most likely does not include being returned to live in the middle of nowhere on an island prison. It's unfortunate they are living in poverty in their new home. Giving them some sort of compensation would be best, but in the history of displaced peoples, that rarely happens.
Are you a liberal? You seem to be incredibly supportive of the United States military establishment, which isn't a very liberal position to take.
(Though I suppose it might be by US standards.)
> The tone of this article really makes me cringe because not only is it anti-military,
What's wrong with being anti-military? Ignoring absolute pacifism (which has obvious problems), opposition to the military (and the military-industrial complex) is a valid political position to hold.
The article isn't "anti-military", anyway. It's not against the US Military, it's against these specific actions of the US Military. Criticism of something and opposition to it are different things.
> it thinks our hearts should bleed for the so-called "Chagossian people."
Basic human empathy, is it not? If 2000 people next door to me were kicked out of their homes, I'd be sad for them too.
> These types of attitudes give liberals a really bad name.
What attitude? Non-unquestioning support of institutions which can and do have flaws, and having human empathy?
Usually, these are valued attributes in people.
> I'll bet a sizeable percentage of Chagossians were very happy to get off that god forsaken patch of land in the middle of a vast ocean
Do you have any reason to actually believe this? Why would they enjoy being kicked out of their home? After all, this "god forsaken patch of land" is probably not all that different from the "god forsaken patch of land" they were moving to: Mauritius.
> The Navy, and it's sailors, welcome such a place,
Which has no bearing on how the occupants feel.
> and given modern realities, it only makes sense for the U.S. and Britain to make use of this strategic asset.
Well yes, it makes sense from a strategic perspective: the US wishes to remain a global superpower with control of all the world's oceans. The BIOT is of strategic importance.
That being said, it has no real bearing on the morality of the action,
> Any Chagossians complaining now are most likely looking for some sort of reparations
That's rather cynical of you. People don't forget injustices, they're right to continue complaining.
> which most likely does not include being returned to live in the middle of nowhere on an island prison.
Island prison? I don't think they would have called their old home that.
> It's unfortunate they are living in poverty in their new home.
It's unfortunate. It's also a direct consequence of how the British treated them when they were evicted.
Okay, but why should they here? Does the US really need to maintain global dominance for any reason beyond the pursuit of power?
I'm here to understand the point of this article. If the author were advocating giving the .io domain fee profits to the Chagossians, I'm all for it, but I don't see that being advocated. I'm not sure what is being advocated. It's just a bad article with a lot of hand waving and emotional appeals that don't really do anything.
Nothing. The article exists to make you think, and consider the history of this piece of Internet space. It doesn't need to advocate for something.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/18/the-story-of-the-chag...