

Official: vb.ly Link Shortener Seized by Libyan Government - ukdm
http://techyum.com/2010/10/official-vb-ly-link-shortener-seized-by-libyan-government/

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tptacek
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!_

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merrick
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.

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noodle
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..

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

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noodle
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.

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donohoe
Looks like there is a crackdown on .ly domains. See also:
[http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-
to-b...](http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2010/10/the-ly-domain-space-to-be-
considered-unsafe/)

~~~
arst
Both posts are about the same domain.

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kloncks
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.

