
What will happen to Bit.ly links when Gaddafi shuts down the Internet in Libya? - andre3k1
http://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-to-http-bit-ly-links-when-Gaddafi-shuts-down-the-Internet-in-Libya-due-to-protests
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gst
"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)?

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

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

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ig1
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.

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jonursenbach
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.

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ig1
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.

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dannyr
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.

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tomafro
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>

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

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

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kuroir
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.

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Loic
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.

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joe_the_user
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.

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js4all
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.

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

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

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kaerast
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

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benatkin
Why does it matter that it's a _cooperative_?

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

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

