Libya Takes Hard Line On Link Shortening Domains 354
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that Libyan government has removed an adult-friendly link-shortening service from the web, saying that it fell afoul of local laws in a crackdown that could come as a blow to other url shortening services such as bit.ly, which is particularly popular on Twitter where all messages have to be limited to 140 characters. 'Other ly domains are being deregistered and removed without warning,' says Co-founder of vb.ly Ben Metcalfe. 'We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.' Alaeddin ElSharif from NIC.ly, the body that controls Libyan web addresses, told vb.ly co-founder Violet Blue that a picture of her on the website had sparked the removal. 'I think you'll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn't what most would consider decent or family friendly,' says ElSharif. '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." It is when you promote your site being solely for adult uses ... that we as a Libyan registry have an issue.'"
Their rules, their game (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Their rules, their game (Score:2, Insightful)
Rather stupid to register a domain of any value in a country as loony as Libya, though.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's the point. Cultures that think pictures of women who are "clad" (which is just a fancy word for "wearing clothes") are very probably suppressing their women.
I would stop short of saying that women in these cultures are abused or mistreated because I don't know the situation. But my impression is that making them adhere to a particular dress code is denying them a basic human right.
On the other hand, forcing "Western" values on Libya doesn't seem all that fair either. So let them be free to make rules for their own people and what businesses like bit.ly or vb.ly run afoul of those rules then let them pay the consequences.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, good, thanks for the link, you'd think it would be something that would be incredibly obvious to include in the story, but apparently not. Either that or I'm giving too much credit to the BBC.
I suppose I should be outraged by this, except:
1. I hate URL shorteners.
2. It's not like there isn't a free market for domains. Don't like the Libyan rules, create a domain somewhere else.
Re:Their rules, their game (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but are the owners of those domains actuall Lybians? If not, then I don't think you have any right to whatever domain name you'd want or like.
And the Lybian registrar has all the rights to take your domain name for actual Lybians.
Re:Different culture, different opinions (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of folk howled with laughter in Europe when middle America made a fuss about Janet Jackson
Actually to be fair a lot of people in the US also couldn't understand what the problem was. However those who complained about it had the louder voice.
I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Short domain names can be had on any TLD.
I fail to see what's so special about an URL ending in .ly, apart from the smug cleverness that some punsters might conceive.
No one is going to type in such an URL, and clicking works just the same across TLD's. And if you are complaining about 'all the good domains are taken' perhaps you could lobby for the squaters to be rounded up and shot.
Sharia is a bit of a red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
If US states had top-level domains under their control, I can imagine quite a few that would try to do the same thing.
It's just conservative cultural mores, which come in all religious flavors. Libya doesn't want its domain used for sexual matters, Texas won't let you buy or sell vibrators, and I think some places still enforce the sabbath so that few businesses are open on Sunday. Connecticut doesn't allow take-out sales of alcohol on Sundays. Various localities in the US ban alcohol sales altogether. John Ashcroft covered up a public statue's boob with a curtain when he was AG.
Talking about sharia just puts it into "oooh, scary muslims! They're so alien and different!" territory.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:2, Insightful)
... the definition of scantily clad is religion dependent.
FTFY.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's the point. Cultures that think pictures of women who are "clad" (which is just a fancy word for "wearing clothes") are very probably suppressing their women.
And people from Brasil look at what the US norm is and shake their head. I have a female friend from Brasil, who after a business trip to the US she told me how she brought her normal Brasilian bathing suit and felt weird wearing it around Americans. The next trip she borrowed her mothers bathing suit because it was more modest and fitted in by US standards. So by your definition and her experience the US is suppressing its women. And dare I mention Prairie dresses?
Re:Sharia is a bit of a red herring (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe, but sharia law is scary, and these actions are consistent with it. So, maybe, maybe not.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Values are completely different today, and no where is it more prevalent than religion.
Except that even within religions the accepted morality varies by geographic region. For example the morality of followers of Catholicism is widely different between such areas as Brasil, the US, Italy and Ireland. And thats not even getting into other branches of Christianity. That is why I said region and deliberately chose NOT to say Religion.
Re:thinkoftheadults (Score:2, Insightful)
Goatse
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:5, Insightful)
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don't want to let any religion get their hands on your government - whether it's a nutjob cult set up by an early 19th century lunatic, a 7th century pedophile, or even a rather kindly gentleman whose major accomplishment was sitting on his ass under a tree for a month and a half.
Ultimately, we want to get religion out of government as much as possible. If something is universal - say, prohibitions on murder or theft - then we can certainly all agree to implement them in a secular manner. But I shouldn't be restricted from buying some beer on my one day off each week just because a bunch of fundamentalist shitheads think I should be wasting my morning praying to their sun god.
Re:Yet another reason religion is bad for governme (Score:3, Insightful)
It troubles me to no end the lengths people will go today in the name of religion. It's actually becoming common place for someone to have an extreme view and use the blanket of religion to protect them.
It was always this way. Hell, arguably the USA was founded by a bunch of people who wanted to practise religion in their own way and didn't see how it was the governments' business.
If you think people will go to extreme lengths today..... emigrating on a sail boat two hundred and fifty years ago was no picnic. A journey that took months, a bunk not much longer (and rather narrower) than the desk I'm sitting at now, any disease had nowhere to go but infect everyone on board. And the food had to be stuff that would keep, being as there was no refrigeration. Precious little idea of what you had to look forward to at the other end, being as the most you'd have heard would have been the odd letter from friends or relatives who'd already gone over. You'd have to be really hacked off to go to that kind of extreme.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:4, Insightful)
and how has meddling with them been doing? seems it only makes them hate us and turn their anger in our direction.
I really don't care if they are liberated or not. how has democracy been working for our own freedom lately?
One of the dangers of URL shorteners (Score:2, Insightful)
Classic example of why URL shorteners should be considered harmful. Twitter is mostly to blame, I've had to shorten URLs for tweets before, but Twitter could employ better tactics than using the full url as the anchor text too.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:3, Insightful)
The Quran say nothing about how women should dress, other then covering their chest.
Few religions have any actual dress code. Islam is butchered by the savages that use their Gods name for war and oppression.
The Quran speak mostly of peace and love, and acceptance of others.
It even says that responsible christians and jews, will go to haven.
Re:Their rules, their game (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ly sites smackdown (Score:2, Insightful)
A better question is why oyu are anti-self determination and anti-democracy. Let Libya run its own affairs w/o interference. Would you want your neighbor to act as a "central authority" telling you when to paint your house & mow your lawn? Well neither does Libya. They want to run their OWN affairs, not be dictated to.
Re:ly sites smackdown (Score:4, Insightful)
So, you think you should get free speech but not Libya?
LY is the code for Libya, it's for them to decide how to administer it, just like it's for my country to decide how to administer .UK and for North Korea to handle .KP (which stopped working last month).
Re:Sharia is a bit of a red herring (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, absolutely. But I just refuse to join in with the pants-wetting xenophobes.
I frankly don't care if some country is imposing the horrific barbarity of Victorian standards of modesty for pictures, in a minor way, via control of their domain.
I'll save my outrage for things that actually merit it, and which are actually specific to Islam. Not a minor, harmless anachronism.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:3, Insightful)
So by your definition and her experience the US is suppressing its women.
I have no idea what a normal Brasilian bathing suit looks like, but men are allowed to go topless more places than women are. That can most definitely be called suppression.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought it had to do with tracking-down and killing dictators like Nero, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Saddam, and so on - in order to restore liberty.
So of the dictators you listed, how many were tracked down and killed by their own armed populace?
sfw? Libya isn't killing any1 to make their point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem with religious types. It is possible to be ethical without being religious. Recognizing certain fundamentals about treating people fairly and intelligently does not require a mandate from a higher power, nor the promise of damnation for failing to live up to that ideal. Further, religion has perpetrated as many evils, if not MORE evils in the world than anything else. Multiple Crusades, for instance, or protecting pedophiles in the name of sparing the Church a tarnished name.
So yeah, get religion the fuck out of government. If you can't be ethical without religion, you are NOT an ethical person.
Re:ly sites smackdown (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you want your neighbor to act as a "central authority" telling you when to paint your house & mow your lawn?
Spoken like someone who's never heard of a homeowner's association.
Re:ly sites smackdown (Score:4, Insightful)
Libya has shown that they do not deserve to be in charge of a tld that happens to be a common English suffix. They have no inherent right to it, so this is just an issue of expedience and user experience for English speakers.
Okay, Libya has no inherent right to the TLD that most closely denotes the name of their country ... but "we" (the US? the English-speaking world? the United Nations?) have the inherent right to take it away from them ... because it "happens to be a common English suffix"?
Are you actually listening to yourself?
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Further, religion has perpetrated as many evils, if not MORE evils in the world than anything else.
Let's be clear here--it's not the religion that's perpetrating the evils, it's the people in it. It would be more proper to say that "many evils have been perpetrated in the name of religion...". If you have a perfect religion, it could/would still be corrupted and distorted by the imperfect people who administer and follow it.
If religion didn't exist, people would blame their bad behavior on something else. Video games, or rock and roll music perhaps...
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:4, Insightful)
one way or another (through war or election) those people chose their own government. if that government is not acting in their own best interest it is just a matter of time before its people will choose another.
Tricky topic there. Did they choose their government? If some asshat comes in, with a full military, and threatens to kill and rape everyone there, and managed to convert some youths (generally) into zealot shock troops to bring terror to the local populace, can you really say it is a choice? If it comes down to support General Asshat or died, and have your family killed, is it really a choice? On one, almost purely literal, level; yes. On another, it isn't, though, since it is a coerced choice, and thus barely a choice at all.
What good is freedom if your dead, and your family raped or slaughtered? Personal safety and your family is generally more important than everyone else, so you'll generally choose these over dying for a nebulous, and potentially unsuccessful cause. This does not mean you endorse, or chose, your government.
Also a government is a wild beast, you can agree with some bits, while hating others vehemently (this is how I feel about the US, I sure as hell didn't choose some of our policies, I was just born here, that doesn't mean I have a shred of control).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, being a philosophy major and associating with a couple people working on their masters in foreign policy. On one hand we have to agree that people should have the right to choose their religion and government. On the other hand do people have the right to inflict their views on others? Is depriving the choice in the former worth allowing the latter? Also, can people freely choose oppression?
Personally I think not. Yes, some Muslim (for example, not to single them out) women would choose their limited (repressed, even) position in society, and completely buy their societies masculine and religious line. But this is all they know, since they are barred meaningful education or experience of the world. Is this choice a real choice, since it isn't an educated choice? Also is this a choice that someone else has the right to make for them?
Education is the precursor to choice. You cannot make a free choice without an awareness of the options. If you repress this awareness you are oppressing choice, thus there is no choice. Women didn't choose to be restricted to burkas, even if they think they did.
If your country restricts information, and doesn't have elections it is a tyranny. Pure and simple.
Is this a justification to outside action? This is debatable. I think it is, though not necessarily a justification for war or military action.
I can see why the US might not be the best person to help allow people to choose their own mess, though. We have a bad history of it, especially on fighting people's choice of economic systems (translation, deciding not to kneel to US corporations), and their choice in electing leaders who are on a different end of the political spectrum than us. But sadly most of the rest of the world is more likely to just enter the relativistic nonsense loop and say "its their culture, thus it is okay". Or the whole "we can't inflict our culture on others", when the question isn't "culture", but "freedom to be an individual".
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:4, Insightful)
If religion didn't exist, people would blame their bad behavior on something else. Video games, or rock and roll music perhaps...
There's been a hell of a lot of evil perpetrated in the name of "democracy" too.
Re:ly sites smackdown (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay let's agree that neither of the groups have a right...
I don't think you're going to get much agreement on that either. The country TLD system wasn't created to create 200 or so TLDs which sound like the end of words because people don't like putting the whole word in the second level and having an appropriate TLD. It was created so that there would be no regional dispute over names. It was created to categorize sites regionally or, in the case of com, net, ord, edu, mil and the other TLDs, based on some other criteria.
Now the fact that countries have realized that they can make money off people who want TLDs that make the URL aesthetically pleasing doesn't change the fact that this is a perversion of the system of categorization. Now it's perfectly fine that when countries decide to allow this type of deviation from the intent...they've been given the domain to administer however they see fit. But it stops being fine when you start arguing that the perversion is more important than the original intent.
The intent is that .ly is the top-level code for Libya. Companies that made the foolish choice to base their business around a TLD from a repressive country at the whim of a dictator are not a reason to stray from that intent. It's their screw up and they have to live with it, as do the twits who decided to use their services.
Re:The Picture in Question (Score:1, Insightful)
But does that still make sense when the essential ideology of said religion is so very, very, very bad ?
Nobody with half a brain argues that the paedophile prophet was anything other than a warmongering slavetrader. A paedophile rapist. A genocidal maniak. A genocidal and diseased terrorist. And this, muslims teach their children, was perfect behavior, ideal in every way. This guy IS islam, as much as buddha is buddhist, Jesus is Christiand and Moses is Jewish.
And then some of those kids decide to kill, rape and commit terror. How idiotically blind must one be to see this as a coincidence ? How much more people have to die ? Because islam has killed over a billion people already, and everyday that counter rises by hundreds.
Why can you say about, take Nazism, that it's evil, but not about this much worse ideology islam ? Hitler was a genocidal maniak, thief and warmonger, but so was the paedophile prophet. And even hitler was not a slave trader, nor was he a paedophile. So why is it so wrong to say that Hitler was a lot more moral than islam is ?