Comments on: the sex-positive link shoterner: vb.ly

By: Darkstar

Darkstar — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:31:26 +0000

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

By: DJTennessee

DJTennessee — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:33:10 +0000

@ c

I worry you’re being excessively pessimistic about how much heavily religious people need hardcore porn to get them through the day.

By: c

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:05:34 +0000

“there are no rules as to what you can do with the domain once you legally have it”

That also means there are no rules as to what they can decide you can’t do. I worry that you are being excessively optimistic about what a heavily religious government will decide that they can and shouldn’t do.

By: DJTennessee

DJTennessee — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:42:37 +0000

stumbling across Euro press to discover them making aggrandizing statements about “our intentions” for market domination

Leave it to the Germans to come up with a domination/submission angle!

Seriously, this is the cleverest invention ever from any of my local heroes.

By: bethany

bethany — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:49:14 +0000

This is awesome… and foreward-thinking, as well… Congrats on the launch!

By: casualencounters.com/blog

casualencounters.com/blog — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:46:28 +0000

Intriguing. What’s your position it it being used to link to illegal content or being used in spam? Would you pull the links under such circumstances?

By: violet

violet — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:22:42 +0000

Damon, I’m really glad you asked.

I guess first and foremost it’s worth highlighting the general public’s abstraction between websites running on ccTLDs (country code Top Level Domain) and the countries that the ccTLD belongs to. Ping.fm has no connection with the Federated States of Micronesia, Flickr’s new flic.kr domain is not based out of Korea, etc. the ccTLD system allows everyone to create new innovative (and short) urls that would otherwise not be available — I don’t think anyone would think that vb.ly is in any way associated with Libya.

the domain was purchased from a private company that is based out of Libya (which actually seems to support a lot of Open Source projects, yay!) and while there are some legal and Islamic-based morality rules that govern what can and can’t be registered in a .ly domain name, there are no rules as to what you can do with the domain once you legally have it. in other words the Libyan Government isn’t supporting, endorsing or presiding over what we’re doing on our domain and we’re not supporting, endorsing or presiding over what the Libyan Government is doing in their country.

we’re hosted on the wonderful Laughing Squid (US company) and we’re based out of San Francisco, CA, US.

in many ways you can look at this in reverse. isn’t it cool we can legally run such a service on top of the Libyia’s domain name — kinda subversive. and if vb.ly becomes successful then maybe it will be a great platform to start some important conversations about the issues you’re referring to. like this one.

By: Damon

Damon — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:15:11 +0000

Are you sure you really want to use that domain?

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

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