He's got more power over the internet than you may think. Photo credit: 10b travelling, Flickr
URL shortners are all the rage these days. If one of most popular ones was to suddenly stop working, a huge number of links and services across the internet would break.
So you’d hope that the main ones are all robust, reliable services, wouldn’t you?
So just thought I’d mention what the .ly in bit.ly stands for.
That’s be Libya.
But it’s ok.
Colonel Gadaffi is a calm, rational internationalist who likes the rest of the world and has never been known to interfere with matters. Rest easy.
Hat tip: SEOptimse, with its rather useful review of retweet buttons for WordPress blogs
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RT @markpack: New post: Why Colonel Gadaffi is important to the internet's future http://bit.ly/8VjTH7
If you prefer a more apt (and possibly more secure) url shortener, there’s j.mp – powered by bit.ly but the top-level domain of the Northern Mariana Islands.
RT @markpack: Hmm, now may be the time to re-read this: Why Colonel Gadaffi is important to the internet’s future http://bit.ly/8VjTH7
RT @markpack: Hmm, now may be the time to re-read this: Why Colonel Gadaffi is important to the internet’s future http://bit.ly/8VjTH7
It’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s true that .ly is the top level domain for Lybia which means that ultimately Gadaffi has power over all .ly domains (but not websites). There’s the story of vb.ly which was the kind of website you wouldn’t want to visit while at work which for that reason lost its domain.
But bit.ly is not a Lybian company (they’re from New York). They pay some money every year to Lybian’s registry to the domain and that’s all really. Even if Gadaffi were to shut off the internet in its country completely it would take quite some time before our computers would be unable to resolve the bit.ly URL to the bit.ly’s US-based servers. By that time, people would have found out there are many aliases for bit.ly; j.mp that Helen mentions is one. The president of the Northern Mariana Islands (one Barack Obama) is generally considered to be a stable leader.
Thanks Martijn. There are other ways Libya could mess up records, or at least try to, by for example saying that bit.ly has been ‘nationalised’ and should point to a government website.
Although in theory the internet should untangle all that and restore bit.ly to working right, I don’t think the procedures are actually that quick or clear (and so compare with how people often talk about how the internet is designed to route round censorship but various Arabic countries are currently demonstrating how the theory doesn’t win out that well over practical details in the short run).
However, if you or any other reader has got deep technical expertise on the matter and thinks I’m wrong and it’d be easy to handle, but all means put me right!
When you enter bit.ly in your browser, it asks your nameserver which IP address to use. Your nameserver probably remembers (i.e. has stored in cache) but if not, it will ask other nameservers and, ultimately, ask the authoritive servers for .ly. There are a number of them, not all of them based in Lybia (US and NL I’ve been told). These servers ultimately depend on receiving updates from the .ly registry, hosted inside Lybia. That’s the only point where you accessing bit.ly depends on Lybia.
It’s not difficult in theory for someone down the line to ‘hardcode’ the IP address(es) used for bit.ly.* You could even do that yourself. I’m not too much of an expert to know how much Gadaffi fiddling with the .ly registry would have an impact, but there are ways aroudn it.
* Just like you could set your computer to go to your website when you enter http://mark.pack/ in your browser — even if there is no .pack top level domain. (And you setting it won’t affect my browser.)
What happened in Egypt (and seems to have happened in Lybia too) was that the government actually turned off the Internet: almost literally disconnected cables and turned off routers. It’s true that there are ways around censorship, but ultimately you need to connect to the ‘net physically to use these work-arounds. (People used dial-up modems to call foreign ISPs, or use satellite modems.)
More:
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10641
Bit.ly’s CEO had posted something similar on Quora yesterday http://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-to-http-bit-ly-links-if-Gaddafi-shuts-down-the-Internet-in-Libya-due-to-protests but it was taken off today, probably because Kim pointed out that he was a little bit optimistic.
(Oh, what I hadn’t thought of is that by using a .ly domain, you are giving a fairly large amount — £100 or so, .ly domains are expensive — each year to the Lybian government.)