 By creeping In other words, as Gawker titled their story: Muammar Qaddafi More or Less Owns Your Links. Astute reporting below from a blog entitled Workbench:  Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain
The URL shortening service Bit.ly just secured $2 million in financing from investors including O’Reilly’s AlphaTech Ventures. Though URL shorteners have been around for years, Bit.ly believes there’s money in offering Twitter-friendly short links along with web analytics to track how the links are used. The company reports that its links were clicked 20 million times last month. So far, the news coverage I’ve read about Bit.ly has neglected an unusual aspect of the startup: It’s one of the only prominent online ventures using a domain name in the .LY namespace, which is controlled by Libya. There are two issues that arise from this relationship. First, of course, is the appearance of an American company doing business with Libya, a country that the U.S. considered a state sponsor of terror from 1979 through 2006. On Dec. 21, 1988, Libyan intelligence agents planted a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 that blew up 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people onboard. Bit.ly’s only doing a trivial amount of business with Libya — the domains sell for $75 per year from the registrar Libyan Spider Network — but its use of .LY domain is helping to popularize and legitimize the top-level domain for general use on the Internet. It’s only a matter of time before a reporter decides to ask the families of Lockerbie victims what they think of the arrangement. I can’t imagine that story going well for the company. Even without that PR hit, there’s another potential concern for Bit.ly and any other venture that builds its business on an .LY domain. These domains are governed by Libyan law, as it states on the Libyan Spider Network site: Any .LY domain names may be registered, except domains containing obscene and indecent names/phrases, including words of a sexual nature; furthermore domain names may not contain words/phrases or abbreviations insulting religion or politics, or be related to gambling and lottery industry or be contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality. So the names must conform to Islamic morality, and it’s possible that the use of the domains could fall under the same rules. What are the odds that some of those 20 million clicks on a Bit.ly-shortened URL end up at sites that would be considered blasphemous or otherwise offensive in an Islamic nation? Bit.ly conveniently provides search pages for such topics as Islam, sharia, gambling and sex, any of which contain links that could spark another controversy. Bit.ly’s building a business atop a domain that could be taken away at any time, and the company’s only recourse would be to seek redress in the Libyan court system. Take a look at Section 11 of the regulations for .LY owners: The Arabic language is the language of interpretation, correspondence and the construction of the Regulation or anything related to it. … In case of conflict between the Arabic and the English versions the Arabic version shall prevail. I hope Bit.ly’s attorneys are brushing up on their Arabic. ~end More from Domain Name Wire: Is it wise to run a web service using a questionable country code domain? I’ve warned about the dangers of country code top level domains. Rogers Cadenhead made some interesting observations about Bit.ly, a URL shortening service that just scored $2M in funding. You see, .ly is the country code for Libya, which has a not-so-great history with the United States. He also points out some of the rules attached to country code domains. I’ve written before about .AE for United Arab Emirates that restricts uses within Muslim law. There’s no poker.ae, for example. The same thing goes for .ly. This presents a problem since the Bit.ly service let’s you forward to just about any web site with any topic. Technically the content isn’t hosted on a .ly domain, but the danger is there that Libya would lay the hammer on this. No serious business should use a country code domain name other than a major, unrestricted domain without special content rules. Update: Twitter’s selection of bit.ly is demise of popular URL shortening service tr.im: tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately. Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected. We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount. There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep. We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you. (there’s money in tr.im somewhere – how about an auction?) Another update: Feedback from tr.im users convinced them to continue the service. With thanks to Creeping Sharia (Note also Tinyurl as another option) 
 The popular microblogging site Twitter was briefly shut down after a group apparently calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army launched attack on the site.
Visitors to the site found that Twitter's homepage had been replaced by a page showing a green flag under red text reading "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army." The website's official blog acknowledged the disruption on Friday, but gave no details as to how the site had been been hacked and who had carried out the attack.
Biz Stone, the site’s co-founder, wrote on the blog: "As we tweeted a bit ago, Twitter's DNS [Domain Name Service] records were temporarily compromised tonight but have now been fixed." "We will update with more information and details once we've investigated more fully," he said. Technology blogs including TechCrunch said Twitter went down around 06:00 GMT for about an hour.
Screengrabs posted on the Flickr photosharing site showed text on the Iranian Cyber Army's replacement page which seemed to criticise reported efforts by the US state department to influence Twitter to postpone maintenance work during recent protests against the Tehran government.
"USA think they controlling and managing internet by their access [sic], but they don't, we control and manage internet by our power," the text said. "Now which country in embargo list? Iran? USA? We push them in embargo list. Take care," it read.
Iranian demonstrators protesting against the results of June presidential elections used Twitter extensively, both to organise marches and to release information about their movement. Their use of the microblogging site led some to dub the action against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the re-elected Iranian president, a "Twitter revolution" and made the Iranian election one of the top "trends" on the site this year.
TechCrunch reported that the disruption also affected Google searches for Twitter.
It posted a screengrab showing that searches for a time returned a result reading "This website has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army," it said. TechCrunch translated the text as saying that it was a reaction to Twitter's interference in the internal affairs of "my country", which it said the US authorities had ordered.
The Iranian authorities repeatedly criticised the US and its allies for "interfering" in the country's internal affairs as the mass protests took place following the disputed election. Al Jazeera
 IRAN'S controversial presidential election was the top Twitter topic in 2009, the popular microblogging service said. "Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly," Twitter said in a blog post yesterday. "Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year." The San Francisco-based service that lets people broadcast news in short text messages using computers or mobile telephones was a primary communications tool by protesters in Iran angered by the results of their presidential election. Dead singer Michael Jackson was the most tweeted about person, while Harry Potter was the film that caused the most Twitter buzz, according to the internet firm. Google Wave - which allows email or instant messages to blossom into shared online arenas where anyone in the exchange can edit documents, add digital content, or comment at any time - was the most tweeted about technology, according to Twitter. The Australian
 by A. Millar “In the last year, two things have happened,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last Monday. “Iran has advanced its military nuclear program, and Iran has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the international community.” The Iranian regime means business. The Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee was also told it has now enriched 1,800 kg of uranium - enough for one-and-a-half nuclear bombs.
Yet despite serious and widespread concern over its nuclear ambitions, Tehran announced last month that it plans to build ten new sites for further uranium enrichment. It was, of course, the re-election of Ahmadinejad - widely regarded as fraudulent - and the regime’s violent crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrators in June that cost it its remaining semblance of legitimacy, not the nuclear issue.
This, and President Obama’s public and private overtures to Tehran over the last few months, have overshadowed the pro-democracy movement, but they are not separate from one another. More at Hudson New York
![]() Dr. Tal Pavel The massive, sustained protests in Iran this past month against the regime’s apparent falsification of the presidential election results was enabled by widespread employment of new communication technologies. Among them is Twitter, the micro-blog which enables its users to distribute short messages of no more than 140 characters (’Tweets’) via the Internet, including by way of cellular phones. One may follow their favorite ‘Tweets’, whether those of individuals or announcements by groups, by visiting the Twitter website . Apart from serving as an additional means of personal communication, Twitter is used in the Arab-Islamic Middle East by a whole range of groups and individuals, covering the entire gamut of society. ‘Tweets’ are employed by political and social movements, religious websites and Islamic cultural centers, as well as for the promotion of films, fashion and commerce. News organizations, such as CNN, the BBC (especially its Persian language service), Al-Jazeera and the Voice of America all have popular Twitter feeds. Twitter speeds up the capacity to deliver the news because of its restricted structure, so much so that many people choose it over newspapers as their primary news source. Read more ...Source: Dayan Center
 By Tal Pavel In recent years, the Internet has become a swift and accessible means of communication, thanks in part to the proliferation of personal blogs and, even more recently, micro-blogs (through “Twitter”). Users are now able to transmit short announcements and updates via mobile phones connected to the Internet. Groups and individuals formerly marginalized or ignored by mainstream media, and in what are generally conservative and tradition-heavy societies, now possess unprecedented means by which to disseminate their views. This is especially true with regard to women. All over the Middle East, women are active on the Internet, writing in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and English, telling their personal stories and discussing societal matters, taking advantage of the relative anonymity that the Internet offers. Some women have no problem with enabling all interested parties to read their Twitter blogs and feeds. Others, especially concerned with protecting their anonymity, e.g. in Saudi Arabia, insure that only people with their prior permission may do so. Read more ...Source: Middle East Internet Monitor
 A RIOT by Muslim youths in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn last week was organised via Facebook, police believe. The troublemakers used the social networking site to flash up inflammatory references to police and rally their friends for a confrontation. One update identified police as "non-believers" who were raiding a "brother's home". More than 150 people gathered in Cumberland Road, Auburn, on Tuesday night, forcing police to call in 100 officers, the riot squad and a helicopter. The tense stand-off came after Middle Eastern organised crime squad police raided four homes. Opposition Police spokesman Mike Gallacher's office revealed one of the Facebook updates read: "Kefeirs raiding brother's house, everyone get down hier (sic)!!" A spokesman for Mr Gallacher said the term used to describe the police had become a slang Arabic term used to describe non-believers. "I don't think it is an intentional move by people to get around the law -- it is the way a lot of younger people contact one another and it would appear there is a loophole in the law," he said. "Using Facebook and Twitter and modern technology gives a quicker way of getting messages out to a larger number of people." Detective Chief Superintendent Ken McKay said the Middle Eastern organised crime squad was looking into phone communication and would expand the investigation to Facebook. He said regardless of the laws covering the means of communication, the police could still identify and pursue those responsible for Facebook messages. "If you incite a riot it doesn't matter by which means, how you do that is somewhat irrelevant," Supt McKay said. And he said he was concerned by the general lack of respect young people from all backgrounds have for authority. Meanwhile, a spokesman for Attorney-General John Hatzistergos also said current laws could be applied, adding: "There is a range of serious offences where people call on others to riot or commit other offences via mobile phone or the internet." Source: Daily Telegraph
Twitter: Norooz: Bodies of hundreds of martyrs from protests in the past month are kept in a morgue in south-west of Tehran. While our dear leader preaches to us about our moral authority and fundamental values and hope and change, injecting us with his daily dose of morphine, the bodies in Iran pile up. Rantburg has this here:The on-line Farsi-language newspaper, Nooroz, reports that hundreds of unidentified dead bodies are being held in Tehran's morgues. One of the few official organs providing information on the detainees is the office of unidentified dead persons, which has summoned some families to various morgues around the city to determine whether their loved ones are among the dead. Nooroz newspaper reports that those families, who find their sons or daughters among the countless corpses, are threatened and pressured into signing statements attesting that their family members died in car crashes or as a result of other ordinary, run of the mill accidents. Unless the families sign these statements, the cherished bodies of their loved ones are withheld from them.
One person who reportedly visited the morgue in south-west Tehran [which in the past had been used only for the storage of fruits and dairy products]reports to Nooroz that she was presented with an album containing hundreds of pictures of the dead and was told to try and find her child among these images. This woman reports that, as she was leaving the morgue, she saw hundreds of dead bodies piled on top of one another.
Yesterday we also received news from one of our readers that the mother of Sohrab Arabi, the ninteen year old student whose mysterious death in connection with the Tehran protests recently made international headlines, was also asked to identify her son from amongst some sixty pictures of nameless corpses.
Tajzadeh's wife: This flow of returning bodies of the youth has made me more worried. Source: Atlas Shrugs
Gerard Group July 09 (source: twitter from Iran) That tweet was just received from Iran regarding the use of unconventional weapons by the volunteer paramilitary organization (which includes Palestinians, Lebanese Hezabullah, and other who have been brutal against the demonstrators and are not answerable to anyone. The fires of dissent continue to burn in Iran on Thursday as thousands took to the streets to protest against the regime. The governor of Tehran authorized a “crushing response” to the demonstration, sending paramilitary police, undercover units and Basij volunteers to put down the protests. Twitter messages from the scene cite many injuries and mass arrests at Engelhab Square, in front of Tehran University. Another “Tweet” claimed that the security services sprayed a gas at the crowds that “burned our skin”. Thanks to tools like Twitter and YouTube, this uprising continues, despite the harsh tactics of the government, which has executed at least 20 demonstrators (that we know of), beaten those in prison into falsely admitting foreign ties, filled hospitals with the wounded, and used the undisciplined Bassij to carry out street violence and brutal home invasions. Source: Canada Free Press
 5 Hours Ago | #1 (permalink) | | Member Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 36 |  Green Brief #10 (June 26)
(Fresh News from Iran) I'm NiteOwl AKA Josh Shahryar - twitter.com/iran_translator on twitter - and I've been immersed in tweets from Iran for the past several hours. I have tried to be extremely careful in choosing my tweet sources. What I have compiled below is what I can confirm through my reliable twitter sources. Remember, this is all from tweets. No news media outlets have been used. (All my work is released under Creative Commons (CC). You can freely use it and repost it wherever you'd like to. Just provide a link to the original source at the bottom.) These are the important happenings that I can positively confirm from Friday, June 26 in Iran. 1. No large rallies or prsotests were held today. There were unconfirmed reports of small gatherings in isolated areas of the city, but for the most part, Tehran didn't seem to witness the same as it has been for the past two weeks. Sources indicated that it was in no way a sign of giving up, but rather a brief interval in more protests that are to come. They added that currently, the Sea of Green is organizing and regrouping as well as coming up with new ways to defy the authorities and also know of the fate of their leaders in order to progress. 2. At 1 PM, however, a large number of people in Tehran took to roofs and released green balloons to show solidarity with the Sea of Green and to commemorate protesters who've died so far. (Link showing the balloons: YouTube - IRAN RIGGED ELECTIONS: Green balloons were used as a form of protest all over Iran 6/26/2009 ) At night, the people again took to the roofs and chanted "Allah o Akbar" and "Death to the Dictator". They also burned candles and held vigils. There was confirmation of the death of one protester who was fired upon by security forces as he chanted from his rooftop. Reports of vigils also came from Mashhad. 3. Khamenei was supposed to lead Friday prayers in Tehran and give a speech; however, he was a no show. Ayatollah Sayyid Ahmad Khatami a hard-line cleric and a member of the Assembly of Experts who has strong ties with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad lead the prayers in his stead. He claimed that the protesters were acting against Allah, branded them 'rioters' and called for their suppression through any means possible. He also added that the government will not bend against pressure and that Neda was killed by protesters. This is backtrack from the government's earlier statements that Neda had been ordered to be killed by a BBC correspondent. 4. Reports indicate that the reason why Khamenei did not attend the prayers was Ayatollah Montazeri's statements yesterday that denounced the government's suppression of the protesters' 'legitimate demands'. This, according to sources, creates a divide between the powerful clergy which has pressured Khamenei just enough to stop him from giving out another speech of the caliber he gave last week. 4. Whether Montazeri's current stance will develop into something of a bigger boost to protesters remains to be seen. 5. (For those who don't know, Montazeri was Khomeini's designated successor until just a few months before Khomeini's death; he openly criticized the Islamic regime and was sidelined in favor of Khamenei. He still wields enough considerable support among the more moderate clergy and is popular among liberal Muslims in Iran.) 6. Meanwhile, on the government's official English News channel, Press TV, George Galloway, a British MP representing the constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, spent several hours denouncing the protests, Israel and Zionism. He called upon the world to accept Ahmadinejad's re-election and called on the protesters to go home and accept the will of the people. He did not indicate which people he meant when he made that statement. 7. A reliable source indicated that Khomeini's family has thrown its lot behind the protesters. Although they denied calling out for a protest tomorrow, they indicated that they were with the protesters and claimed to be supporting the protesters lawful demands and don't consider Ahmadinejad's government legitimate anymore. This, coupled with Montazeri's statements and Larijani's lethargy, is a strong indication that the clergy are divided in what to do with the protesters and that there is a considerable level of public support now for the protesters among the religious elite. 8. The spokesperson of the Guardian Council announced today that a commission had been formed to recount 10% of the ballots cast with representatives of the candidates present. The commission includes Ali Akbar Velayati, Hadad Adel, Eftekhar Jahromi, Aboutorabi Fard, Dari Najafabadi and Hossein Rahimian. He also gave candidates 24 hours to appoint representatives that would join the commission in the recount. 9. As reported before, the government is heavily charging people for the return of their dead family members' bodies who were killed during the protests. Families are being charged thousands of dollars and are also required to sign a waiver that states they won't sue the police and that Mousavi is the reason behind the death of their loved ones. More people were arrested today including Mohammad Mostafaie, who is a prominent lawyer and important reformist. 10. . The Iranian Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden was attacked today by angry Swedish-Iranians after a peaceful protest. It has been reported that as the protesters neared the gate, one of the guards tried to force the protesters away which enraged them and they tried to take over the Embassy. The police were forced to call for back up to control the protesters. There was also a report of a molotov bomb thrown by pro-Sea of Green protesters at the Iranian Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. It caused little damage to one of the walls. 11. The government is continuously attacking and arresting Iranians who are using twitter to get the message out to the world. Several of our sources have so far been arrested or have stopped using twitter altogether, yet the remainder have pledged to continue until the last minute. Amidst the somber mood, some emotional moments can also be seen. One Iranian tweeted: "I would rather our Iranian youth were tweeting about Michael Jackson than having 2 face this death & horror. Lets set them free to do so." (There is simply too much on the tweets about where Mousavi is at this point. According to last reports, he was being sternly watched by the government and his movement is restricted, but it's an ever evolving situation.) Read this if you want to help or get help!The government in Iran is still increasing internet filtering and throttling in an attempt to silence their people. Anonymous info shows that many in Iran are looking for proxy and Tor information in Tehran and all around the country. Please donate your bandwidth to help bring down the Iran Curtain. Here are links on how to help and get help on this: English: Tor and the Iranian Election - Bring down the Iran Curtain | Ian's BrainFarsi: Tor: ?????? TorImages and vids and instructions on how to send them to us: Helpers with expertise in the field of medecine, translation and such: “Medici Cu Internet is a collaboration between piratbyran.org, HackersWithoutBorders and werebuild.eu trying to organize contacts with medical expertise online since there are problems in Iran with hospitals being monitored by the government. Join the IRC-channel at #mci-ir - WebIRC - AnonNet or send an email to us at embassy [at] piratbyran.org for more info. Medical experts, Farsi-translators and people who know the medical situation in iran are welcome to join and collaboratively set up an index with common injuries and their best treatments.” People Outside Iran: This is as clear and concise as I can be. I have not included ANYTHING that I have sensed to be remotely fishy, but humans always err. People Inside Iran: Don't believe a WORD of what I am telling you. Do what you think is best, keeping everything in mind. I know LITTLE of what you know so make your decisions based on your OWN judgment. P.S. Please post this around and tweet and retweet.
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 GOOGLE and Facebook have set up Farsi versions of their websites and services, saying that they were responding to the importance of the internet as a communications tool for Iranians during the turmoil in the country. The web has made it possible for many Iranians to communicate since last week's disputed election, and the international media have used services such as Twitter and YouTube in their reporting of the protests. Recognising the internet's role in events in Iran, Google added a Farsi dictionary to Google Translate, its online translation service. It will enable millions of Iranians who are trying to get their message out to the wider world to translate any text, from blog posts to Twitter messages, from Farsi into English and vice versa. A Google spokesman said: "This is not a political statement. There's a huge amount of interest in the events in Iran and we hope this tool will improve access to information for people inside and outside the country." The company said that it was working to provide Farsi translations for the other 40 languages in the service. Facebook hastily launched a Farsi version of its website. The website had appealed to its Farsi-speaking users around the world to help. A Facebook spokesman said: "We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site." Despite attempts by the authorities to control the flow of information from Iran, those angry at the disputed election results have been finding ways around the virtual barriers. Until now, Twitter and YouTube have been central in the protesters' efforts to communicate with each other and with the wider world. Tweets -- messages sent through Twitter -- have been used to organise the time and place of protests. At the request of the US State Department, Twitter delayed shutting down the site for maintenance last week to ensure that Iranians could continue to use the service. YouTube, the video-sharing website, appears to have been blocked by Iran's censors. Google, which runs the site, reported that traffic from within Iran to the site was down by 90 per cent since the protests began. However, this has not prevented thousands of videos pouring on to the site, showing skirmishes and the enormous scale of the protests. It is believed that most of these videos have been emailed from Iran to people outside the country, who have then loaded them on to YouTube. Early reports from Tehran after the announcement of the election results suggested that the authorities had tried to interfere with, or had disabled, access to many websites and had blocked text messaging. But hackers are helping to keep web channels open and have taken down President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's website. Iran is a computer-literate society, with an estimated 700,000 bloggers, making Farsi the second-most popular language on the web after English. Source: The Australian
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI | June 17 | TEHRAN Iran's most powerful military force is warning online media of a crackdown over their coverage of the country's election crisis. The Revolutionary Guards, an elite body answering to the supreme leader, says Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that "create tension" or face legal action. It is the Guards' first public statement since the crisis erupted following the presidential election last Friday. Iranian reformist Web sites as well as blogs and Western Web sites like Facebook and Twitter have been vital conduits for Iranians to inform the world about protests over the declaration of election victory for hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The government barred foreign media Tuesday from leaving their offices to report on the street protests. Source: Washington Post
The spirit of liberty finally arrived at Tehran's Freedom Square. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrated Monday against Friday's election, which handed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an improbably lopsided victory. The mass protests followed a weekend of street demonstrations, rioting and other expressions of discontent. These events were brought to the world in real time through social-media networks and online video. Tehran's authoritarian leaders clearly were caught off-guard. They had managed to take down the telephone system opposition supporters used for texting but for some reason were slow to eliminate other social media. As open defiance of the election results broke out, citizen journalists used new media to spread the word. And the whole Web was watching. Read more ...Source: The Washington TimesH/T: J.R.
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