A Little Bit.ly Sharia? Tech Business Builds on Libya Domain

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)

Web Jihad

by Anna Mahjar-Barducci

Do you believe that during World War II, Americans would have tolerated a Nazi radio station broadcasting from the middle of the US?

“We need to wage war against extremist websites,” comes a call from Abdul Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, the Saudi director-general of Al-Arabiya TV, and former editor-in-chief of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. "After years of violent war,” continues Al-Rashed, “the image has become clear to everybody today; that Al Qaeda is more of an ideological problem than an organizational one. While there is a lot to do on the ground to eradicate this malignant disease, the first priority should be to confront extremist ideology, its theorists, and its scholars before its students and its soldiers.

They are the secret to the organization and the reason for its continuation and its ability to recruit people and raise money, despite the great losses it has suffered all over the world.”

It is hard not to share such a view. In fact, after the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253, by young Nigerian terrorist Umar Farooq Abdulmutallab, attention turned towards the American born Sheikh Anwar Al-Awlaki, presently hiding in Yemen, and the same Sheikh who instructed Major Nidal Hasan, to commit the Fort Hood killings.

On November 9, Al-Awlaki published an article on his website, Anwar-alawlaki.com, in which he called Hasan a "hero" and "a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people."

Al-Awlaki hit the headlines again last week, when authorities announced that he had influenced Abdulmutallab, who had repeatedly visited Anwar Al-Awlaki's website for inspiration, as it was indicated by his computer records that showed a high traffic to that site. A connection has also been shown between Al-Awlaki's online presence and the five Fort Dix would-be bombers, as well as the 7 July 2005 London bombings, when a series of coordinated suicide attacks on London’s public transport system killed 56 people including the bombers, and injured around 700 people.

But it is not just Al-Awlaki. The jihadi magazine Talae' Khorasan ("Pioneers of Khorasan"), which deals with jihad and the mujahideen in Afghanistan, published a few days ago an interview with "Abu Dajana Al-Khorsani" - who last week carried out the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan.

In the interview, Al-Khorsani praised those who write on the jihad forums to wage jihad for Allah, and to fight the tyrannical rulers who harm Islam. Al-Khorsani praised the Al-Hesbah forum in poarticular, calling it his spiritual home and "the school that trained the writers to be experts." He added that the forum writers who influenced him include Louis Attiya Allah and Muhhib Al-Rasoul.

Examples could continue endlessly. The point, however, is that Islamic forums on the Internet have become an essential tool for global jihadists. Through the web, not only do they make threats, but also exchange information, impart orders and delineate strategies.

Last September, the Emir of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir Al-Wahishi, wrote about bombing U.S. airplanes, suggesting the use of small quantities of explosives than can pass through checkpoints: "It requires no great effort on your part, nor large sums, to manufacture 10 grams, more or less, of explosives. Do not search long for the materials, since they are in your mother's kitchen and are ready at hand, in whatever city you are.” Exactly what Abdulmutallab did on Northwest flight 253.

Most of these forums are hosted in the US. American authorities close down jihadist sites only when there is a proven link with some terrorist attack, but otherwise they tolerate such forums even when they are calling people to jihad, expressing support for martyrdom attacks, and encouraging the killing of American soldiers. This is utter nonsense.

The war on terrorism is a global war, involving each of us wherever we are, not just confined to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The enemy can hit us anywhere, whether we are at work, or in a subway or on an airplane. We are under attack.

So why then don’t we shut down their means of communication? Because, in so doing, we would probably imperil somebody’s right to free expression.

We are facing a global movement wholly uninterested in anything resembling dialogue, and that will use any means necessary to kill as many of us as possible. Still it seems as though our main preoccupation is to preserve its rights.

Voltaire said, “I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This is clearly one of the founding values of our civilization -- but what should one do when extending this right to people who are trying to destroy us means transforming freedom of expression into a suicide pact?

Hudson New York

China: Al-Qaeda urges holy war to defend Muslims

A leading Al-Qaeda militant on Wednesday called on Muslims worldwide to defend Uighurs in China's restive northwestern region of Xinjiang.

He told Uighurs to prepare for a holy war or Jihad and urged a "vast media campaign" to raise awareness of their fate at the hands of "oppressive" China.

In the video posted to jihadist websites, Abu Yahya al-Libi appeared to launch a frontal assault against China.

"This massacre is not being carried out by criminal Crusaders or evil Jews who have committed crimes against our nation," al-Libi stated.

"Today, a new massacre is being carried out by Buddhist nationalists and communists against the Muslim population in eastern Turkestan," said al-Libi.

Islamists call Xinjiang East Turkestan. Uighurs are Muslims native to Xinjiang province, and have cultural ties to Turkic peoples in Central Asia.

"There is no way to remove injustice and oppression without a true return to their (Uighurs) religion and ... serious preparation for Jihad in the path of God the Almighty and to carry weapons in the face of those (Chinese) invaders," he said.

Read more here,,,,

Source: Adnkronos

America's Mainstream Web Terrorist: Exposing the truth about radical Islam's associates

By Joe Kaufman

Mainstream Muslim organizations in America claim to be institutions of peace, but the reality hasn’t matched the rhetoric. A history of terrorist links has done irreparable damage to these groups’ public pronouncements, rendering their words empty. One of the links, a former Al-Qaeda web designer named Mazen Mokhtar, has been making the rounds of many of the groups, most recently being featured on a video aimed at converting non-Muslims. It is individuals such as him who expose the grand American Islamist lie.

On April 24, 2007, Egyptian-born Mazen Moein Mokhtar was arrested at his North Brunswick, New Jersey home, charged with failing to file tax returns and filing false tax returns. While the charges, on their face, weren’t related to terrorism, Mokhtar’s terror-filled past suggested that there was more to the indictment than just taxes.

One of the tax years in question was 2000, where Mokhtar failed to report nearly $90,000 in net income. That year he had received a gross income of over $162,000 through his computer consulting business, Mindcraft. One of the jobs he undertook in 2000 was the creation of a website, minna.com, which corresponded to the name of the group both it and Mindcraft’s site were registered under, Minna International Corporation. “Minna” possibly alluded to an individual who resided at the same North Brunswick address as Mokhtar, Meena Shah.

Shortly before and after the September 11th attacks, an English language website, qoqaz.net, a.k.a. Jihad in Chechnya, was raising funds and recruiting fighters for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The site was a project of Azzam Publications, an organization named for Osama bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam. The Arabic companion to the site was qoqaz.com, which exists today as alqoqaz.net. “Qoqaz” connotes Chechnya’s Caucasus Mountains, where Al-Qaeda-related mujahideen fighters have warred against Russian military forces. Read more ...

Source: FrontPage Magazine