19 February 2011

Internet shut down

There have been on-off rumours all morning that Gadaffi has shut down the Internet in Libya - just as his fellow dictator did in Egypt a couple of weeks ago. Let's hope the final outcome is similar.

It's been a particular worry to all those Twitter and FaceBook hipsters using the URL-shortening service at Bit.ly, because the .ly domain belongs to Libya. But they needn't worry - because apparently whilst .ly belongs to Libya, of the five "root servers" that make the domain work, only two are in Libya, and all five need to be shut down for .ly URLs to stop working. Two servers are in the US and one is in the Netherlands.

And they can always use TinyURL.com

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