:Ben Metcalfe Blog

I’ve been saying for sometime that Apple is about to kill off the optical drive inside its future laptop ranges. And tucked into Steve Jobs’ keynote today was probably the foundation of that strategy.

The new MacBook Air (which is sans-optical drive) comes with a special usb-thumb drive that enables users to reinstall their operating system. It looks like this:

You can install an operating system from any external drive – it doesn’t have to be a DVD, it can be a USB disk, external hard drive or even an SD card. But you do need some kind of external disk, in case you can’t boot into the laptop, leaving the OS as the only piece of software that needs to be delivered via physical medium.

You can already download iLife and iWorks via the internet and license them online. And with the announcement of the App Store for Mac, Apple is clearly signaling the end of physical distribution of software.

Finally, if you subscribe to the Steve Jobs way of consuming media, the CD and DVD also dead there too. All the music, tv and films you could ever want are available for download via iTunes – be it to your Mac, iPhone or AppleTV.

Even if you consume your media independently, the Amazon MP3 store, music-on-demand services such Pandora and the continued widespread use of p2p all support the end of the physical distribution of media. NetFlix (probably anticipating this) are about to release a streaming-only service very soon too.

Plus there are many gains to be had on the hardware side of things

There’s another side to this story, which are the benefits to Apple from the loss of the optical drive.

Even in a large laptop like the MacBook Pro 15″ that I’m typing this post on, you can see from the image below that a large amount of footprint is taken up by the optical drive. Check out this photo from iFixIt.com which clearly shows the optical drive in green:

Every time Apple makes its laptops smaller, lighter and thinner they are having to deal with an awkward component that can’t be made any smaller – the optical drive has to take a 5″ disk regardless of the size of the laptop.

One of the reasons the iPad has such battery life is the ability for Apple to stuff the case full of battery. With the optical drive gone, Apple can make thinner laptops that have more battery inside them.

Finally, piracy can probably also be reduced if the USB keys themselves contain some kind of proprietary mechanism to check the operating system is being installed from an Apple-manufactured memory stick.

RIP DVD

Given Apple’s fairly recent switch to including SD card slots on MacBooks, I actually thought they would go with SD card but it looks like USB drive is going to be the medium of choice. I guess as the MacBook Air 11″ has shown, Apple has designs on such small technology that even an SD slot may be too big to accomodate across all of it’s lines.

(for those not familiar with the back story, check here).

Having become clear Libya has no intention of ever releasing the vb.ly domain back to Violet, we have course-corrected by reopening her url shortening service under the new domain vbly.us.

We had originally pursued a number of other 2-letter options (eg xx.yy) to relaunch the service under. However, given what has happened with Libya and the .ly space we decided to avoid any ccTLD that has regulations that were unclear or open to interpretation. Ultimately, we don’t want what happened with Libya happening again to the service’s users, so for the stability and assurance of the service going forward we elected to register a .us domain.

A .us domain, registered and owned by a US Citizen (Violet) and hosted on servers in US (Newark, New Jersey to be exact) ensures that the service completely resides under US jurisdiction and benefits from full First Amendment Rights.

The domain vbly.us also means that you can easily modify your existing urls to work with the new domain. Thus http://vb.ly/yoururl becomes http://vbly.us/yoururl and will work as before. No urls were lost or forgotten during the downtime.

At a higher level, the “vb.ly saga” has been an interesting experience which I will write a more reflective post about shortly. Issues to be discussed range from the wonders of elastic server instances to meet the worldwide media influx through to dealing with a highly sensitive and emotionally charged issue such as Islam and the legal implications of Sharia law.

In the meantime, I’m sorry to all the users of the service who were let down by what had happened. With the .us registration we do not expect this to happen again.

Please follow the @vb_ly twitter account for further developments! You can also track this story on Hacker News.

I would like to warn current and future owners of .ly domains of a concerning incident regarding the deletion of one of our prime domains ‘vb.ly’ by NIC.ly (the domain registry and controlling body for the Libyan domain space ‘.ly’).

In short:

The domain was seized by the Libyan domain registry for reasons which seemed to be kept obscure until we escalated the issue. We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.

This is deeply concerning for everyone, but especially .ly domain owners, because it sets a precedent that all websites running on a .ly domain must comply with Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law in order to maintain their domains. This is especially concerning for anyone running a url shortener or hosting user-generated content on a .ly domain.

You may also not know that since June 2010 .ly domains less than 4 characters long may no longer be registered by anyone who isn’t in Libya – which suggests there is tension around foreign owned, high-value, short .ly domains.

The full story:

Our domain ‘vb.ly’ (which was joint owned by myself and my partner Violet Blue) was deleted by NIC.ly without warning or notice on or around September 23rd 2010. We were subsequently told that our domain has been removed to us being “in clear violation of NIC rules and regulations” relating to “text referring to adult content and offensive imagery from [our] main page”.

The regulations for .ly domains are available at http://nic.ly/regulations.php. Aside from the fact that we contest that any adult content or offensive imagery exists on the site (vb.ly is a url shortener), what is more concerning is that there does not appear to be any regulation(s) written on that page that actually pertains to the violation notice we were given.

In other words we felt that the NIC.ly registry was claiming it has deleted our domain for infringements that do not actually form any part of their regulations.

However after numerous emails and escalating the matter to NIC.ly directly, we were told by Mr Alaeddin S. ElSharif (Web services Dept. NIC.ly/Libya Telecom and Technology):

“…clause 3.5 clearly states that: “The Applicant certifies that, to the best of his/her knowledge the domain name is not being registered for any activities/purpose not permitted under Libyan law.”

Pornography and adult material aren’t allowed under Libyan Law, therefore we removed the domain…”

Again, while we contest that there was NO pornography or adult material on vb.ly, I would suggest that there is a far more concerning issue here if domain registries can decide on the validity of a domain registration based on the content of the website that uses it. I would argue that the two are extricably decoupled and separate entities.

An additional concern is that the clause being used here pertains to Libyan Islamic Law which appears impossible to find listed in English.

This incident also follows on from a significant (but sadly unreported) recent decision by NIC.ly that as of June 2010:

“.LY domains that are shorter than 4 characters are only allowed for companies or individuals having presence in Libya.” [link]

Existing owners of such domains may renew but those premium domains are no longer open for registration by anyone who does not have a presence in Libya. Think about that, the domains for bit.ly, owl.ly (another set of url shorteners) and ad.ly (advertising solution), would not be registrable now by foreigners. Previously, any domain available was available to anyone who wanted to register it.

We found this u-turn in registration policy surprising. We wonder whether having seen the ‘mini domain gold rush’ that occured with the .ly domain space, there is suddenly a desire – perhaps even pressure – to have local Libyans control some of the the most premium and valuable .ly domains.

With this already in our minds, we found the following line from the email communication we received about the deletion deeply concerning:

…your domain being removed from NIC.LY records and made available for re-registration for locals

We wonder whether this line suggests that in the back of the mind of the person deleting our domain was the motivation that a rare <4 letter .ly domain would suddenly become available for a local Libyan national to register.

I’m not against Libyans registering .ly domains; instead I suggest that NIC.ly/Libya realized too late the value of these premium domains and now there is clearly back-peddling going on to ensure they don’t all end up in the hands of non-Libyans. Further more, I wonder if there is pressure for NIC.ly to do what it can to recover premium <4 letter .ly domains where possible so that they end up back in the pool only available for locals to re-register Finally, I wonder whether NIC.ly are being pressured to go so far with this that they would even revoke domains for reasons that don’t specifically violate any of the regulations that domain owners agreed to upon registration.

.ly domain space to be considered unsafe

For these reasons I believe the .ly domains should be considered unsafe. Anyone running a business or relying on a website with a one, two or three letter .ly domain should be incredibly cautious. This obviously includes anyone who uses bit.ly, 3.ly, owl.ly and any other similar url shortener.

I cannot see how the deletion of our .ly domain couldn’t happen to the owners of these domains too. In fact bit.ly is hosting many, many links that depict the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), extreme pornographic subject matter, etc.

However, the fact that NIC.ly are asserting editorial control over the content of any website using a .ly domain is perhaps the most troubling to any .ly domain owner and indeed the internet community at large. Not only is it paramount to censorship and doesn’t reflect the decoupled nature of domains vs websites, but it sets a dangerous precedent in the space.

At the time of writing our domain vb.ly is still revoked and our website is offline.

To sum up:

• .ly domains deemed to be in violation of NIC.ly regulation are being deregistered and removed without warning – causing significant inconvenience and damage.
• .ly domains are being deregistered and removed due to reasons that do not correspond to the regulations defined in the official NIC.ly Regulations.
• NIC.ly seems to want to extend their reach beyond the domain itself and regulate the content of websites that use a .ly domain. The concept amounts to censorship and makes .ly domains untenable to be used for user-generated content or url shorteners.
• Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law is being used to consider the validity of domains, which is unclear and obscure in terms of being able to know what is allowed and what isn’t.
• NIC.ly have suddenly decided that <4 letter .ly domains should only be available to local Libyans and this appears to create motivation to recover what premium domains they can to go back into this new local-only pot of domains.

You can read more about this, including copies of email correspondence, over at Violet Blue’s TechYum website.

UPDATE: My partner Violet Blue (former co-owner of vb.ly) has a thought provoking review of the way this story has played out across the media today. Her site is slightly NSFW.