Some additional context from wikipedia: the island was originally 100% uninhabited in the 19th century when the French brought slaves there. Over the course of the next century, it was mostly privately owned, and the majority of residents were employees of plantations who were under temporary contracts and would return to Mauritania or the Seychelles after the contract was over. Ever since the slave days, there was a creole population, and that's the relevant group -- they were not indigenous peoples, but rather freed slaves and their descendants living on private land. In the 1970s, about 1100 people were forcibly removed after the British government took control of the island for the US naval base. They were compensated in cash. I think it's absolutely reasonable to feel like this was a dirty land grab, but whether they were really permanent residents, and how many they were, is in dispute. This sort of falls in the category of eminent domain seizures. I generally have a problem with those, but I don't spend too much time dwelling on the displaced populations that resulted from other government land seizures. Should we all feel guilty when we visit national parks? Or when we drive on highways? Or for the many military bases throughout the US? Do you think they just happened to find land with exactly zero residents?
I said it was in dispute, not that I agreed. If you squat on gov't land in the US and have kids there, would the gov't just cede the land to you after an appropriate amount of time? Maybe yes, I guess, but it's complicated.
Would you be worried if the same argument and logic were applied to people who arrived in the US after Columbus, or people who arrived in Gaul after the Romans?
If a line can be blurred back to the beginnings of recorded history, then the line doesn't really exist.
>Should we all feel guilty when we visit national parks?
No, you should respect that the national park has a disturbing history, and accept that as part of your national history. Sweeping it under the rug, or using already spurious laws like "eminent domain seizures" to justify it is not going to lead to progress in these matters.
I didn't say we should sweep it under the rug, I said that there exists context that the original author did not provide. Yes, the history of the population matters in these cases. I don't know where we should draw the line, but I do know that "we should never have military bases if one person has to be relocated" is not the line.
Is 10 minutes reading an article and contemplating an unjustice really that big a burden on your life? No one is asking you to start self-flagellating...
I'm not arguing that it's too big of a burden to contemplate the injustice. I'm arguing that the scale of the injustice may not be as great as the author contends, and there may have been a competing thing of value that was gained by the injustice, and that it is naive to argue that a government removing someone from their home is always an injustice regardless of context.
Another interesting point is that .io domains started to become more popular after Google decided to categorize them as Generic ccTLDs [1] (I believe in 2013). Before this, .io domains weren't great because of Google's algorithm taking region into account, and SEO was nigh impossible.
.IO is truly just a phenomenon that "just happened." It collectively rolled out and picked up momentum with each new domain registration. I remember a few years back when I started seeing a few here and there pop up. Right away as an old school Linux veteran I thought it was cute and "got" the idea. No one planned this, and even if they did it wasn't the master plan that created the popularity of .IO.
.IO has only commercialized within the web developer and b2b communities. I'm not saying that in a negative way, it is however a billion dollar industry at least. I really appreciate the post from a historical standpoint and hope in some way the popularity of .io will some way contribute to this territory.
The latest stats I could find [1] put the total number of .io domains at around one million. Even if you assume $100 registration fee (you can get one for much less), it's still 900m shy of a billion.
.an (Netherlands Antilles) is being phased out [1]:
The .AN top-level domain for the Netherlands Antilles is no longer eligible for
continued delegation, as it is no longer an ISO 3166-1 two-letter code. In
accordance with the code’s removal from the ISO 3166-1 standard, the ISO 3166
Maintenance Agency asks users of the standard to “stop using [the code] ASAP”†.
As discussed in detail in the consideration of a similar case of the .YU
top-level domain, ICANN’s role is to be an independent technical coordinator of
the domain name system. As such, the ISO 3166-1 standard was chosen as the
arbiter for what is, and what is not, a basis for country-code domains. In order
to retain consistency with the standard, ICANN coordinates the removal of the
.AN domain in conjunction with the transition to its successor domains. In such
cases, ICANN asks the current operator to perform an orderly wind-down and
transition process.
The proposed sponsoring organisation for .CW intends to continue to operate the
.AN domain while transitional arrangements are executed. These transitional
arrangements include provisions for registrants in Curaçao to transfer
registrations to .CW; and for registrants in Sint Maarten to transfer
registrations to .SX. The applicant calls for a phased transition to be
concluded over a period of three years, after which time the .AN domain will be
fully retired.
Not strictly speaking; it hasn't happened often enough for a policy to be established. The ccTLDs .cs (Czechoslovakia), .dd (East Germany), .yu (Yugoslavia), and .zr (Zaire) were all dissolved some time after the reorganization/renaming of their countries. However, this hasn't always been the case. For instance, .su (Soviet Union) continues to be used today.
I don't see what the issue is here, apart from non-DNS things (kicking people out, etc). If Chagos got autonomy, it wouldn't be keeping .io as its ccTLD - what sense would that make? And if Britain wants to have .io, they'd just need some other random island with enough of a presence to justify the country code.
Phrasing it as if somehow .io belongs to these people is simple intellectual dishonesty.
I think the main point of the article is the country codes are not very defined in the process of creation, their use and who reaps the rewards of ownership.
I'm wondering if it is possible for a TLD holder to, at will, seize any domains below it, and, for example, extort the owners of the domain? And from that perspective, is it really smart to choose an exotic TLD name?
The .LY ccTLD is particularly problematic because many countries, including the US, have trade sanctions in place against Libya. Among other things, this makes it difficult to get an SSL certificate for a .ly domain.
For obvious reasons, I wanted a `.md` domain but those are expensive... also for obvious reasons. This is a rather unfortunate and common result of our DNS system.
I lack an ability to put into words just how much I hate the tone of this article and the tone of this author. Particularly this last line.
> As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.
Why has every Silicon Valley leftist gotten it into their heads that this isn't a completely ridiculous statement? We're not superheros or magicians, in spite of the fact that the technical illiteracy of the rest of society may make us believe we are. We had some power a decade ago, but we've spent that. How did we spend it? What do humans historically do with power? They leverage it!
We pillage and rape the earth. Five million people are dead in the congo so that we can steal their minerals and ship them to China where a suicidal 9 year old makes it into an iPhone, which is sold at exorbitant prices to lower and middle class Americans who consume websites that act as Centrifugal Bumble-Puppies and Orgy-Porgies that we create.
But yeah, the real tragedy is that there's a TLD for an island of 2000 people who are losing their culture. Techies needs to be aware of THAT and stop THAT tragedy. Get real.
The only power of the Internet ever held any promise in was allowing fringe opinions to be heard. Anyone could publish and be heard and read about certain taboo subjects and not be publicly shamed for entertaining a certain thought. 4chan still holds this sentiment. Reddit did for a while until it decided it had to make more money. I grew up on that Internet.
It's long dead. Political correctness has killed everything. We had an opportunity to expose the masses to truly uncontrolled thought and discussion. We had an opportunity to embrace society-- ALL of society. We had an opportunity to create forums where we could all try to understand each other. Yes, that means racists and pedophiles and sexists and dickheads. But we instead created controlled environments like Facebook and reddit that represent nothing new and the world will flow on as it always has. We've created systems that encourage homogeneity in opinion and have marginalized the same people we always have.
You had me nodding in agreement when I thought you were standing up against slacktivism and outrage-bait. Then I got puzzled when you started railing against consumerism and its consequences. Finally I realized you were just nostalgic for when the internet wasn't mainstream -- as if you are starved for open forums on today's internet. I think your real issue is that regular "lower and middle class Americans" are also on your internet, and as such it reflects society, which you find conformist and boring. Fine, just don't tie it into some nihilistic rant about how we're all complicit in mass murder because we consume electronic devices.
You haven't killed racism or pedophilia, you moron. You've created an environment where you can continue to misunderstand them. You've continued the tradition of denying to try to understand them and actually make progress on the issues.
> I think your real issue is that regular "lower and middle class Americans" are also on your internet, and as such it reflects society, which you find conformist and boring.
That's exactly my point. I'm upset that the internet going mainstream meant that they're not on "my" internet. They're on the part of the internet accessible via facebook and maybe reddit if they're <25y/o males.
Cynicism like this only leads to self imposed amorality. It makes stagnation a self fulfilling prophecy.
You're basically making a bandwagon argument that humans historically have abused power, so this frees anyone in tech from any obligation to try to not abuse power. This is an absurd argument because it precludes progress.
There's a fair criticism of bleeding heart syndrome in the article. It's not the job of "tech" to solve every problem. But this doesn't mean we should just say "fuck it" when confronted with moral ambiguity because millions of people died in the Congo. The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push. And if pushing veers into silliness sometimes, who cares.
"The only way things improve is by large numbers of people speaking out. Power has no inherent motive to change, people need to push."
Please provide a real-world example of when this has most recently happened in any situation important enough to actually "count". The abuse exists everywhere you look, and there is never, ever, any serious backlash against it. The problem is that 99.99% of the population can care, but it only takes 0.01% willing to take advantage of the remaining population.
There will never be a sense of justice in such things. People who want the power will always take it, and there is nothing that will change that. Cynicism is not a negative trait, it's the bloody goddamn truth of our species. It sucks, but that's how things work. There is no changing this. It's simply not in the cards. Anyone who disagrees is either full of themselves or totally blind to the way the world works.
One recent real world example of "things [improving] by large numbers of people speaking out" is gay marriage in America.
It took time and victory had some false starts (i.e. Prop 8 in California), but now gay people are equally entitled to ruin their lives with marriage.
In all seriousness, legalizing gay marriage is clearly one that far more than 0.01% of the population cared to oppose the issue, and yet they still eventually lost to an informed and vocal majority.
> But yeah, the real tragedy is that there's a TLD for an island of 2000 people who are losing their culture. Techies needs to be aware of THAT and stop THAT tragedy. Get real.
So because big bad things happen, we must ignore the small things?
No, but we are the architects and general contractors of the internet. Sure as web developers and engineers at small companies we don't have vast decision making power, but as a whole especially in the open source community the distributed power we all possess is really something magical that will define the future of the web as a whole.
For me, that last line conjured memories of Blank Reg from Max Headroom when one of the episodes examined a possible futuristic court of law. No official identity, no justice.
> [the internet was a place where] Anyone could publish and be heard and read about certain taboo subjects and not be publicly shamed for entertaining a certain thought.
It's hilarious to me that you're doing just that.
You're trying to shame me for finding some ideas interesting simply because it came from a crazy person? Does finding a piece of writing interesting imply that I agree with it or the actions of the person who wrote it? Are you going to shame me for finding van Gogh's art beautiful in spite of the fact that he cut his ear off? Have you ever even read what I'm referencing?
I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example. Also it was never the case such people were not criticised / shamed. Free speech works both ways you know - if you're free to say what you want then others are free to slag it off.
> I don't think the net's changed that much. You can still find places to be pro racism and the like. Check out r/coontown for example.
Yeah that's wholly disinteresting to me. Firstly, because that is a trolling subreddit. If it was a serious racism subreddit it would be more interesting, because I could debate with people who actually feel that way and hear their arguments, instead of angsty 15 year olds posting unfunny images.
I guess I shouldn't be arguing that fringe opinions are not available on the internet-- they are. What I should be arguing is that fringe opinions are much easier to ignore on the internet now. We've created a lot of information and ways to filter it, and now we can effectively ignore them. I think downvoting and upvoting and hiveminds are what really has killed meaningful discourse. That's why I like the 4chan model so much-- every post gets to take up space and can't be ignored.
For an extra dose of tin-foil-hat, I think reddit could be doing some vote manipulation in the larger subreddits. No one has really challenged the fact that they stopped including upvotes and downvotes in their JSON as of a few years ago. Without them it's really difficult to collect information and do analysis on certain users and keywords that anything is happening.
(That's a fun idea, reddit should stream metadata about what's going on in the site to interested people.)
Free speech is a double-edged sword. It means you get to say whatever you want, and there are plenty avenues to do so online. But if you say despicable things, people will (and should) judge & shame you for it. I'm not accusing you of anything—merely pointing out that publicly endorsing the manifesto of a terrorist and serial killer does not look good. It's not unlike if you had listed Mein Kampf as a favorite read. It makes me (and I imagine most people) want to not associate with you, and certainly it would remove any chance of a job offer if you were interviewing and I googled your name.
Well that's your personal call to make. And I just have to accept that. I'm not willing to concede publicly liking an essay just because some people are going to be uncomfortable with it. It's political in nature. Are you going to not consider me if I call myself a communist or an anarchist? If I call myself trans-gendered or homosexual? Where's that line for you?
I can totally understand not hiring someone for publicly endorsing Mein Kampf. It's a love-letter to racism. It's the same reason I can understand not hiring a transphobic or homophobic individual. You can't hire someone if brief research turns up that they have hatred for a group of people. What happens when one of your employees or customers falls into those groups?
But what I don't totally understand is how Industrial Society and Its Future falls into that. I get that associating with a murderer is probably bad PR. But I like to think most people would give me the benefit of the doubt and assume that I think killing people is really uncool and not acceptable work behavior. By endorsing it, I'm not saying that I hate some group of people (because the essay doesn't really condemn anyone specifically, besides progressives). I'm not endorsing a call-to-violence (because the essay isn't a call to violence, and actually has a few points where he admits he thinks he might be getting some things wrong). I'm just saying I thought it was a profound piece of writing. Not even that I agree with it, just that it was some reasoned opinions I'd never heard. It's even been submitted on this website before, which is ironically where I found it in the first place.
So Mein Kampf makes people uncomfortable, and that's something that's unacceptable. But where/why does the Unabomber Manifesto make people uncomfortable? If the fact that it was written by a murderer alone makes it an unacceptable thing to find interesting to my employer, I think they're being short-sighted and I regret nothing. They obviously haven't read it or even skimmed the wikipedia page on it. They're not just judging a book by its cover, they're judging a person by a book that they're judging by the name on its cover.
I might find I regret this when I find out that I'm unemployable after school, though. Oh well. Such is youth.
Isn't it funny that the web has country codes at all? Clearly they're not being used most of the time for their country code purpose. It seems like a bit of a mistake to have them. It's right there in the web's name: this web thing is world wide.
I do not want to offence anyone, but something which is not said by the article is that the first known inhabitant of this territory were the French. This place was taken by the British at a time of French weakness, exploiting the chaos of the Napoleon's defeat. All that to eventually force the inhabitants out for building a foreign military base, just because (apparently) the British government did not have the will to develop their own nuclear weapons.
As a French, I hope some day we will have a brave enough government who:
* tells the British to refuse to have foreign troops occupying a full territory displacing their own people;
* says that the current situation is wrong, and that these territories are supposed to be French, with the same legitimacy as the Réunion. There is no need to go to war or alike for that, but I feel this is something which should be said.
I personally wish the article had gone a little further into being snarky, perhaps subtly, in recognizing how stupid, meaningless, unfunny, and unclever the idea of .io for "in/out" is for domains. Most websites and all computers do input/output and there's nothing interesting about that fact. I think it's a dumb trend, and I have an irrational, emotional dislike of the suggestion that it is good in any way for all these annoying startups and their dumb domains. end rant
Wut? .com is supposed to be for commercial sites only. I see it everywhere, regardless of if someone is selling something or not. .net is for network infrastructure, I see it used all the time. Other than strict TLDs like .gov, they're used for things other than their intended use all the time.
.io is a good way to get a name that would otherwise be taken up by a squatter while still having some technological tie. The former is really what it's all about.
Yeah, and people don't use .com well either. But "commercial" actually is a reasonable class of site.
Um, strict TLDs like .gov are misused?? What's a .gov site that isn't a government site? That is actually regulated…
.io is a stupid TLD name (except for actual Indian Ocean sites). I think what bugs me is "some technological tie" — wut? It's not anything. Input/Output isn't a nifty technological idea even.
Re: squatters: they could squat on any TLD. The only reason they squat on .com or .net is because you want it. Now, they will start squatting on .io because people want that. I don't see the difference.
BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit light-rail line, is perfectly appropriate as a .GOV site. It's administrated as a branch of the California government, with a Board of Directors elected by residents of the area they serve.
I don't know what davisut4health.gov was, but right now it just appears to be an alternative URL for the Davis County Library. (And oddly enough, your post appears to be the only reference to this domain on the Internet!)
You misread, I said .gov is a strict TLD, as in you need to be some sort of government agency to get one. Although that's washy as well, but not to the extent that .com/net/org/io are.
Ha, let's be honest, they will always squat com and net first as long as they're the most popular TLDs, which I don't see changing anytime soon.
But getting a .io domain already taken by a .com is also kind of stupid. It's only useful if the .com is being squatted on and you hope some day to make enough money to buy the .com too (see e.g segment).
I'm a Navy veteran and a liberal. The tone of this article really makes me cringe because not only is it anti-military, it thinks our hearts should bleed for the so-called "Chagossian people." These types of attitudes give liberals a really bad name. I'll bet a sizeable percentage of Chagossians were very happy to get off that god forsaken patch of land in the middle of a vast ocean and cursed the day their ancestors were ever brought there. The Navy, and it's sailors, welcome such a place, and given modern realities, it only makes sense for the U.S. and Britain to make use of this strategic asset.
Any Chagossians complaining now are most likely looking for some sort of reparations, which most likely does not include being returned to live in the middle of nowhere on an island prison. It's unfortunate they are living in poverty in their new home. Giving them some sort of compensation would be best, but in the history of displaced peoples, that rarely happens.
"Then, in the Spring of 1971, US military officials gave the order to round up all of the pet dogs on the island and have them killed. About 1,000 pet dogs were taken – some straight from screaming children – and gassed with exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. The Chagossians were told that if they didn’t comply, the same would be done to them."
Are you a liberal? You seem to be incredibly supportive of the United States military establishment, which isn't a very liberal position to take.
(Though I suppose it might be by US standards.)
> The tone of this article really makes me cringe because not only is it anti-military,
What's wrong with being anti-military? Ignoring absolute pacifism (which has obvious problems), opposition to the military (and the military-industrial complex) is a valid political position to hold.
The article isn't "anti-military", anyway. It's not against the US Military, it's against these specific actions of the US Military. Criticism of something and opposition to it are different things.
> it thinks our hearts should bleed for the so-called "Chagossian people."
Basic human empathy, is it not? If 2000 people next door to me were kicked out of their homes, I'd be sad for them too.
> These types of attitudes give liberals a really bad name.
What attitude? Non-unquestioning support of institutions which can and do have flaws, and having human empathy?
Usually, these are valued attributes in people.
> I'll bet a sizeable percentage of Chagossians were very happy to get off that god forsaken patch of land in the middle of a vast ocean
Do you have any reason to actually believe this? Why would they enjoy being kicked out of their home? After all, this "god forsaken patch of land" is probably not all that different from the "god forsaken patch of land" they were moving to: Mauritius.
> The Navy, and it's sailors, welcome such a place,
Which has no bearing on how the occupants feel.
> and given modern realities, it only makes sense for the U.S. and Britain to make use of this strategic asset.
Well yes, it makes sense from a strategic perspective: the US wishes to remain a global superpower with control of all the world's oceans. The BIOT is of strategic importance.
That being said, it has no real bearing on the morality of the action,
> Any Chagossians complaining now are most likely looking for some sort of reparations
That's rather cynical of you. People don't forget injustices, they're right to continue complaining.
> which most likely does not include being returned to live in the middle of nowhere on an island prison.
Island prison? I don't think they would have called their old home that.
> It's unfortunate they are living in poverty in their new home.
It's unfortunate. It's also a direct consequence of how the British treated them when they were evicted.
I'm suggesting that liberals who don't temper their empathy with practical realities risked being dismissed as holier-than-thou dreamers. I looked up the word temper to make sure I it was the right word, because I'm not sure you are from my culture, and Google suggests it means "their idealism is tempered with realism." I know it probably feels good to author an article like this one, but battles must be chosen and this one is kind of ridiculous in the larger picture of things wrong with the world.
I'm not here to debate that. I fervently wish we Americans were spending less money on the military and more on educating our children. I took part in the military. I understand it's a giant machine (military industrial complex) that doesn't just wind down in a couple years or even decades without sustained public pressure.
I'm here to understand the point of this article. If the author were advocating giving the .io domain fee profits to the Chagossians, I'm all for it, but I don't see that being advocated. I'm not sure what is being advocated. It's just a bad article with a lot of hand waving and emotional appeals that don't really do anything.
