Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

How about a redirect?

If i have a .com address redirect to my main .de page, i'd expect that the worst that could happen is the .com redirect will be changed to a takedown page, without any extradition charges for myself, am i wrong?

View on HN

I don't think the .COM vs DE extension is as relevant as what type of interaction your web site is having with American citizens. ( Selling pharma/torrents/gaming etc )

They'll grab your NET/COM/ORG address in a heartbeat, but I think actually extraditing a person would require:

a: that person residing someplace that bends to US will. ( damn near everywhere )

b: costing US interests enough $$$ to piss them off.

Even if they don't extradite, you might find yourself arrested at the airport if you ever make a connecting flight through the good old US of A.

I sincerely doubt that the ICE would see it that way. I presume they would liken it to putting up a billboard in Yuma that says "Free Crack at my store in Mexico!"

Correct. However, if you always redirect to somewhere else, and that somewhere else has an identity which really stands out, then people will get used to that destination. So, when the government takes away your DotCOM, your existing audience is already prepared with the knowledge of where to go to get your content. After some research, I believe that destination should be DotTEL, and I wrote about some of its features recently [1]. Lastly, I notice that I forgot to include there that DotTEL is also useful as a status page for the services handling the content to which it points.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3649087

Thats more what i was thinking of. Once my .de url is established enough a takedown order of the .com won't hurt so much and is just one google search away if you really can't find it on your own.

I'm not big on trying to get myself ranked high in search engines, but I am switching all of my DotCOMs to redirect to the corresponding DotTELs, and I'll let visitors know, somewhere near the top of the DotTEL, that this is what they should bookmark or remember to use if the DotCOM disappears. DotTEL is controlled by UK law, so to lose that, someone needs to get a UK court order against you, or they need to convince DotTEL that you have broken their agreement. Of course, if the US wants to make an example out of you, it can exert pressure on the UK, given that they are best buddies on so many matters these days, but that's not going to happen to most people.

In that post, you wrote, "DotTEL is not at all limited, as long as you can transition to the mindset of decoupling your content from its address."

Care to elaborate? I thought tel stores no more than phonebook data. How could you use it to serve a web app?

It's not only for phonebook data. Telnic, the company which manages DotTEL, uses [1] as their main example. For more examples, see "DotTEL of the Week" [2].

By "decoupling", I mean to get away from the mindset that your domain goes directly to your content, which is what we've all come to expect when we type in the URL and press ENTER. I envision my DotCOM redirecting to my DotTEL, which has: 1) a very short description of what it's all about, 2) a link to a long description, 3) a link to a chatroom, 4) a link to a forum, whose content might be mirrored, in realtime, to one or two other forum providers, which would also be linked on the DotTEL, thus providing continuity for important material, and 5) links to any other webapp or content that I could possibly want to include. Also, I can quickly modify the DotTEL with status info about myself or about any of my links.

The bottom line is that my DotTEL becomes an anchor for all of my stuff. Of course, I don't anticipate that everyone will simply convert, as most people will come up with objections as to why their content or their audience can't or won't switch or be switched to this intermediate format, but it will work fine for me, and I assume for a good number of people who want some measure of protection when faced with the aftermath of their DotCOM being seized.

[1] http://justin.tel

[2] http://www.nic.tel/community-weeklytel.html

That might be acceptable for your personal information, but for a startup? Let's see what that does to your conversion rate.

I think you've misunderstood my point.

If you're advertising crack in Yuma, the Feds really aren't going to care if you're selling it in Mexico. Either way, you're going to end up in prison.

I understood it, but decided to take my response in another direction, with my input still having value for the general discussion. Anyway, DotTEL is British, which means that it will take the US a bit longer to take down than a DotCOM, but since I live in the US, no TLD will matter as far as arrest goes.

Extradition charges? You think they are going to go to the trouble of extraditing you? What are you doing exactly that you feel there would be the risk of that? How many people do you think they can even afford to extradite in a given year?

You may laugh, but how many years ago would extraditing a university student with a website that had links to pirated content have been laughable?

It's very simple. Benefit of .com (for most) far outweighs the chance that that will happen.

You're http://chocolatapp.com/ uses .com, right?

Nice by the way. I use coda and flow. Would like to be able to select text and make a code snippet. I would select the text and have a little icon appear. If I click the icon (which is proximate to the text) it would save the snippet.

Later bring up all the snippets and add other info. That way you don't get all distracted with typing other info.

Edit: The "I use coda and flow. Would like to see" means I will buy a product with this feature and why I am mentioning. Sorry for the fork.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com