Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Bay Founder Launches Anonymous Domain Registration Service (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Former Pirate Bay spokesperson and co-founder Peter Sunde has just announced his latest venture. Keeping up his fight for privacy on the Internet, he's launching a new company called Njalla, that helps site operators to shield their identities from prying eyes. The name Njalla refers to the traditional hut that Sami people use to keep predators at bay. It's built on a tall stump of a tree or pole and is used to store food or other goods. On the Internet, Njalla helps to keep people's domain names private. While anonymizer services aren't anything new, Sunde's company takes a different approach compared to most of the competition. With Njalla, customers don't buy the domain names themselves, they let the company do it for them. This adds an extra layer of protection but also requires some trust. A separate agreement grants the customer full usage rights to the domain. This also means that people are free to transfer it elsewhere if they want to.
Just means if the company gets seized, you have no rights to your domain as it's not yours, it's company assets.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your so-called "argument" could be applied to just about any/every tool or service ever invented that someone somewhere decided to exploit for nefarious reasons.
Whoever is in the WHOIS is the owner of the domain, per ICANN.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
structured, since in order to reclaim your domain you have to deanonymize yourself anyway, defeating the purpose of the whole service.
Additionally, if your name isn't already tied to the service, you're going to have to tie whatever alias you used to pay and register on their site to your RL name, which might have interesting connotations for either your local penal code, or financial (tax) laws.
As co-founder of The Pirate Bay, Njalla might also get some pirate sites as customers. Since Njalla owns the domain names, this could lead to some pressure from rightsholders, but Sunde isn’t really worried about this.
“The domain name itself is not really what they’re after. They’re after the content that the domain name points to. So we’re never helping with anything that might infringe on anything anyhow, so it’s a non-question for us,” Sunde says
Well, except for giving the owners privacy and shielding them from the legal consequences of running a piracy site. If Njalla were taken down by, say, ICE (yeah, yeah US isn't the world police but they've done it before), would all the domains it "owns" be taken down as well?
Part of ICANN regulations state the person or company who it is registered under owns the domain, so every anonymous domain name registrar operates under same principle.
It's nice that a recognized person is doing it though who has earned respect and trust by at least me :)
Also I registered my domain under a fake name, though if you track payments it can be linked to me.
But still no one really checks for fake names.
The problem with public registration requirements is that it puts people at a significant disadvantage compared to corporations. A person is much more exposed by having all the required information from a domain registration accessible in a public database. The only requirements should be that the domain owner can be contacted through the registrar, and that an address where legal documents can be served must be on file and handed over to authorities with a warrant, but none of the information needs to be public. It's not right that I can't have my own email address without also giving everybody my home address if I give them my email address.
something that would be nice for torrent too:
a torrent where you can add file after starting to share it.
en masse
Let me break it down for you...
1) The MAFIAA has won the clearnet. It is nothing more than whack a mole now. This constant disruption prevents the building of great things. Such as The Pirate Bay index, and the trackers, of old heyday. It's too hard to hide long term on clearnet, and the risks are too high, and it's all about the advertising money now.
2) The FUTURE of principled p2p filesharing is now moving onto the anonymous encrypted overlay networks (darknets). You can share all your stuff therein 24x365 forever without fear of ever being shutdown. Here's what you need...
Reliable Storage - ZFS raidz checksums compression etc
Reliable Computer - ECC memory, you can use Ryzen or Intel Xeon and even some i3's. The Xeons such as E3-127x are very perfomant full featured chips, look them up.
Reliable OS - FreeBSD, Linux
Darknet Software - I2P, Phantom, CJDNS, Tor, OnionCat, IPFS, Pond, Ricochet, Zcash, Tox... so many more cool systems out there for you to discover... start your research and usage, build the next great darknet index.
Ripping Software - cdparanoia, cdda2wav, flac, ffmpeg, etc. Policy: must always share lossless original, except for huge bluray which can be downconverted to dvd-9, then add lossy versions of the original if you have time/space.
Network Connection - Carve the your one physical pipe into two logical rate limited bandwidth pools, one that you do not use yourself as a user but do dedicate to giving back to the darknet by running a node on it, the other that you use to fileshare on (both upload and download). The giveback pool must be at least 3 times larger than the usage pool, but you can flex into it when it is quiet, use your packet filter qos for that.
The Darknets await you... :-)
All the reasons have already been stated. Leave it to say the only real solution is the replacement of DNS with something more peer to peer. The next best thing is to keep a local cache. Trust no one.
I was thinking of my command and control domains for new ransomware.
The Canadian TLD (.CA) masks personal domain registration information.
When you register a .CA, you define if you are a business or individual. If it's a business, the information is available to the public via WHOIS, if you register as Personal, the information is not available to the public to search. In the event the domain holder needs to be contacted for legal reasons, the CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) will hand over the info in compliance with the law.
This is how all TLD's should be run.
As a business owner, and Domain Reseller, I have a lot of domain names under my business. The biggest issue I have with it being on public record, is the SPAM e-mails. I get so many SPAM e-mails, I created a special e-mailbox just for my domain names (domains@mybusinessname).
I'm actually in the process of setting up a special service for my own clients to "mask" just the e-mail addresses on their domain registrations, where I pass it through a spam filter and flag messages before sending them over to the client where it's clear as day that the messages are probably spam. Think of it as an inbound spam filter, but only for domain registrations.
The worst SPAM is where the spammers claim that your domain name has expired (even if expiration is weeks or months away) and send out fake renewal invoices. I get so many calls from clients wondering why they've received a bill for $200 for a domain name, when they already paid for the registration.
My goal with this filtering is that anytime something looks like an invoice, I'll inject a big red banner to the email saying this is probably a scam and should simply be discarded.
Now, you may be thinking "Why not just trash the spam?" Well, according to ICANN and the CIRA (and friends), if you provide an e-mail masking service, ALL messages must be delivered. The whole point of the WHOIS is for users to get in touch with domain owners, and a single false positive would be in violation of the domain registration agreements I am a part of.
I am currently working to automate this process for my own customers, and may open it up to the public if there is any interest in it from outside users. Depending on message volume, it will be free, or really cheap. Ideally I'd like to offer it to other registrars/resellers to utilize and I would charge them a minuscule fee just to cover my costs.
That's called WHOIS privacy. Shitty registrars charge you through the nose for it. Unreasonable ones charge you once. Good ones don't charge you at all. Excellent ones have it set on as a default. I'm with the latter.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
That will do wonders to turn your company into an instantly recognizable one.
That was my first thought, too, but I'm not sure this will be any easier than using the current slimy registrars.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
And enjoy your no-knock warrant.
Ya, there's really nothing special here at all. I can sign up for a domain at many legit places, and set my whois to whatever I want. Usually I use "Zoidberg, Phd." and the address of a homeless shelter in a large city where I don't live.
If I wanted to truly detach myself I'd sign up with a fake name, burner phone number, and prepaid card.
Besides that being *exactly* what you get these days for filesharing on clearnet, plus time in solitary and a lifelong sentence and fine,
You're a useless jackass troll, so get lost.
Watch out for those though. The big catch is that whatever info appears in WHOIS is the official owner of the domain. So by protecting your privacy, you are giving away the official ownership of the domain. This is even the case of the .CA domains given above.
You know who would love an anonymous domain service? People who run botnets.
Also the people who send fraudulent bills, run questionable investment schemes, or other organized all around criminal activity using a web front.
That's a cute bit of legal trivia, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it. It has no legal basis in the real world. If there is ever any dispute a court will decide who owns what.
Nope. My name is not obfuscated, making me the owner, but my address is and says so on every line. As that results in an invalid address, it cannot be used as proof of any ownership other than mine.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Which will result in 'tainted domains' that may not be being used for criminal purposes, but are tainted by association with such a registrar.
I also wonder when search rankings and suchlike will start to take registrar reputation into account.
You did this from your house? What are you? Stoned or stupid? Where are your brains? In your ass? Don't you know anything? It's stupid, man. It's universally stupid.
Look em up.
This is not true. The Registry still receives your information you submit at the time of registration from the Registrar, to be held in escrow (for law enforcement, or proving who the legal owner of the domain is). They then submit their own information to be placed in the WHOIS database.
So you are still the real owner, and only the public record (WHOIS database) of the domain is masked with the WHOIS Privacy companies information.
Providing false information on your domain registration is against the registration agreement, and they have every right to terminate your domain name without notice.
WHOIS privacy services cost what they do for two reasons:
1) They have a list a mile long of compliance crap they have to keep up on
2) They are required to forward any messages they receive to the domain owner. This means e-mail, telephone, and postal mail.
One trick they use to get around this: They set up a shell company in a small foreign country that would cost a lot to call or send postal mail to. E-mail forwarding is easy, and really low cost. This heightens the bar for people to actually try and contact the company behind the domain name to a point where most people and scammers will simply not try.
They also have to submit your real information to the Registry, where it is held in escrow for situations where law enforcement needs to be involved and only the public WHOIS database receives the privacy protection companies information.
Explains why they have manage to keep thepiratebay.org for 15 years now.