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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
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.
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.
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!"
Legitimate people/companies are not likely going to use this service. The only people that would likely use this are people doing things that are shady, and they don't want it to be traced back to them. If the company (and your domain) gets seized, you would probably rather just let the domain go, and find another way to get a new domain than try to fight to get your domain back and expose your identity.
WTB [sig], PST!!!