9 ms·

Njalla – A privacy-aware domain registration service

116 points by TonnyGaric 9y ago

brey 9y ago
> As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law that's pretty subjective.
- amq 9y ago
  > If you use our service in a way that affects anyones health or safety, we reserve the right to suspend your service Clarifies it a bit
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    I'd argue that's still overly broad, unfortunately. Do we interpret that as direct threat - i.e. someone's somehow using the service to directly fuck with people's pacemakers or nuclear facilities or something - or something broader, like for example a site being used to organise a harassment campaign against someone? Does a site used for serving malware fit in that definition somewhere? Etc etc.
- paxcoder 9y ago
  Note that Peter Sunde is the co-founder of the company: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-launches-anonymous-domain-registration-service-170419/ https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-launches-anonymo...
mattzito 9y ago
> When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party. That's extremely concerning, given that the domain name industry has a very robust set of regulations and legal procedures to govern privacy, mediate dispute, and establish consumer rights. I'd be very concerned about what this relationship between Njalla and myself would do to those protections - they're not a registrar, nor are they a reseller - what am I actually paying them for? Unfortunately, the ToS and/or registration agreement that I am signing up for doesn't appear anywhere that I was able to find. I went through the purchase flow to try to buy a domain, but it won't let me proceed without funds in my wallet, and I'm not going to put 30 euro just to try and read a legal doc. In other words, this seems like it's Probably a Bad Idea(tm), though it's difficult to know without more transparency on their part. (full disclosure: I work for a company involved in the domain industry)
- whoisp 9y ago
  My understanding is that ownership of a domain belongs to whoever is listed in the Whois, and therefore long established Whois privacy products already deal with the problem (of "private" ownership) through the use of a contract between the customer and Whois contact (proxy owner). Can you clarify if that understanding is wrong?
  - mattzito 9y ago
    I am not a lawyer, so I am sure there is nuance here that I am missing. However, that interpretation of the ownership is a fairly narrow inferred one, which is to say that ICANN says "WHOIS data needs to be accurate" and "Transfer procedures need to go to the owner via the data in whois", ergo whoever is in the whois must be the owner. Some registrars, however, say "Nonsense, the owner of the domain is the Registered Name Holder, and we maintain that information, and the whois privacy is just a registered agent who will pass that information back to the registrant". I think it's telling that the Njalla ToS linked elsewhere does not mention ICANN, UDRP, or WHOIS as a sign that they have not thought through the implications of what they are proposing to do. EDIT: also, a practical step for transferring a domain is to ask the registrant to disable whois privacy to do name and address validation, which might also mitigate the "who owns this domain" concern
- kbody 9y ago
  Here you go https://njal.la/tos/ https://njal.la/tos/
- smarx007 9y ago
  §2.3: 1337 will have the right to immediately terminate the provision of the Services and these Terms, as stipulated below under section 9.2. Such termination will have the effect that 1337 may, at its discretion, choose to assume the registered domain name and hold it in its own account, let it expire, or sell it to a third party.
  - HenryBemis 9y ago
    Seriously? "leet"??
wlkr 9y ago
Another similar service which has been around for a while is PRQ [0,1] which was created by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, both founders of TPB. PRQ offer far more than just domains and accept payment via BTC. They also have a proven track record of hosting extremely controversial content. [0]: https://prq.se/ https://prq.se/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQ
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/3mpqkOPh.jpg http://i.imgur.com/3mpqkOPh.jpg
  - wlkr 9y ago
    As far as I can tell that's the result of an image (from ipv6forum.com) in their footer being loaded over http.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  This one appears to have been made by the people behind IPredator who are somehow endorsed by TPB but I never knew / understood the direct connection.
marjans 9y ago
lol I made almost the same thing earlier this year and everyone told me that it's never going to work out (it also didn't because I'm getting like 0 visits) http://anonname.com/ http://anonname.com/
- vmp 9y ago
  Any particular reason why there isn't any HTTPS?
  - marjans 9y ago
    could not afford to pay for it when I was buying domain name hehe
    - ReverseCold 9y ago
      Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/ https://letsencrypt.org/
- tyingq 9y ago
  It might be the lack of any upfront information on the terms and conditions as well as your technical approach to preserve privacy (remailers, etc).
  - marjans 9y ago
    yeah you are probably right, I should add that ..
franciskim 9y ago
ICANN shutting this down in 3...2...1...
- jbg_ 9y ago
  It won't even take ICANN, since I seriously doubt they are accredited themselves. They are probably dealing with one or more resellers and may well be breaching the terms of their agreements with those resellers.
  - galagan 9y ago
    You don't think they have look this up before they started to build this service? I'm pretty sure they have been thinking of every little scenarios that might come up and double check with all parts involved.
    - jbg_ 9y ago
      It really wouldn't be the first time a startup hadn't fully checked the regulations that would affect them, or decided to take their chances with flaunting them…
nolok 9y ago
I see that they are offering the .fr TLD, for which such anonymity is illegal as far as I know (eg even OVH as a registrar and they OwO service which display OVH as the owner to be contacted and then transmit contact to you is not allowed). I guess the difference here is that they don't hide the real owner behind a "contact us to get through" as they are themselves the real owner, so they might be legal, but then comes the question of "do you really want someone else to be the legal owner of the domain of your website".
- user5994461 9y ago
  >>> "do you really want someone else to be the legal owner of the domain of your website". Interesting. I'd expect the problem to be the other way around. Do Njalla want to be legally liable for all domains run by their customers?
  - nolok 9y ago
    I see that as a non issue because of the jurisdiction they're in (a small Caribbean place). If there is an issue (drugs, pedophilia, the usual suspects ...) they close it down immediately, claim they weren't owner of the content and were merely leasing the domain to the user, since a sub-lease is what they're effectively doing. If the domain because popular, they can seize control of it easily, or start snooping on users, or do whatever the hell they want.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  If you want to be completely anonymous, you might have no choice.
jaclaz 9y ago
Isn't it queer that "right-wing extremists" are seemingly prohibited from expressing their own "political weird thinking"? >Think of us as your friendly drunk (but responsibly so) straw person that takes the blame for your expressions. As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you're not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech, your political weird thinking, your kinky forums and whatever. Even Trump is welcome. Hell, he might even be a customer. We’ll never know. We might even be approved by him! Or not. We don’t really care.
- mrtree 9y ago
  The problem is that the boundary of what is lawful seems to have a very american bias. In France Le Pen can express her views, but on this site it couldn't.
- ue_ 9y ago
  I don't think it's so weird, some other services have such stipulations. It's part of the idea of no-platforming, in which the provider of a service wants to minimise spreading of ideas (in this case far right ideas) by not affording people who hold such ideas a platform to speak on. It can be quite effective to prevent spread of these ideas, and even if you disagree with this particular instance (I don't) most services do this to some degree. I do think it is strange though, that they say that they are "for promoting your freedom of speech" simultaneously. Their barring of right-wing extremists suggests that they don't care much for freedom of speech (there's nothing wrong with that, though).
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    Yep, but the whole point about anonimity on the net revolves directly or indirectly around freedom (of speech). An anonimity service is provided to allow people to express their ideas (wrong as they might be) without fear of retaliation . By - more or less - preventing "right wing extremists" to express their "weird" ideas they contradict the base premise. This is not entirely different from some (still queer in my opinion) "free" software licenses, prohibiting the use of the software to (example) members of the US government or military, it is simply not "free" anymore when such clauses are given. Here, as always happens when there is a discretionary choice involved, is determining what qualifies a "right wing extremist", and whether the ban applies to the person/member (and to his/her political ideas) or to the content, let's say that you are a "right wing extremist" that wants to put online a set of cooking recipes, should you be prevented from having a domain there? Or is it when in the recipe for some stew you make a not-funny reference to "kosher" meat being not suitable? And who determines if that is only "not-funny" (maybe it is actually funny) or if it is a non-acceptable pro-Nazi hint?
interfixus 9y ago
Handing over my domain control to some hazy third party? Some hazy third party in Sweden, where top officials up to and including government ministers vocally promote the idea the idea of internet censorship, and where people have actually been sent to actual jail for voicing opinions. I think I'll pass.
- galagan 9y ago
  Njalla is owned by 1337 LLC in Nevis. It's also possible to own your domain within Njalla if you don't want them to be the actually owner of it. I just moved my domains there. Super happy with the service since it's so simple and clean.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  What are your other options?
kitssupplies 9y ago
CV Kits Supplies is Engaged In The General Services Contractors Providing Services Among Other Services Office Cleaning Service Building, Portable Toilet Rental, Property, Headquartered Di Jalan Raya Natar Lampung Indonesia. Vision & Mission CV. Kits Supplies Customer Satisfaction is our challenge detail us : http://kitssupplies.com http://kitssupplies.com 081368381598 ( +62) INA
GBiT 9y ago
Main selling point of Njalla is that one of its founders is ex ThePirateBay guy, Peter Sunde who fights for privacy and creating privacy related services. He is a co-founder of Flattr. So it is more of a trust service.
vavoida 9y ago
nice service, I like the idea of the automatic pgp-key-lookup-service
feld 9y ago
This is good. The closest I've been able to get to anonymous ownership is buying a domain on Gandi and then delegating all roles except Owner to another Gandi account under a fake name. This way I never show up in WHOIS at all but I guess Gandi still knows who bought it (I didn't use bitcoin) I really want to see more of these kinds of services. Anonymity is important.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Section 9.2 in their TOS, though, seems a little concerning. "9.2 1337 may in its sole discretion, also terminate the Services and these Terms and choose to keep, sell, suspend or cancel your domain name registration if:"[1] (list of conditions follows) I can see why that's needed, but it doesn't give a good feel to how much they'll push back before abandoning you once somebody is unhappy with your domain and/or content. Would have a better feel if they replaced "keep/sell" with "transfer", which they would be compelled to do, for example, if an ICANN dispute was lost. I would really want a little more detail on what exactly they do for common things like ICANN inquiries, disputes, DMCA, etc. [1]https://njal.la/tos/#term_9_2 https://njal.la/tos/#term_9_2
uiri 9y ago
.ca solves this issue by not publicly publishing the details of individual registrants in the Whois system. CIRA still keeps a record so that they know who the owner of the domain is. Corporate/organizational registrants still have their contact information made public. Is there a reason why Njalla is better than this reasonable system?
imjustsaying 9y ago
>As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you're not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech What did he mean by this
dijhrykl 9y ago
This is an interesting idea executed terribly. Obviously there are huge liabilities associated with this kind of proxying, but for people which want or need highly anonymous domain registration it could be a worthwhile idea if backed up by an adequately robust contract. The issues: firstly, they don't support freedom of speech: >As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you're not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech Secondly, they don't make it clear in what jurisdiction they operate. Thirdly, they don't specify anywhere what registrar(s) they use to register domains. This prevents customers from performing due diligence on the registrar and its history (for example, does the registrar have a history of arbitrary domain suspensions?) Fourthly, as mentioned in another comment, their terms of service is absurdly loose with regards to their responsibilites; they can terminate service arbitrarily, and have no obligation to transfer ownership to you in this case. This is completely unacceptable. Fifthly, their website doesn't work properly without JavaScript. This is completely unacceptable in any case, but is particularly egregious for an anonymity-focused service which provides a Tor hidden service, where many customers may wish to keep JavaScript disabled (as is Tor Browser's default) to reduce attack surface. Apparently people don't know how to make websites anymore. Sixthly, their website copy is amateurish and has basic typographical errors. Seventh, and perhaps most gravely of all, their entire website betrays a fundamental misconception of the roles and demarcation of a registrar (or pretend registrar, as is the case here.) Above I mention that they are anti-free speech, but the very fact that they think it is the place of a (pretend) registrar to have a policy on this matter betrays a fundamental misconception about the liabilities of a domain registrar. The very idea that a domain registrar (or pretend domain registrar) should be in some way responsible for content hosted "on" a domain is faulty, and at the same time sets a hazardous precedent; this is exactly the kind of thinking which absolutely should not be encouraged or perpetuated in the domain name industry, as it is only going to lead to more and more political intervention at the domain name level. A domain name registrar nominates domain names (meaning essentially the name itself, plus the specified nameservers) to a domain name registry. The only legitimate involvement a registrar has in the use of the domain name is any issue involving the legality of the literal domain name string itself, or the nameserver names, or maybe WHOIS data. Notice that for all its faults, this actually moreorless matches the ICANN model: There are dispute processes for trademark issues regarding the domain name string itself, and dispute processes for WHOIS data. There are emphatically not ICANN dispute processes for content served by nameservers, or content served by hosts referenced by zone data served by nameservers! (I suppose theoretically someone could find a way to break a law with the nameserver names themselves; setting a nameserver for example.com to <illegal-string>.example.com, say, but it seems like that's sufficiently obscure a possibility that it has not yet arisen.) A domain name registrar is not responsible for the content served by name servers referenced by a domain name, let alone the content served by services provided by hosts referenced by the content of a zone file served by a name server referenced by a domain name. That this pretend registrar fundamentally fails to comprehend this demarcation of responsibility is extremely problematic, and betrays a troubling lack of understanding of the system. Of course, it certainly may be the case that domain name registries and registrars (and pretend registrars) in the future get more and more dragged into disputes regarding services provided by hosts referenced by zone files served by nameservers referenced by a domain name, but this is extremely undesirable. It would represent the politicization of the domain name system, which would itself seriously undermine its stability and reliability. We have already seem some attempts to politicize the system and they do not bode well; it's certainly not helpful if registrars start overestimating the degree of their responsibility, as it only increases the feasibility of future politicization of the domain name system. In particular, it should be noted that there is basically no case where the seizure of a domain name for the content it "hosts" (in reality, references, not even directly but via a set of referenced nameservers) can be proportionate; or at least, no case where it can be reliably ascertained that the seizure of a domain would not be grossly disproportionate. For example, if google.com accidentally hosts a small amount of illegal material, should google.com be suspended? Of course not; so unless one is suggesting that 'important' domains should be subject to different, more preferential rules than 'unimportant' domains (an affront to the idea of an internet open for all), where is one supposed to draw the line? Moreover, most nameservers do not allow zone transfers. This means that the extent of a zone served by nameservers referenced by a domain name cannot be reliably ascertained, which again means that there is no way to reliably ascertain that the seizure of a domain name is not grossly disproportionate. If a domain hosts illegal.example.com, but also hosts a million legal subdomains, how can the seizure of example.com for hosting illegal.example.com be proportionate? There is no way to reliably ascertain the existence of subdomains, so illegal.example.com could be known to search engines but the million legal subdomains could be unpublished, internal names yet unknown (by obscurity) to the world. Even if the full contents of a zone could be reliably ascertained, most records reference IPs (A/AAAA), not services (SRV, MX), so unless you portscanned every IP referenced, that doesn't tell you what type of service is hosted on those subdomains (and even if you did portscan those IP addresses, there's the possibility that some services are firewalled to certain source IPs, for example services for internal use only, etc. etc.; the possibilities are endless, and thus so are the opportunities for unforeseeable collateral damage). There is an extremely relevant real-world example of this: the no-ip.org debacle (no-ip.org is a domain which provides free subdomains to arbitrary parties), in which a court, truly extraordinarily, allowed a private corporation, Microsoft, to assume control of the entire no-ip.org domain, simply because of a single bad user, and a very tenuous claim that the abusive subdomain involved infringement of a Microsoft trademark. This resulted in massive disruption to all other no-ip.org users. Again, there is no way of reliably ascertaining an upper bound for the operational impact caused by a domain seizure.
Sophira 9y ago
They don't seem to be very interested in listening to feedback: > We're sure it's the best there is, but since we're always improving, we'll pretend to listen to your feedback and make it better. Openly saying that they'll only "pretend" to listen to feedback doesn't fill me with confidence.
- galagan 9y ago
  Think it where writing with some irony...
Artemis2 9y ago
How do people concerned about security here register their domains? Security of some registrars seems extremely spotty and nobody really talks about how they're safer to use than the competition, but domains are a huge single point of failure. Maybe there is space for a specialized service, something close to Cloudflare Registrar (https://www.cloudflare.com/registrar/ https://www.cloudflare.com/registrar/)?
lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 9y ago
No DNSSEC support?
ijafri 9y ago
Their ratio is going to be 10 customers x 10 DMCA notices.
redxblood 9y ago
This is extremely expensive.

116 points by TonnyGaric 9y ago

brey 9y ago

> As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law that's pretty subjective.

amq 9y ago
> If you use our service in a way that affects anyones health or safety, we reserve the right to suspend your service Clarifies it a bit
- vertex-four 9y ago
  I'd argue that's still overly broad, unfortunately. Do we interpret that as direct threat - i.e. someone's somehow using the service to directly fuck with people's pacemakers or nuclear facilities or something - or something broader, like for example a site being used to organise a harassment campaign against someone? Does a site used for serving malware fit in that definition somewhere? Etc etc.
paxcoder 9y ago
Note that Peter Sunde is the co-founder of the company: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-launches-anonymous-domain-registration-service-170419/ https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-launches-anonymo...

mattzito 9y ago

> When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party. That's extremely concerning, given that the domain name industry has a very robust set of regulations and legal procedures to govern privacy, mediate dispute, and establish consumer rights. I'd be very concerned about what this relationship between Njalla and myself would do to those protections - they're not a registrar, nor are they a reseller - what am I actually paying them for? Unfortunately, the ToS and/or registration agreement that I am signing up for doesn't appear anywhere that I was able to find. I went through the purchase flow to try to buy a domain, but it won't let me proceed without funds in my wallet, and I'm not going to put 30 euro just to try and read a legal doc. In other words, this seems like it's Probably a Bad Idea(tm), though it's difficult to know without more transparency on their part. (full disclosure: I work for a company involved in the domain industry)

whoisp 9y ago
My understanding is that ownership of a domain belongs to whoever is listed in the Whois, and therefore long established Whois privacy products already deal with the problem (of "private" ownership) through the use of a contract between the customer and Whois contact (proxy owner). Can you clarify if that understanding is wrong?
- mattzito 9y ago
  I am not a lawyer, so I am sure there is nuance here that I am missing. However, that interpretation of the ownership is a fairly narrow inferred one, which is to say that ICANN says "WHOIS data needs to be accurate" and "Transfer procedures need to go to the owner via the data in whois", ergo whoever is in the whois must be the owner. Some registrars, however, say "Nonsense, the owner of the domain is the Registered Name Holder, and we maintain that information, and the whois privacy is just a registered agent who will pass that information back to the registrant". I think it's telling that the Njalla ToS linked elsewhere does not mention ICANN, UDRP, or WHOIS as a sign that they have not thought through the implications of what they are proposing to do. EDIT: also, a practical step for transferring a domain is to ask the registrant to disable whois privacy to do name and address validation, which might also mitigate the "who owns this domain" concern
kbody 9y ago
Here you go https://njal.la/tos/ https://njal.la/tos/
smarx007 9y ago
§2.3: 1337 will have the right to immediately terminate the provision of the Services and these Terms, as stipulated below under section 9.2. Such termination will have the effect that 1337 may, at its discretion, choose to assume the registered domain name and hold it in its own account, let it expire, or sell it to a third party.
- HenryBemis 9y ago
  Seriously? "leet"??

wlkr 9y ago

Another similar service which has been around for a while is PRQ [0,1] which was created by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, both founders of TPB. PRQ offer far more than just domains and accept payment via BTC. They also have a proven track record of hosting extremely controversial content. [0]: https://prq.se/ https://prq.se/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQ

ReverseCold 9y ago
http://i.imgur.com/3mpqkOPh.jpg http://i.imgur.com/3mpqkOPh.jpg
- wlkr 9y ago
  As far as I can tell that's the result of an image (from ipv6forum.com) in their footer being loaded over http.
giancarlostoro 9y ago
This one appears to have been made by the people behind IPredator who are somehow endorsed by TPB but I never knew / understood the direct connection.

marjans 9y ago

lol I made almost the same thing earlier this year and everyone told me that it's never going to work out (it also didn't because I'm getting like 0 visits) http://anonname.com/ http://anonname.com/

vmp 9y ago
Any particular reason why there isn't any HTTPS?
- marjans 9y ago
  could not afford to pay for it when I was buying domain name hehe
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    Let's Encrypt: https://letsencrypt.org/ https://letsencrypt.org/
tyingq 9y ago
It might be the lack of any upfront information on the terms and conditions as well as your technical approach to preserve privacy (remailers, etc).
- marjans 9y ago
  yeah you are probably right, I should add that ..

franciskim 9y ago

ICANN shutting this down in 3...2...1...

jbg_ 9y ago
It won't even take ICANN, since I seriously doubt they are accredited themselves. They are probably dealing with one or more resellers and may well be breaching the terms of their agreements with those resellers.
- galagan 9y ago
  You don't think they have look this up before they started to build this service? I'm pretty sure they have been thinking of every little scenarios that might come up and double check with all parts involved.
  - jbg_ 9y ago
    It really wouldn't be the first time a startup hadn't fully checked the regulations that would affect them, or decided to take their chances with flaunting them…

nolok 9y ago

I see that they are offering the .fr TLD, for which such anonymity is illegal as far as I know (eg even OVH as a registrar and they OwO service which display OVH as the owner to be contacted and then transmit contact to you is not allowed). I guess the difference here is that they don't hide the real owner behind a "contact us to get through" as they are themselves the real owner, so they might be legal, but then comes the question of "do you really want someone else to be the legal owner of the domain of your website".

user5994461 9y ago
>>> "do you really want someone else to be the legal owner of the domain of your website". Interesting. I'd expect the problem to be the other way around. Do Njalla want to be legally liable for all domains run by their customers?
- nolok 9y ago
  I see that as a non issue because of the jurisdiction they're in (a small Caribbean place). If there is an issue (drugs, pedophilia, the usual suspects ...) they close it down immediately, claim they weren't owner of the content and were merely leasing the domain to the user, since a sub-lease is what they're effectively doing. If the domain because popular, they can seize control of it easily, or start snooping on users, or do whatever the hell they want.
StavrosK 9y ago
If you want to be completely anonymous, you might have no choice.

jaclaz 9y ago

Isn't it queer that "right-wing extremists" are seemingly prohibited from expressing their own "political weird thinking"? >Think of us as your friendly drunk (but responsibly so) straw person that takes the blame for your expressions. As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you're not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech, your political weird thinking, your kinky forums and whatever. Even Trump is welcome. Hell, he might even be a customer. We’ll never know. We might even be approved by him! Or not. We don’t really care.

mrtree 9y ago
The problem is that the boundary of what is lawful seems to have a very american bias. In France Le Pen can express her views, but on this site it couldn't.
ue_ 9y ago
I don't think it's so weird, some other services have such stipulations. It's part of the idea of no-platforming, in which the provider of a service wants to minimise spreading of ideas (in this case far right ideas) by not affording people who hold such ideas a platform to speak on. It can be quite effective to prevent spread of these ideas, and even if you disagree with this particular instance (I don't) most services do this to some degree. I do think it is strange though, that they say that they are "for promoting your freedom of speech" simultaneously. Their barring of right-wing extremists suggests that they don't care much for freedom of speech (there's nothing wrong with that, though).
- jaclaz 9y ago
  Yep, but the whole point about anonimity on the net revolves directly or indirectly around freedom (of speech). An anonimity service is provided to allow people to express their ideas (wrong as they might be) without fear of retaliation . By - more or less - preventing "right wing extremists" to express their "weird" ideas they contradict the base premise. This is not entirely different from some (still queer in my opinion) "free" software licenses, prohibiting the use of the software to (example) members of the US government or military, it is simply not "free" anymore when such clauses are given. Here, as always happens when there is a discretionary choice involved, is determining what qualifies a "right wing extremist", and whether the ban applies to the person/member (and to his/her political ideas) or to the content, let's say that you are a "right wing extremist" that wants to put online a set of cooking recipes, should you be prevented from having a domain there? Or is it when in the recipe for some stew you make a not-funny reference to "kosher" meat being not suitable? And who determines if that is only "not-funny" (maybe it is actually funny) or if it is a non-acceptable pro-Nazi hint?

interfixus 9y ago

Handing over my domain control to some hazy third party? Some hazy third party in Sweden, where top officials up to and including government ministers vocally promote the idea the idea of internet censorship, and where people have actually been sent to actual jail for voicing opinions. I think I'll pass.

galagan 9y ago
Njalla is owned by 1337 LLC in Nevis. It's also possible to own your domain within Njalla if you don't want them to be the actually owner of it. I just moved my domains there. Super happy with the service since it's so simple and clean.
StavrosK 9y ago
What are your other options?

kitssupplies 9y ago

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GBiT 9y ago

Main selling point of Njalla is that one of its founders is ex ThePirateBay guy, Peter Sunde who fights for privacy and creating privacy related services. He is a co-founder of Flattr. So it is more of a trust service.

vavoida 9y ago

nice service, I like the idea of the automatic pgp-key-lookup-service

feld 9y ago

This is good. The closest I've been able to get to anonymous ownership is buying a domain on Gandi and then delegating all roles except Owner to another Gandi account under a fake name. This way I never show up in WHOIS at all but I guess Gandi still knows who bought it (I didn't use bitcoin) I really want to see more of these kinds of services. Anonymity is important.

tyingq 9y ago
Section 9.2 in their TOS, though, seems a little concerning. "9.2 1337 may in its sole discretion, also terminate the Services and these Terms and choose to keep, sell, suspend or cancel your domain name registration if:"[1] (list of conditions follows) I can see why that's needed, but it doesn't give a good feel to how much they'll push back before abandoning you once somebody is unhappy with your domain and/or content. Would have a better feel if they replaced "keep/sell" with "transfer", which they would be compelled to do, for example, if an ICANN dispute was lost. I would really want a little more detail on what exactly they do for common things like ICANN inquiries, disputes, DMCA, etc. [1]https://njal.la/tos/#term_9_2 https://njal.la/tos/#term_9_2

uiri 9y ago

.ca solves this issue by not publicly publishing the details of individual registrants in the Whois system. CIRA still keeps a record so that they know who the owner of the domain is. Corporate/organizational registrants still have their contact information made public. Is there a reason why Njalla is better than this reasonable system?

imjustsaying 9y ago

>As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you're not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech What did he mean by this

dijhrykl 9y ago

This is an interesting idea executed terribly. Obviously there are huge liabilities associated with this kind of proxying, but for people which want or need highly anonymous domain registration it could be a worthwhile idea if backed up by an adequately robust contract. The issues: firstly, they don't support freedom of speech: >As long as you keep within the boundaries of reasonable law and you're not a right-wing extremist, we’re for promoting your freedom of speech Secondly, they don't make it clear in what jurisdiction they operate. Thirdly, they don't specify anywhere what registrar(s) they use to register domains. This prevents customers from performing due diligence on the registrar and its history (for example, does the registrar have a history of arbitrary domain suspensions?) Fourthly, as mentioned in another comment, their terms of service is absurdly loose with regards to their responsibilites; they can terminate service arbitrarily, and have no obligation to transfer ownership to you in this case. This is completely unacceptable. Fifthly, their website doesn't work properly without JavaScript. This is completely unacceptable in any case, but is particularly egregious for an anonymity-focused service which provides a Tor hidden service, where many customers may wish to keep JavaScript disabled (as is Tor Browser's default) to reduce attack surface. Apparently people don't know how to make websites anymore. Sixthly, their website copy is amateurish and has basic typographical errors. Seventh, and perhaps most gravely of all, their entire website betrays a fundamental misconception of the roles and demarcation of a registrar (or pretend registrar, as is the case here.) Above I mention that they are anti-free speech, but the very fact that they think it is the place of a (pretend) registrar to have a policy on this matter betrays a fundamental misconception about the liabilities of a domain registrar. The very idea that a domain registrar (or pretend domain registrar) should be in some way responsible for content hosted "on" a domain is faulty, and at the same time sets a hazardous precedent; this is exactly the kind of thinking which absolutely should not be encouraged or perpetuated in the domain name industry, as it is only going to lead to more and more political intervention at the domain name level. A domain name registrar nominates domain names (meaning essentially the name itself, plus the specified nameservers) to a domain name registry. The only legitimate involvement a registrar has in the use of the domain name is any issue involving the legality of the literal domain name string itself, or the nameserver names, or maybe WHOIS data. Notice that for all its faults, this actually moreorless matches the ICANN model: There are dispute processes for trademark issues regarding the domain name string itself, and dispute processes for WHOIS data. There are emphatically not ICANN dispute processes for content served by nameservers, or content served by hosts referenced by zone data served by nameservers! (I suppose theoretically someone could find a way to break a law with the nameserver names themselves; setting a nameserver for example.com to <illegal-string>.example.com, say, but it seems like that's sufficiently obscure a possibility that it has not yet arisen.) A domain name registrar is not responsible for the content served by name servers referenced by a domain name, let alone the content served by services provided by hosts referenced by the content of a zone file served by a name server referenced by a domain name. That this pretend registrar fundamentally fails to comprehend this demarcation of responsibility is extremely problematic, and betrays a troubling lack of understanding of the system. Of course, it certainly may be the case that domain name registries and registrars (and pretend registrars) in the future get more and more dragged into disputes regarding services provided by hosts referenced by zone files served by nameservers referenced by a domain name, but this is extremely undesirable. It would represent the politicization of the domain name system, which would itself seriously undermine its stability and reliability. We have already seem some attempts to politicize the system and they do not bode well; it's certainly not helpful if registrars start overestimating the degree of their responsibility, as it only increases the feasibility of future politicization of the domain name system. In particular, it should be noted that there is basically no case where the seizure of a domain name for the content it "hosts" (in reality, references, not even directly but via a set of referenced nameservers) can be proportionate; or at least, no case where it can be reliably ascertained that the seizure of a domain would not be grossly disproportionate. For example, if google.com accidentally hosts a small amount of illegal material, should google.com be suspended? Of course not; so unless one is suggesting that 'important' domains should be subject to different, more preferential rules than 'unimportant' domains (an affront to the idea of an internet open for all), where is one supposed to draw the line? Moreover, most nameservers do not allow zone transfers. This means that the extent of a zone served by nameservers referenced by a domain name cannot be reliably ascertained, which again means that there is no way to reliably ascertain that the seizure of a domain name is not grossly disproportionate. If a domain hosts illegal.example.com, but also hosts a million legal subdomains, how can the seizure of example.com for hosting illegal.example.com be proportionate? There is no way to reliably ascertain the existence of subdomains, so illegal.example.com could be known to search engines but the million legal subdomains could be unpublished, internal names yet unknown (by obscurity) to the world. Even if the full contents of a zone could be reliably ascertained, most records reference IPs (A/AAAA), not services (SRV, MX), so unless you portscanned every IP referenced, that doesn't tell you what type of service is hosted on those subdomains (and even if you did portscan those IP addresses, there's the possibility that some services are firewalled to certain source IPs, for example services for internal use only, etc. etc.; the possibilities are endless, and thus so are the opportunities for unforeseeable collateral damage). There is an extremely relevant real-world example of this: the no-ip.org debacle (no-ip.org is a domain which provides free subdomains to arbitrary parties), in which a court, truly extraordinarily, allowed a private corporation, Microsoft, to assume control of the entire no-ip.org domain, simply because of a single bad user, and a very tenuous claim that the abusive subdomain involved infringement of a Microsoft trademark. This resulted in massive disruption to all other no-ip.org users. Again, there is no way of reliably ascertaining an upper bound for the operational impact caused by a domain seizure.

Sophira 9y ago

They don't seem to be very interested in listening to feedback: > We're sure it's the best there is, but since we're always improving, we'll pretend to listen to your feedback and make it better. Openly saying that they'll only "pretend" to listen to feedback doesn't fill me with confidence.

galagan 9y ago
Think it where writing with some irony...

Artemis2 9y ago

How do people concerned about security here register their domains? Security of some registrars seems extremely spotty and nobody really talks about how they're safer to use than the competition, but domains are a huge single point of failure. Maybe there is space for a specialized service, something close to Cloudflare Registrar (https://www.cloudflare.com/registrar/ https://www.cloudflare.com/registrar/)?

lsjdfkljdfwkwdf 9y ago

No DNSSEC support?

ijafri 9y ago

Their ratio is going to be 10 customers x 10 DMCA notices.

redxblood 9y ago

This is extremely expensive.