DomainTools Blog

I thought I would cover an Industry icon in today’s post. Paul Stahura is the COO of Demand Media and Founder of eNom. He is considered by myself and others as one of the most clever people in the domain industry. One of Paul’s recent ideas at the ICANN Lisbon last month was a concept of Secure Blobs for Law Enforcement. What if all registrars output a secure blob at the end of every whois record. This would allow people with decryption keys to decipherer the secured thick whois text. Keys would be given out to law enforcement agencies that access the blobs. Law enforcement would also be kept anonymous to the registrars because their is no way to tell who is looking at the blob and who is looking at the plain text record. The request would appear to be just another whois lookup. Everyone would be able to see the thin contact record (AKA OPOC record) and the thick secure blob would be for anyone with a key.

I am not sure if the idea is practical – could international governments share a key? The idea is definitely interesting and would require more thought.

On another Note, Paul said he might join the Blog’O Sphere soon. The domain industry needs more bloggers. This would be a good platform for Demand Media to announce important milestones. I caught news on TechCrunch that Paul’s company Demand Media just re-launched Dot TV. I noticed that the CEO Richard.tv resolves to a grovy site but Paul.tv goes to a Demand Media parking page. Everyone at Demand Media got a Dot TV domain name as a launch present. Chris Ambler the Chief Software Strategist got Ambler.TV where he hosts videos of himself taking pictures of women at a lingerie shoot.