Another win for Njalla and press freedom!
Nov 11, 2025
Another win for Njalla and press freedom!
Njalla takes on a cult and triumphs, triggering a win for citizen journalism and the internet.
At the end of last year (2024) we stopped a court case being brought by a cult that was trying to injunct one of our domains. However they were allowed to re-file. We have been waiting to see if they would, but nada. By now it seems they have lost their appetite for fighting against the truth, and we are declaring it a win for Njalla.
So what cult was mad at us (this time), why exactly, and how did we win?
In the middle of 2023 we received a letter from one of our domain name registrar partners telling …
Another win for Njalla and press freedom!
Nov 11, 2025
Another win for Njalla and press freedom!
Njalla takes on a cult and triumphs, triggering a win for citizen journalism and the internet.
At the end of last year (2024) we stopped a court case being brought by a cult that was trying to injunct one of our domains. However they were allowed to re-file. We have been waiting to see if they would, but nada. By now it seems they have lost their appetite for fighting against the truth, and we are declaring it a win for Njalla.
So what cult was mad at us (this time), why exactly, and how did we win?
In the middle of 2023 we received a letter from one of our domain name registrar partners telling us one of our domain names: “descentfromheavenlymountain.is”, had an injunction claim against it. The injunction was being brought by an American cult: “CMA International Foundation”, which was upset with a citizen journalism project that had exposed it. Our registrar partner wanted to know how we wanted to proceed.
The domain name used to point to a website that a Njalla user had started (on servers that had nothing to do with Njalla) that investigated and documented the cult. Like any good journalism the work was published with proof, which in this case has included images taken from, and of, the CMA website.
The usage of these images of course falls under the fair use copyright act. But the cult was trying to use copyright and libel laws to try to shut the project down. In actual fact the research had already been finished and the domain name now just pointed to an archived version of the site, held in an entirely different place.
Nevertheless we wanted to take up the fight, as we believe in freedom of the press. And supporting journalism and stopping cults and other parasites is one of the reasons we do this work. In addition, there is the important question of who is liable/responsible for content online. We know that domain name ownership is _separate_ legally from website and content ownership and liability.
The case was being brought in Iceland as the domain name has the Icelandic top level domain, and proceeded through the course of 2024. Initially the district magistrate just dismissed the injunction claim since the operation of business was not in Iceland. But the cult appealed this and brought a case to try to get a judge to force the district magistrate to actually take the case (ie look in to it).
Annoyingly the court did uphold this appeal. It rejected the premise that the district magistrate could just dismiss the claim just because the business wasn’t in Iceland. _But_ the court also said the district magistrate didn’t need to handle the original claim, which was riddled with problems. CMA would need to file again.
Through this process our lawyer pointed out all the ways in which CMA were technically wrong in their case. And there were many. As seems to be usual for cults and scammers, getting the facts right is hard. - The defendant had not owned the domain during the period the case documents referred to - By the time the case was brought the ownership of the domain had changed again and Njalla wasn’t involved any more - The DNS was handled by cloudflare (who were not being sued) - Neither Njalla or our partners had ever hosted the actual content of the website themselves - The web was hosted by cloudflare, and only contained a redirect to archive.ph, for _all_ pages. There was no material on the blog itself available what so ever.
Moreover, as our lawyer argued, journalism is not a crime!
Clearly the cult had not expected resistance. They hadn’t met Njalla yet! Being forced to be correct and precise turned out to be too much for them. They folded. Its been a year now and no further case has been brought.
Who knows, maybe reading this will get them all riled up and want to actually do some due diligence and try their luck again. We are ready! The fight for a free press, and taking down cults, is one we will always be up for fighting!
Due process? An EU attack on privacy and citizens rights
Jun 05, 2025
EU released the newest edition of their so called ‘Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List’ which claims to describe ‘the latest trends in counterfeiting and piracy..’ and Njalla is on the list, LOL wut?!
Great artists take action
Feb 25, 2025
From time to time we get questions from new users who ask “if we steal domains” because they have read a negative review on Trustpilot. Fair question, easy answer: No, we don’t.
DHL sucks
Dec 01, 2021
Dear DHL,
thanks for sending us an e-mail about your concerns about our domain name dhlsucks.com.
We usually prefer getting these legal threats in physical form but we are aware of the skillset your company lacks in order to get physical letters delivered to it’s destination.
Hi, jack.
May 03, 2021
A lot of people are public about their usage of Njalla. We however find that it’s their prerogative to decide if they want to acknowledge our relationship. We’re like that secret partner that’s ok with being a secret, maybe kept on the side or maybe just because real intimacy is the business of just the involved parties. That’s why we rarely openly talk about dealings with specific domain names that are registered through us.
We don’t have enemies
Nov 10, 2020
We don’t have enemies. Enemies have us though.
It turns out that the RIA (not the artist thank god) and MPA, Motion Picture Association, are annoyed with the fact that Njalla is not shutting off domains on their illegal requests. We think it’s important that courts do their work in order to have some legal grounds for blocking something as important as infrastructure.
We always stand up for freedom of speech, worked against censorship and privacy. As a group we work tirelessly on promoting and extending these very basic human rights to everyone on the globe. We’re not afraid of a little good PR from people that see us as enemies. In fact, when these groups see Njalla as something bad, it’s because they see basic human rights as something negative. The fact that they’re also upset with entire countries like Iceland makes us think someone had a bad day when Trump was not re-elected.
These lobbyist groups have now listed Njalla on their “notorious markets” list. We’re proud to be on the list, since it means we have impacted something. Other people/groups/movements that look at us as notorious are groups like The anti-abortion groups, Pro-animal cruelty groups, the anti-democratic movements, the alt-right and not to forget Nazis. They’re upset with us not shutting of activists domains in these fields as well. History will tell if MPA/nazis/anti-abortion groups, or the rest of us, are on the right side.
It’s also come to our attention that MPA doesn’t like Cats. Hitler didn’t have cats, he had dogs.
IPredator is moving to Njalla
Oct 30, 2020
So, we finally did it!
A bit over 12 years ago IPREDator was started. The name IPREDator was a symbolic name made up back then because of the new IPRED law. That law grants companies the right to acquire peoples private information without going through the police regarding immaterial rights violations. The VPN service was born as a fuck you to the politicians for voiding the peoples right to a fair trial. In retrospect, we should have named it something less creepy, but at the time it was very good and effective...
We challenge you to a duel
Dec 02, 2019
Sápmi 2 december 2019
Dear PIR,
on the 13th of december, at 13:37 CET, we will meet at GPS position 67°38’49.6“N 17°21’58.0“E.
We will duel.
Our community will send one of our best. You are welcome to send anyone from PIR or “Ethos” Capital. Your choice of type of duel. We’re from the north, we win at everything.
The reindeer and the arctic foxes will be our witnesses and judges. The winner gets control of .org.
Bring warm clothing, flashlights, hot drinks and an apology.
Best, The team from njalla.org, self-decided representatives of the .org community.
Furnish Information?
Nov 20, 2019
HELO. WE LIKE ELEPHANTS. ELEPHANTS HAVE FISSION-FUSION SOCIETY! TRU! BELIEVE! WE THINK, KNOW!, INDIAN WILL NOT FUSION WITH NJALLA. :(
Taking our Njetski to Ukraina
Nov 06, 2019
UKRAINE POLICE WANTS INFORMATION. WE EXPLAIN HOW NJALLA WORKS. SEXY (REALLY REALLY SEXY!!!!) GRAPHICS. SO SEXY, ADVISORY ETC. WE HIDE IN BODY.
ICE ICE BABY
Oct 30, 2019
We received a subpoena from Vanilla Ice (we think, those speaks foreigns we no know). Those seem to wants to migratings to usssss. Ice Ice baby All right stop collaborate and listen Ice is back with my brand new invention Something grabs a hold of me tightly Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly Will it ever stop yo I don’t know Turn off the lights and I’ll glow To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle Dance go rush to the speaker that booms I’m killing your brain like a poisonous mushroom Deadly when I play a dope melody Anything less than the best is a felony Love it or leave it you better gang way You better hit bull’s eye the kid don’t play If there was a problem yo I’ll solve it
Sustainability à la Njalla
Oct 24, 2019
Recently there was some news about NordVPN, probably one of the biggest VPN-providers in the world, having a security breach on one of their servers. First, we want to applaud them for being open about the breach. Second, we want to talk a bit about the problems with running a security focused project.
As many of you know, part of the team behind Njalla is also part of the team behind IPredator VPN, one of the most secure and long running VPN projects around. In the infancy of IPredator we worked together with some other organisations on hosting, software etc but later decided we wanted to up our game in terms of security and control over our platform(s).
We started with an important move; we migrated to our own data centres totally controlled by us, with machines totally controlled by us. We don’t allow any external people in our data centres, we don’t allow other peoples machines inside. We run our own ASNs. The only thing that is not 100% in-house is our anycasted DNS service. This is in our opinion not the biggest issue since the data is public and it’s still with IP-ranges controlled by us. We did look long and hard before selecting whom to work with even on this.
The way we operate have trade-offs. For instance we don’t lease machines since we want to own the hardware, we don’t have loans since we don’t want to feed that type of business. We put ethics and privacy first, which means that profit for us is means to re-invest and slowly get more people involved. We don’t have any venture capital that makes us answer to someone else but ourselves - and our users. But we don’t have huge amounts of cash to spend on buying up “market shares“. We don’t buy ads anywhere (we don’t want to pay money to the ad networks that are enemies of privacy anyhow). This means we don’t reach a mass market, but we probably couldn’t afford that anyhow.
We run different projects in our small group. Some people are involved in more than one of the projects, some are just in one. We overlap sometimes, sometimes not. But we all know each other and if we need to help each other we do. Some are experts in networking, some in programming, and almost all of us are experts at showing the finger at assholes and to troll the people in power that need to be trolled. That means we’re hardly a typical organisation that people apply to work with. We also have high standards in terms of who we work with. Not just on skills, but also in terms of mindset. And when we talk about mindset, it’s about cause instead of career. A lot of the people involved in our projects are so to speak fucked when it comes to a normal career, since we’ve sacrificed a lot being involved in activism. People in our group has been to prison for fighting for the rights to an open internet.
Being a smaller organisation in terms of people also means we’re not going to get the newest coolest features out there. We won’t offer a VPN that you can pretend to be in lots of different countries in, because we’re not going to put machines in other peoples data centres. And for obvious reasons we’re not going to build a data centre in the US or the UK in the near political future.
The features we have are built for a purpose. We’re not chasing profit, we’re chasing change. Most of our most precious users are making us lose a lot of money from the various legal costs we have with them. Or DDoS attacks that come out of that. But that’s our “business plan”. Not something to go to the bank and ask for a loan with, but something that makes you able to look yourself in the mirror, every morning when you wake up. Over time we’ve developed one skill that can’t be taught lightly, the fine skill of helping our users in cases which are legally sensitive. Activists around the world know all too well the pressure hitting them, and way too few organisations stand up for these activists because they’re problematic.
Shortly said: we’re not the typical people to run projects like these and we use that as an advantage. A lot of people trust us, which is the basis of our ability to survive financially. That means that we take care of that trust, or we’re gone. It’s our livelihood. But it also means we’re not going to be the ones with the cheapest services or offers. We’re all about total sustainability. And now we’re not even talking about obvious things as only green power for our machines, re-using heat from our data centres or re-using hardware or for that matter the solar panels that we of course have. We’re not doing that as selling points. We’ve done this for over a decade and most people only know one thing about us: they can trust us. We can’t stress enough that we don’t take that lightly. The rest of the “do right” things we do because they’re the right thing to do.
If you’re reading this you might know someone involved in our projects. Some of us are public about their work. Some of us aren’t. Since we work with privacy we know that people sometimes need to be a bit less public. And we know that trust doesn’t come without being a bit transparent. We’re trying to find the balance there. We hope that the trust you have in the ones you know (of) extend to them being able to work with the right people.
If you’re a user of our services, you might have read some of our boring Terms of Services. Some complain that they are flexible (to our favour). That might be true, one of our terms is that you can’t use our service in a way that hurts anyone. What that means is of course up for interpretation. But for us that means that running an election using our platform, where people can say that they like their government or not is definitely ok, even if it’s illegal in certain weird countries. Morals and laws do not always overlap. And thinking that there’s a fine line where things that are ok and things that aren’t would be defined is also not reasonable. We host a lot of people that we don’t agree with, we’ve kicked out a lot that we don’t agree with as well. We never take these situations lightly, we discuss them internally and come to a conclusion. But we have a goal in mind with our services, and that is to improve life and democracy, not to help people spread hate.
We build and run the services we do because we didn’t trust anyone else to do so. We’ve run our own VPN for 10+ years because we didn’t know who ran the other ones, or how skilled they are. For instance we built njalla because we didn’t trust anyone else to protect our domains or our privacy, and we understand how core a domain name is for most peoples operations. This doesn’t mean we’re always the right fit, it just means that if you need a service that understand that sometimes life is just fucked up, we’re around. And when you pay our sometimes a little bit higher fees (which we try to actually keep as low as possible without trade offs), the money goes to the next project we start, if not to expand the current one or get more people involved. Some of our projects are a financial nightmare but important to have around, so they’re supported by the ones that are better off.
Sustainability is a word that can mean a lot of different things. But for us it’s not just about having a balance between work and life, or being green, it’s also about making projects for those who need them, and to make sure that we stand for something. When people call us names for sending silly replies to power-abusive organisations, we know we’re doing things right. We’ll never be the next Godaddy or Facebook, because, we’d rather want to not have the facebooks and Godaddies. That’s sustainability.
1 april joke: Press release regarding new BandS-privacy agreement
Mar 14, 2019
This was 1 april joke!
PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLISHING, 14 MARCH 2019
The worlds leading privacy domain and vps provider Njalla (njal.la) has entered into cooperation with multiple leading internet providers.
Today we proudly announce that the cooperating internet providers will no longer charge for any traffic from your data plan to sites registered or hosted with Njalla. This will remedy the need for large data plans as long as your favourite internet sites has their hosting or domain name with Njalla.
Some internet providers have also entered into a BandS-privacy agreement with Njalla, where selected traffic to unsafe providers will instead be redirected to Njalla services. Any customers of the provider interested in domain name registrations with an unsafe provider will instead be redirected to Njalla’s website to ensure that the end-users privacy will be respected.
“This is a huge step forward for internet privacy as we know it”, says A. Pascal, CPO of Njalla. “Finally we can control the bad privacy decisions of end users, instead of having to hope for the large Internet giants such as GoDaddy, Google or Amazon to protect them and ultimately fail.”
“We’ve always loved Njalla and their dedication to privacy and anonymity” says one of the cooperating internet providers (which in the spirit of privacy and anonymity wishes to be anonymous). “There’s no-one else we trust, not even ourselves, since we have laws that prohibit us. Njalla operates in a fluid legal state which we can’t (and don’t dare) to replicate. It provides a huge benefit for their practices.”
The cooperations will enter into effect in the first day of next month.
For more information, please contact press at njal.la or call +883 5100 0834 6319
Toast AI image recognition
Aug 14, 2018
This sticker (when placed in an unrelated image) tricks deep learning systems into classifying the image as a toaster.
You can read the research on https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09665.pdf (PDF).
We keep evil spirits away
Feb 05, 2018
Our respond on latest legal threat
Jan 27, 2018
About those threats
Jan 25, 2018
Dear valued Njalla participant,
Every now and then, you ask how we deal with letters about our service, from people that do not like our service. We do get some of those, and we reply to, well, some of them. We believe in a certain level of transparency (especially when the thing we are transparent about is edu-tainment). So here’s a letter from some people in England (that’s where York is right? (That’s at least what the map said! (and they claim to be the NEW local news paper))) that are upset about... well. A lot.
—————————————————— From: “[redacted], Deborah” <[redacted]nytimes.com> Date: January 9, 2018 Subject: Infringing Use of New York Times Content on www.paywallnews.com Dear Sir or Madam: I am writing from the Legal Department of The New York Times Company (“The Times”). It is my understanding that 1337 Services LLC is the registrant of record for the website “paywallnews.com”. It has come to my attention that significant amounts of New York Times content are being posted on the referenced website (which appears to have been created solely to provide readers with free content they would otherwise have to pay for). If you go to this link: http://www.paywallnews.com/sites/nytimes, you will find nothing but New York Times content, bearing the name of The New York Times over each article but providing no credit to either writers or photographers. The Times has no record that anyone from paywallnews.com ever received permission or license to post any content whatsoever from The New York Times. This abuse of New York Times content constitutes a most egregious infringement of The Times’s rights under applicable copyright law. It further clearly breaches your own Terms of Service (Section 4.2.c., here: https://njal.la/tos/). Accordingly, we hereby demand that you immediately provide us with contact information – including email addresses – for both the actual owner of the paywallnew.com website, and for the hosting provider on which the paywallnew.com website is located. If we have not heard from you within three (3) business days of receipt of this letter, we will have no choice but to pursue all available legal remedies. The demands made herein shall not prejudice or waive any rights or remedies that The Times may have in respect of the subject matter set forth herein, all of which rights and remedies are hereby expressly reserved. Sincerely, Deborah [redacted] Legal Department The New York Times Company 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 (T) [redacted] (F) [redacted] (E) [redacted]nytimes.com —————————————————— From: “Njalla” <[redacted]njal.la> Date: January 9, 2018 Subject: Re: Infringing Use of New York Times Content on www.paywallnews.com Dear Deborah, Thanks for that lovely e-mail. It’s always good to communicate with people that in their first e-mail use words as “we demand”, “pursue all available legal remedies” and so forth. I’d like to start out with some free (as in no cost) advice: please update your boiler threat letters to actually try what most people try first: being nice. It’s not expensive (actually the opposite) and actually it works much better than your method (source: a few tens of thousands years of human development that would not have been as efficient with threats as it would have been with cooperation). Now, back to the questions you sent us. We’re not sure who you are, so in order to move further we’d like to see a copy of your ID card, as well as a notarised power of attorney showing that you are actually representing the people you’re claiming to do. A lot of our customers have competitors trying to unlawfully take down the competition. So, we kindly ask you for that (see, we’re not demanding, it can be done this way too) before we move on. Regards, Njalla —————————————————— From: “[redacted], Deborah” <[redacted]nytimes.com> Date: January 11, 2018 Subject: Response to your email of January 9, 2018 re Infringing Use of New York Times Content on www.paywallnews.com Dear Sir, I apologize for any hurt I have caused to your feelings. I usually deal with corporations that employ people used to reading legal documents, so I forget how such documents may appear to others. And I must admit to a certain frustration when I come across an entity like paywallnews.com, the very name of which sets forth its intention to provide free access to that which honest people pay for, and which is, in fact, continuing to provide an extremely large and growing amount of New York Times content even as we write. But I digress. Obviously, you have a large experience of dishonest parties; to allay your suspicions, I am delighted to provide you with a letter, on New York Times Company letterhead, signed by the Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of this organization and duly notarized, attesting to my identity and employment here (the document is attached below). Once again, as I mention above, the referenced website is stealing large amounts of New York Times content. If you click on this link: http://www.paywallnews.com/sites/nytimes, you will see the section of the referenced website that is devoted – as the url suggests – to content from The New York Times, which has all been carefully labeled as such. You may consider this my formal assertion that The New York Times Company owns the copyright in this content and its use has not been licensed by us or our agents. As this abuse – aside from being an egregious infringement of The Times’s copyright – breaches your own Terms of Service, I hope you will be able to see your way to helping me to put a stop to this practice by providing me with the name and contact information for the owner of paywallnews.com and for the ISP on which it is hosted. The demands made herein shall not waive any rights or remedies that The Times may have in respect of the subject matter set forth herein, all of which rights and remedies are hereby expressly reserved, Sincerely, Deborah [redacted] —————————————————— From: “Njalla” <[redacted]njal.la> Date: January 11, 2018 Subject: Re: Response to your email of January 9, 2018 re Infringing Use of New York Times Content on www.paywallnews.com Dear Deborah, thanks for your apology - and consider it accepted. It didn’t hurt my feelings, it’s more that we don’t accept the tone of threats in todays world. It feels ignorant, self-righteous and contra-productive to any modern society. As you might know, we’re an art group working for altering the status quo of todays narrativised discourse, which leads to us thinking a little bit further than just the mammalian cerebellum. Also thank you for the attached document. It’s good to know which party one is talking to. We’re not considering people dishonest because they claim to be someone they’re not, we consider them bad con artists. As artists ourselves, we take pride in good art. Our frustration regarding the domain in question is however off a different thematic view. For us the domain name reference is more likely for a news site about paywalls, but that might be a cultural difference, we’re just the normal audience of newspapers, not working in that sphere where most of our days revolve around our world view. We’re however also frustrated, but because of the fact that these websites need to exist. In our world it’s a shame that people are not considered equally important enough in society, so people can be derived of their human rights to participate in the our information community, as stated by the United nations in (for instance) quite relevant articles 19, 21 and 27 of their universal declaration of human rights. We’re both humans and we might come from different classes in society, so you and I might think differently here, Deborah. But I for one, and I can speak for all of my co-artists here at the office, think that human rights are quite swell. Further, stealing content seem quite harsh of this website though, didn’t know that they did that! Is there anyway you can get the stolen items back though? You should either go to the police and request them to help you get the stolen items back. Or maybe talk to your insurance company, they might help to compensate you for the loss. But a helpful idea; if they’ve stolen something and then put copies of that on a website that you can freely access, I would suggest just copying it, so that both of you have the same things. That’s a great thing with the digital world, everyone can have copies of things. I am surprised they stole something when they could just have copied it. I’m guessing it’s some older individuals that don’t know the possibilities of modern day technology to make copies. I also looked at the Terms of services on our end that you referenced in the earlier letter (the threatening, remember?) – you stated that the domain was violating ToS 4.2c. Let me send you a copy of that for you, for easier reference (and you can have this copy, we still have our own); ‘You agree that you will not use the Services and/or the domain name provided by the Services for activities involving: [..] c. Publicizing and/or spreading of content that is illegal according to any applicable laws’ Deborah, I was quite shocked and appalled that you referred to this part of our ToS. It made me actually not visit the website in question even though you’ve linked it now a few times. You’re admitting to spreading illegal content at your newspaper, for profit, is that correct? We’re quite big proponents of freedom of speech, let me assure you of that, but we also have limits. If you spread illegal content, and our customers stole that illegal content and are now handing out free copies of that, that’s a huge issue for us. Since it would be illegal for us to get those copies if they’re illegal, I’m asking you what type of content it is? From my limited legal understanding in our country, I only know that child pornography and messages of hate directed at certain genders, race or religious groups are illegal. I’m not sure how it is in York, but I’m quite certain England have similar laws to us considering our nation used to be a colony of yours. I really do hope that you do not personally participate in the creation and spreading of these types of content. Now, I understand that you want information about the people behind the theft and spreading of the dangerous and illegal content that they have deprived you off. However, I can’t give you that information without a national court order over here. And to be honest; we’re an art group and not really good at collecting that information. We’re trying to build up the worlds largest private collection of domain names. We can’t afford to buy all of these ourselves (and we aren’t bright enough to come up with that many thousands of really interesting domain names we’ve got so far) so we have customers (or participating audience as we actually call them internally) that give us both names and pay the bills for them! An important part of our artistic message is that creator and audience blend so much that we like no-one to have credit rather than some-one. We like the idea of a genderless, nameless, free community of equal peers, achieving a reciprocal value through cooperation. It goes against our values and artistic goals to demand private information from our audience, when they’re nice enough to participate. But the nice thing (for you, that is!) about the global interconnected network we lazily refer to as the internets, is that the information about which IP address a website is hosted on, and thus which provider this is operated by, is totally open! You can see the same information just as much as we can. Well, honestly, we know lots of people that could probably get more information, but that would probably be a crime, and we are not happy to commit crimes. Rather I’m hoping you’ll stop creating illegal content and spreading. It’s never to late to turn leafs. All the best, Njalla / Konsthack
Stay safe
Dec 15, 2017
For Christmas, get your friends some anonymity
Dec 04, 2017
We like to take alternative ways
Nov 27, 2017
GoDaddy is an evil company that hurts cute dogs
Oct 03, 2017
We know how to deal with papers
Sep 13, 2017
Don’t overcomplicate things
Sep 13, 2017
Can’t understand a word? Leave it to the professionals. Or us
Sep 12, 2017
We know how to hide things
Aug 10, 2017
We like to stay sober
Aug 07, 2017
We like cats
Aug 07, 2017
IMMACULATE RELEASE
Apr 19, 2017
FOR IMMACULATE RELEASE.
Announcing the opening of NJAL.LA