re: 100% Confirmation That Unseen.is is NOT Private or Secure.

There’a a post making the rounds at budgetcamerareview.com, a number of people have asked us if this is true.   Back when this story was written by Jim Stone in October of last year, we had just started our move to Iceland, so things were in a state of flux and some things were still being moved and frankly some things still didn’t work right.  Most everything should be fixed now and I’d like to go through point by point on the status of everything with our company in Iceland.  Go look at the facts and make up your own mind:

1.  The whois listing showed a Mill Valley address, that was our old US based postal mailing address.  We still maintain it for people in the US who pay with cash or send letters, to save them the costs of mailing to Iceland.  All the assets of the company now reside in Iceland, though we still have our domain registrar in the US (that’s the Carlsbad, CA address).  DNS is still run internationally by Amazon because they are are considered the best and most resistant to attack.  We have quite a bit of experience with this, the Chinese govt routinely attacks certain sites and DNS is one way they do that.  In the future, we’ll move that to Iceland, too, but it will be distributed to servers in several countries and the domain registrar will also be an Icelandic company, most likely the same one that hosts our site, Advania.

Current whois info is here:

We include detailed information like the server IP Address which is 82.221.104.228. Unseen.is resides at Advania hf. in Iceland.

Yes, that’s an Icelandic IP address.

2.  Jim’s email address wasn’t shut down.  There was a glitch from when we first established that service.  That’s been completely resolved and email account and traffic are now growing quite smartly.  We should have some exciting news on the encryption front for the email in the next few weeks, which will make that service even more secure.

3.  Are we linked to Before It’s News?  The companies are completely separate and independent, but we share many of the same shareholders.  Before It’s News uses the same mailing box to save money.  In fact, we got the idea for Unseen from running Before It’s News.

4.  My wife, Christina, doesn’t own a house in California, don’t bother looking for one.

5.  The company, Unseen, efh, is a private Icelandic company.  This cost us quite a bit in legal and accounting fees to establish, but it’s done now.  The company is officially established in Iceland and the assets have all been transferred there.

The official info is (from our Terms of Service):

The merchant, Unseen, ehf, is the registered owner of the domain https://unseen.is
Unseen, ehf
1 Dunnerbrunnur 5
113 Reykjavik, Iceland

Reg. ID: 4204130680
VAT: 115387

{Note: these are the official Icelandic registration numbers for the company, you can look them up on an Icelandic government web site.}

Tel: (354) 695-9991

Contact address for customers: [email protected]

6.  We are now taking payments in Iceland (effective Jan 25th, approximately).  These go into our Icelandic bank account and we pay taxes in Iceland.

7.  Our SSL certs have been upgraded and Google Chrome browsers should get a GREEN padlock.  As I mentioned in a previous post, you shouldn’t rely entirely on SSL to keep you safe.  I was told in 1997 that the NSA had broken 128bits SSL in real time.  Here we are almost 20 years later using 256 bits, so you should probably assume SSL isn’t that secure.

8.  Your data is stored on servers in Iceland.   If you are in the US,  your data is going to travel through the US and there’s nothing we can do about it.  You could move out of the US and that might help.

9.  What’s with the funny spelling for Unseen and the unsene.com domain?  That’s the domain we started testing with, unsene.com.  We no longer use it, since we’ve moved to Iceland.   In the US, .com domains are pretty much all taken, so we used the archaic spelling until we moved to Iceland.  Good domains are widely available in Iceland and we’ll be offering Icelandic hosting soon.  Go get a domain there and build a web site with us in a few months.

If you find any things that look strange or suspicious about Unseen.is, please let us know at [email protected] and we’ll check it out and fix any problems you find.  We’re doing our best here, but we rely on the help of our users to keep everything safe and sound.

CK