People have all been wondering, “What happened to pauldotcom? Why’d he change the name to Paul’s Security Weekly?” Well, we’ll explain it. You can either read below or hear the story straight from Paul in the video above. Here’s the story:
Paul bought the pauldotcom.com domain in 2003, and started using it in 2005, when Paul and Larry went to SANS and decided to do a podcast together. They were trying to figure out what to call it but names like Coca-Cola and Microsoft were already taken, so they put their thinking caps on…also known as “drink beer and see what sticks to the wall.” Paul owned the Security Weekly domain but wasn’t using it for much other than hosting Kung Fu movies, so they decided to use it, plus it was a bit of an inside joke along the same lines as Slashdot. Saying the URLs out loud gets a little confusing. Yeah, geek humor.
Paul Asadoorian was owned by a different guy named Paul who had purchased it in 2001, but along the way offered to sell it to Asadoorian. Our Paul was not interested in buying it, even as early as 2005. Then the owners of paul.com wanted to buy securityweekly.com but Asadoorian was not interested in selling and rebranding. Who ever wants to do a rebranding? Then you gotta come up with some name like hacknaked.tv or something.
Then a phone call from the paul.com owner with threats to come after securityweekly.com, and along the same time the paul.com web site content changed. Somewhere along the line, the paul.com domain got sold from the original Paul to the current owner.
That phone call forced Asadoorian to file for trademark and copyright. Paul said he learned a lot about the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during that process and what actually matters. It’s not a popularity contest, it’s about when you started using, not how much you use it or what for. Even if we prove we were using it for security podcasts, it doesn’t matter to the USPTO. The bottom line is if someone has an attorney willing to file motion after motion and just swamp the whole process down in the legality, it’s going to come down to who has the most money. So Asadoorian was faced with a choice. Either fight it, pay a crap-ton of money along the way and regardless of how rock solid the case is, you never know when you leave it in the hands of a judge. Or, pay *less* money and have a guaranteed outcome. Asadoorian chose the latter. Thus the name change.
One thing Paul and Larry would like to emphasize is no harm should come to the owner of Paul Asadoorian or his digital properties. Please don’t even think about SWATting, DOSing or anything else bad that you can do to a web site. We are choosing to take the high road here, so please help us with that endeavor.
In the end, Paul decided to rename the podcast to “Paul’s pauldotcom” and the new official and legal trademark is Hack Naked. So now all that “pauldotcom” stuff you’ve bought and acquired over the years will become extremely valuable collector’s items. There will be no more ever created. So please treat those shirts and towels and stickers with care. And be sure to update now with all new Hack Naked swag!
As for the iTunes RSS feeds, they should all still work. Paul has made configuration changes with iTunes, so it should all be invisible to the user. Also, there is a new web site at a new domain for the show. You’re already here, so apparently you found http://secweekly2.wpengine.com. Paul thanks Greg Hetrick and Rob Kornmeyer for helping to code a bunch of rewrite rules to eliminate 404 errors. There’s a lot of content here and getting it all to seamlessly work with the new domain wasn’t just a flip of a switch. So if you find any more 404 errors on the site, please let us know.
And your Twitter feed should have also automagically switched to the new @securityweekly as well. See how easy we try to make things for you!
Anyway, on to the rest of the show!
