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Can Web Sites Go Offshore For Free Speech?
invoke asks: "All the recent stories about Web pages being yanked for various supposed violations of DMCA make me worry that I may inadvertently irritate some large corporation. What I am seeing now in America and the EU suggests that I would most likely find my Internet connection terminated with no real recourse, causing me no end of hassle. I can't afford to lose my connectivity, as I run several domains off my static IP. Therefore, I'm looking for a safe-harbor solution for hosting a 'vanilla' free speech site. I'm not intending to host warez or serialz, just stuff that might irritate people-with-money. Any suggestions?"
Unfortunately, I don't think moving offshore will help in the "real world". This is the hacker mentality, which serves us well in the computer world - "if I find a way to bypass the rules that are in place to do something cool, it's good". If you annoy a corporation or a government enough, they can just make new rules - like making it illegal for people in their country/corporation/whatever to visit your website, blocking your address, or like France did with greenpeace, sinking your boat or whatever you're using to go offsite. Legally, I don't think it protects you much. For instance, let's say you're a US citizen for the sake of example. If you do something to a US citizen/corporation that a lawyer thinks has violated the law, I don't think it matters that you've done this in a location outside the US. For example, if I am a US citizen residing in the US, and I swindle someone else who is a US citizen with a website that is hosted in Canada, I bet a lawyer would find a way to at least attempt to charge me under US law. Right or wrong, I do not believe it will prevent legal attacks. I think the Australians who attempted to host pornsites in the US found this out. The Australian government didn't care where the websites were hosted; the Australians were found to have violated Australian law. I think if you host your website in the US you have pretty good assurances of freedom of speech. I'd talk to the folks at www.faceintel.com for some guidance if you wanted to set up something controversial on how to protect yourself. I think you will have to try to work within the system to successfully change it. If you try to bypass the system, it's fun and exciting, but it often makes those in control more inflexible and can ultimately damage your cause if it makes you seem like an outlaw.
Going offshore doesn't offer protection if they find out who you are. And the odds are very good that, unless you are very careful, they WILL find out who are. Most people are as sloppy as Kevin Mitnick.
You can and will be sued in the U.S.; or prosecuted, if it's a criminal activity. The U.S. in practicality, doesn't recognize borders, just like the internet.
There have been enough cases on other similar matters to show that at best it doesn't work; and possibly make things worse for you at trial.
If you are extremely careful, you might get away with it. But it's unlikely if you've done anything noteworthy here.
Does anybody know of a good way to anonymously set up a website? I do not wish to be anonymous for legal reasons (so hosting in the US would be fine), I want to be anonymous because I fear some psycho who is offended by my website might try to hunt me down. Ideally, I'd be able to have my own domain name without anybody being able to track me through whois, but I suppose I would settle for an anonymous web hosting service.
Everyone's been complaining that even ISPs have ISPs. Very true. Just cut your connectivity by calling your upstream provider. Has anyone looked into the L0pht's wireless project Guerilla.net? It's basically the internet without wires. Currently, they are continuing construction and testing, but this solution prevents someone from cutting the upstream provider. The offshore server farm is broadcasting and anyone with a packet radio receiver can access it. (Even those without packet can. Packet receivers with internet connectivity become routers.)
People have been talking quasi-seriously about moving a server farm onto a boat into "international water"...even if this were practical... ...they'd still get ya. Witness the case of Radio Newyork International (RNI), which in 1987 floated the Sarah, a coverted fishing trawler, into international waters off Long Island Sound and began broadcasting, unlicensed, on AM and shortwave. Even though they were in "international waters" on a ship registered in Panama, the FCC was able to get the Coast Guard to raid the ship, armed, and arrest the operators of the ship (the infamous Allen Weiner) and even reporters covering the event. They used some obscure citizenry laws to pull this off, though when Allen Weiner and the Village Voice threatened legal action, the FCC quietly dropped pending criminal charges, but Weiner and investors lost all of their equipment. Bottom line is that no matter who you are, where you are, or what you're doing, Big Brother will find a way to put a halt to it.
You can get what you need here:
Freenet is a peer-to-peer, gnutella-with-strong-crypto-like server system. It's works but is still in very early stages of development.
You can also check out Vince Cate's Datahaven Services which is located in Anguilla, and will provide restriction-free (except for porn) boxes for a very reasonable price. Have fun, and don't get caught.
So don't fly the US flag. Renounce your US citizenship. Fly the skull and crossbones. Also be prepared to be on your own if you're boarded. Be well armed. And don't expect anyone to help you.
What good is moving a website overseas if no one can find it? I mean what if the DNS servers or the Internet search engines censor you?
Well that has happened to me. I host a site that is completely legal but it contains scandalous news about a particular medium sized U.S. corporation (think faceintel but smaller). Suffice to say, my target company doesn't like my website but they can't legally shut me down. So they have done the next best thing.
For the last 3 years they have been playing this game with the search engine companies. Either they are paying them cash and/or they are sending nasty lawyer mail to them. I'm not exactly sure. But every couple months I submit my site to the major search engines, it gets into their database and I get search hits for a couple months, then all of a sudden the search engines start dropping my site like a rock. Then I submit my URL to the search engines again and the cycle repeats.
I must have played this re-submiting game a dozen times and this sort of thing doesn't happen to others on my ISP. It is all very spooky.
On the web, if no one can find you then you simply don't exist!
Have you bought your Altavista keyword today?
Did you know that Altavista has(had) a form page that sold just that? Scary huh?
Wha? South African, South East Asian? Hell, I'd do it myself for nothing but looting privilages! Murder may be wrong and all, but I could build a hell of a beowulf cluster with all that gear!
What good is moving a website overseas if no one can find it? I mean what if the DNS servers or the Internet search engines censor you?
Well that has happened to me. I host a site that is completely legal but it contains scandalous news about a particular medium sized U.S. corporation (think faceintel but smaller). Suffice to say, my target company doesn't like my website but they can't legally shut me down. So they have done the next best thing.
For the last 3 years they have been playing this game with the search engine companies. Either they are paying them cash and/or they are sending nasty lawyer mail to them. I'm not exactly sure. But every couple months I submit my site to the major search engines, it gets into their database and I get search hits for a couple months, then all of a sudden the search engines start dropping my site like a rock. Then I submit my URL to the search engines again and the cycle repeats.
I must have played this re-submiting game a dozen times and this sort of thing doesn't happen to others on my ISP. It is all very spooky.
On the web, if no one can find you then you simply don't exist!
Have you bought your Altavista keyword today?
Did you know that Altavista has(had) a form page that sold just that? Scary huh?
The ideal of free speech, as desirable as it may seem to all of us, is in the real world nothing more than a pipe dream which those in power want to convince us we have. True free speech has never existed, and will probably never exist under the current socioeconomic models of today, in which aggressive competition is the force that shapes our society and the lives we lead in it.
The capitalist system which dominates the world is based upon older social systems such as feudalism, and inherits from them a kind of "caste" system in which money replaces birth as the indicator of rank. The only real difference is that there is an illusion of opportunity which is deliberately fostered by those at the top in order to keep those at the bottom happy. After all if you think you might be able to rise up the social ladder through hard work and skill, then you are going to be content with your lot, believing better things are around the corner. This is the basis for the "American dream".
The struggle to gain status and power within the system is an aggressive and competitive one - there is less room at the top than there are people trying to rise there. This creates a climate where backstabbing, slander and other forms of socioeconomic rape become accepted and acceptable means to gain something over others, either pushing yourself up or your rivals down.
Whilst this infighting serves those at the top, keeping the masses busy fighting each other rather than challenging them, things like free speech are a danger to them. Their positions of power are based on an intricate web of money, power, reputation and connections, and annoyances like public opinion can topple even the mightiest giant.
So rather than have their positions exposed to the free speech of the public, they will instead fight using their considerable resources to quosh it, preferrably using pre-emptive legislative strikes. We see this happening across the Western world at the moment with laws like the UCITA and so on. So surely the obvious choice is to go offshore, outside of national laws?
While this may work for a while, the globalist coterie of people in power aren't themselves tied to any particular nation. Sooner or later they will find a way to pressure national and international bodies into "harmomising" international laws or some other excuse that will involve extending the reach of anti-free speech laws.
So in the short term this may work as a solution to oppresive national laws, but it's only a matter of time before legislation catches up with you wherever you are.
Thus the only way to solve this problem is to buy up some land - preferably islands for defense reasons - and start our own country, which would intentionally not form any treaties with anyone, and completely ignore any and all foriegn intellectual property and/or censorship regulations. A "rogue" nation, with a single purpose in mind. There is still the problem of physical connectivity. Putting up a satellite would be a start, but it might be that nobody bothers to pick up the signal. Pipe piracy would, in the long run, probably be the only solution. Oops, Japan's not connected any more. Instead, we are.
Of course, it'd probably be easier to just have a revolution in the US. There will be sooner or later anyway...
A friend and I have been proposing that gopher be resurrected for this purpose -- an "underground" internet-based source for truly free information.
:^) I think this would most easily accomplished with a reformed gopher architecture. That way, there can be no images can be loaded into the information, and there are no layout tags. Just free information. Plain Old Text.
The web (in its current state) has become a playground for everybody, and it's gotten quite messy. Banner advertisements are constantly being shoved down one's throat; the same goes with ALT tag ads if you've turned image loading off. Everybody's "corporate interest" is leading to this or that company or government or organization trying to stop the freedom of speech that we enjoyed on the Web only a small time ago. Escaping corporate interests will be harder and harder as time goes on, because it looks like it's going to become illegal to do so.
So, the solution that a friend and I thought of would be to make a second internet -- one without the "crap".
If anybody else wants to investigate this as a team project, send me an email -- I'd love to talk.
Jon Abbott
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
If your boat is flying a U.S. flag (registered in the U.S.), they Coast Guard can board it in international waters. If it's flying no flag, they can also board. Again, this, I believe is set by international law, not some "American" law. If it's flying a British flag, for example, in international waters, they cannot board it.
Does it make you feel better about yourself when you bring everyone around you down? You're hoisting your world view onto other people in a desparate attempt to convince yourself that because you're a failure, everyone else has to be.
It doesn't have to be this way.
-Stu
1) host your own web site. Get a T1 and your own
hardware. This puts the responsablity onto your own sholders.
2) Don't put stuff up in violation of copyright. It does not belong to you.
3) If anyone does send you a letter asking you to take stuff down. Talk to your lawyer. Near as I can tell the stuff that they are going after falls into a few very specific catagories. (Copyright violations etc)
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
ship has an American reg US law still applies.
IANAL
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I owe nothing.
Yes, I borrowed money for my house, but only because the interest on the loan helps to offset the high taxes I pay.
Unlike other rich folks, I do not begrudge my taxes though. I have enough to live on, and live well. I could make 10 million dollars, and pay 9 million to the government, and still have more money than I know what to do with. As long as the government is doing something productive with the money, I consider it my duty as a fortunate person, to take some burden off of people who make like $20k/yr. I remember those years, and paying taxes sucked when you couldn't afford rent and groceries.
I have forgotten that what I thought was a simple truth when I was younger, was really a lie. That people *can* make it in this country, and that nobody's really opressed. While it's true, that materialism loses it's charm, the things you own tend to own you, I don't forget my roots, and I don't forget who to thank for my good fortune.
Finally, I don't believe in hell. So I will not see you there. For Christians, there is no Rubicon, because you can always turn back.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
" capitalism demands a pyramid structure of wealth and power, "
/. of the growing threat of corporatism, globalization, and erosion of rights, we're mostly pretty happy that US corporations had the freedom to invent transistors, microchips, software, ethernet, etc. And that the PEOPLE were fleeced with high taxation to fund the development of the internet, or the space program (even if that was just a glorified cold-war pissing contest).
I've always hated that description, a pyramid is a three-dimensional structure. You're talking about a hierarchy which can be mapped to a simple two-dimensional tree structure. It ticks me off to hear these terms being abused like this in a cheap attempt to over-dramatize an idea - in order to rouse emotional responses from the reader. But that's what Marxism was all about wasn't it? Compassion for one's fellow man, hate for those who could be twisted in one's mind to being non-human, because they're rich.
No, I haven't believed in this system my whole life. In fact, back when I was in college, I was quite taken with the whole Marxist ideal. Now that I've "grown up", and I've become that what I used to hate: A white, employed, middle-class, male, with a wife, two dogs, SUV, two kids, watches sit-coms, has a 401k, etc. etc. - I look back at my childhood, and saw that I hated the rich because I had no hope that I would ever possibly become rich. None at all. It happened quite unexpectedly, after eight years of hard work. I have improved my standing in life, I rose from the level of the proletariat, I took advantage of the opportunities I had in my native-born country, and yes, I played the sick game of consumerism, and was rewarded with a shiny new credit history.
All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not living on a commune growing tofu.
And while we're all pretty aware here on
I didn't have this perspective when I was 24, and making $6/hr delivering pizzas. I couldn't have.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The TLD is from outside the US. The HOSTING is not. .CC is owned by Clear Channel Communications now, even though it was orignally for the Cocos Islands. Y'know, the company that is probably running a vanilla corporate rock station near you? .TV is only licensed from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu rather than wholly owned, but don't think that this means that they have any web servers there. A lot of those islands don't even have electricity, much less bandwidth. All you gain from using these domains is forcing anyone trying to track you down to use whois one, maybe two, more times to find where your data resides. Hmm, tricky.
Doesn't matter who provides the domain services, its where your server is.
-reemul
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
To do the same, or something similar, with a web server demands some additional resources, but is actually not that different in practice.
Instead of being parked outside of the physical legal domain, you now have to be parked outside of the virtual legal domain.
What does this mean, in practice? Using "pirate" IP numbers, a "pirate" DNS, and (most importantly) NO logical connection.
If there is no logical point of connection, then there is nothing to shut off. There is also no easy way of tracking where the server physically is.
In short, you must be able to intercept packets for your server at arbritary points on the physical network, and inject synthesised packets also anywhere in the physical network.
(By "anywhere", I mean more than 1 place, and the more places the better.)
Tunneling to a large number of proxies (ALL of whom have the same vhost IP/name) would be one way.
Another, less legal, way would be to borrow the same idea as used in DDOS attacks, but install a distributed proxy service instead.
A third method would be to extend the Gnutella protocol to support anycast proxying. (Essentially Gnutella is 9/10ths there, so this wouldn't be overly difficult.)
A fourth, -definitely- illegal and strongly NOT recommended method (but perhaps the most water-tight) would be to use one of the first two methods with injected routes. By this, I mean transmit valid BGP4 and/or RIP2 packets to a random set of routers, of which at least one is connected to each proxy. The injected routes would create randomly and continuously shifting paths to each proxy, making it much more difficult to figure out where anything is. Combine this with a randomly shifting IP address, and it becomes impossible to block or trace. Individual sysops could remove proxies, if ordered to or if not approved. However, with no burden on any one proxy and no continuous load along any one path, it's unlikely any given proxy would ever be found, or even objected to, if it was. (Most computer-literate people are closet Robin Hoods, whether they'll admit to it or not. Provided something is not interfering with legitamate use of resources, is unlikely to bring the Wrath of God down on their heads, and doesn't compromise "security" (read: bring their prawn collection to the attention of the media), most sys admins are likely to decide it's more hastle than it's worth... ...and bookmark the website for future "reference".
All these methods boil down to The Golden Rule of Real Security: DON'T put your eggs in one basket, and keep moving the baskets. It royally buggers up the egg-smashers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For your ISP connection you wouldn't want the government listening in, but he's wanting to post stuff that he wants people to see, so tapping isn't really a problem. On the other hand, if Russia is willing to pass laws that allow easy tapping, what are the laws regarding shutting it down (the real issue here)?
I am reminded of a great quote from A Man for All Seasons:
Thomas More: This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast. Man's laws, not God's. And if you cut them down--and you're just the man to do it--do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Let's not forget the fact that he was one hell of a speaker.
Some people, who got the chance to hear him speak, said that he possessed such convincing power that if he told you to jump of a cliff, you really WOULD jump of a cliff without any hesitation what so ever.
Wasn't there another similar project a few years ago called Oceania, only founded more explicitly on Libertarian/Objectivist ideology? Are they still around, or have they disappeared?
Isn't their constitution based primarily on the writings of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein?
Interesting premise, considering that the interconnectedness of the net these days makes it virtually impossible to isolate a substantial subsection of the internet.
Don't be too sure. If it becomes a problem to The Powers That Be, i.e., if servers sprout in non-WIPO countries offering MP3s and war3z, I'm sure the copyright industry will push vigorously for tying Internet connectivity to an IP treaty. Chances are countries such as Britain, Australia, the EU will quietly sign it with perhaps a few concessions; countries such as Russia won't get much in the way of choice. And if the treaty prohibits signatories from providing connectivity to non-signatories, it's unlikely that Cuba or Libya or whoever will be able to set up a data haven.
The copyright industry has enough lobbying clout that they got copyrights extended to virtually perpetual terms; if such a treaty regime is at all possible, they could get it put into place.
Once upon a time, it was possible to occupy unclaimed land offshore and found a sovereign nation; that's how the Principality of Sealand was founded, on an abandoned defense platform off the coast of England.
They closed this loophole in 1978 or so, though; now claims must be approved by the nearest neighbour, even if the land is in international waters.
What if the State Department or someone issued an order requiring special dispensation to connect to a specific "pirate" state, much in the way that it is illegal to export web browsers to Libya or Iran? It would be a lot easier to enforce than export restrictions on downloadable software.
If it was illegal for US ISPs to connect to country B, but legal to connect to C, and C allowed connections to B one might be able to get around it. Unless we then made it illegal to connect to C (secondary boycott enforced by our gov't) or banned routing of certain IPs.
The whole point of the treaty scenario is that if C is a signatory and B is not, it will prohibit connections to B; if C is not a signatory, connections to C will be prohibited.
The only thing the gov't could do then is make the penalties so huge (20 year prison sentences) that people wouldn't do it. And many still would. And monitoring/finding everyone doing it is impossible, and any halfway effective attempt is extremely expensive.
It won't be more expensive than finding war3z sites on the web and shutting them down. And if there are a few high-profile examples (multi-million-dollar fines, lengthy prison sentences), that alone will have a persuasive effect on others.
Which means that there's nothing stopping, say, AOL Time Warner from paying someone to sink your data haven in international waters, slaughtering everyone on board in the process. And there are many hired guns who may be willing to do such a job; if one of the South African mercenary contractors won't do it then surely a pirate crew can be found in South East Asia who are not averse to doing a bit of extra work and making a few hundred thousand on the side.
The problem here is that the "offshore" site (non-US, non-EU) must connnect to the rest of the world through some physical connection. That connection is most likely provided by a peering arrangement with one of the global telecomm providers. And there is a major asymmetry of power between the smaller country and the {US,EU}.
So when your posting annoys someone with serious clout, they have a quite chat with the State Department and the interconnecting telecomm player. They in turn have private chats with their peers, and your site disappears. The alternative is for, say, voice service into that country to "stop working" for a few days, until the point gets across.
IMHO the best choice is to set up your own site with a local or regional ISP in your home country, get some legal advice, and fight the battles you need to fight. That's the only way to prevail in the long run.
sPh
Governments in S. America or Africa would probably cave to whatever the FBI wanted with just a phone call.
Better be a country where the US government can't intimidate. Malaysia or Singapore maybe. Or Cuba!
Why didn't I think of that before? Cuba'd be perfect.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
No, 'cause then USSpacecom would zap it with a giant "laser" from one of their killer sattelites.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
It was an American company, no? Which means it was a legal entity incorporated within the US, and therefore subject to US (mostly state-level) authority.
If my "company" has no presence in the US, they can't really do anything.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Well, if you want to criticize China, best to do it in the Us.
If you want to criticize the US...
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I'm not suggesting that China is some great haven for free expression, but their government seems to take great pleasure in (what they percieve to be) anti-capitalist expression such as mp3 trading, linux, etc. The _massive_ HK warez scene operates above ground and unchallenged.
I just got a free webmail account on mol.mn (Mongolia online, in the Mongolian People's Republic), and I am going to try and see of I can get webspace there also specifically for DVCSS-type information.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
There are several members of the EU and each has a seperate legal system. The laws of one do not apply in another.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I sympathize with you.. In addition I am awfully nervous about the recent changes to the Internic's polocy regarding domain names. I feel I own my domain. It would be nice again to feel that I 'own' a peice of cyberspace, and to be assured that content I post there, within my own judgement, isn't going to be censored or abolished because of a different point of view.. I thought that that was one of the principal virtues upon which the Internet was built..
-- NeTMoNGeR
hopefully in the future there will be strong enough interconnection
Really? All I can see is big companies merging with big companies to form bigger companies.
The bigger they get, the harder it is for a new player to come into the market of international backbone connections.
And the fewer players, the easier it is to get denied service.
This is not Fidonet where you could dial another node.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
From WordNet (r) 1.6 [wn]:
liable: subject to legal action; "liable to criminal charges"
libel: a tort consisting of false and malicious publication printed for the purpose of defaming a living person
(This is intended to inform, not complain or ridicule)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I don't think he's skulking off, AFAICT he just doesn't want the ISP pulling the plug at the first sniff of a defamation or copyright lawsuit against themselves.
I don't think the purpose of this Ask is to avoid all responsibility, it's to avoid having the ISP pull the plug at the first sniff of a libel or copyright suit against *them*.
This may be a moot point. I do not know the nature of your specific case, but it seems like if you were running a business in the US you could still be found libel. Hence even if Napster relocated their servers to some obscure island nation, they would still be out of San Mateo and still be in trouble. I seem to recall reading something on this before but can't quite remember. Anyone want to add anything?
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The problem with DCMA kinds of acts is that they make the ISP responsible if they don't "take you down" after getting notified of "copyright violations".
The problem with the internet, whatever method you choose, is that you'll always need an ISP.
Suppose you put your server on a boat in the ocean. You'll need an ISP to hook it up to the internet. THEY have a "home country" and when they get threatened by lawyers talking their legal language, they'll pull your plug really fast, even if you're in international waters. Sure, nobody could sue you in the end, but your ISP IS land-based.
Same holds when you have your own server behind a T1 in your home. Your ISP can still be forced to pull the plug on you. They just firewall off your port 80, and once you move your server, they fireall you off alltogether. Then what?
Roger.
It doesn't matter now in large ways what country you or your site belong to. True true the laws per country say one thing or another about piracy, copywrite, etc. but the simple fact is that Gov'ts and corporations are successfully piercing that veil, stepping over whatever small hurdles may exist. US DVD corps getting legal action against a minor in Norway. FBI involvement in the Phillipino search for the ILY author. Reciprocity of copywrite laws where applicable so that having a US congressional hearing has far reaching consequences outside of the US both for individuals and more importantly for media companies that do business world wide.
Make no mistake about it. Michael Eisner was NOT wrong when he stated publically the the US's #1 export is intellectual property: software, movies, television, music, patents, laws, copywrites. There is enormous pressure both in the US and beyond to support those industries by any legal or quasi-legal means and where no reasonable legal means can be found then a country eg. the Phillipines will specifically request US legal and law enforcement support in order to circumvent the local dearth of US-friendly laws and legislation. The question we should be asking is how does the US government get involved in extra-national law and law enforcement on behalf of one company or another. And in some of these cases the nationality of some of these companies isn't even clear, eg. a European media group doing business in the US getting the Federal gov't to intervene in some other country's law enforcement process when the local law doesn't even cover the specific allegation the US agency wants to pursue??
If you don't like what someone is saying, leave the chat room/message board/etc.Or better yet, oppose them with a better argument. Most people aren't saying things to be offensive, they're saying them because they really believe in them. If you disagree enough to get upset about it, persuade them to change their mind!
A free speech site, huh? Been there, doing that!
Talk to any lawyer (if you're American). The way to go is to create a corporation, not be a non-profit or just a bunch of individuals. That way you and your staff are protected by 'the Corporate Shell'; otherwise it's just your person on the line to face any lawsuits. When you incorporate, you actually 'create' another entity with rights and privaleges called the 'corporation'. Email me if you have more questions.
Oh, and another great group to be a part of is the fabulously de-centralized FreeNet.
And good luck!
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
The US used to fund radio stations shooting anticommunistic propaganda to the Eastern Block back in the days when anonymity was merely a matter of finding a typewriter.
Ha! Where is that "free speech" of capitalists now?!^)
posted with netscape 6pre1
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Consider this a plug for Vince Cate and Offshore Information Services. For a reasonable price, he'll run your webserver and set up your anonymous Anguilla corp. You have to comply by his TOS, but that should be pretty easy if you're not planning to host pr0n or defraud people.
(Disclaimer: Vince is a friend of a friend, so I'm not entirely free of bias here. He renounced his US citizenship a few years ago to make all this easier, which was deemed sufficiently noteworthy that the New York Times ran a piece about it.)
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Unfortunately, Brunei is an Islamic sultanate. Countries where bare arms on women are considered obscene are not likely to be good places to set up uncensored web sites. (Aside from the ethical implications of doing business with countries that treat women like animals.)
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
That's right, the future ;) Checkout "Freenet" on Freshmeant and the homepage, http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ for more info. Freenet is a peer-to-peer network designed to allow the distribution of information over the Internet in an efficient manner, without fear of censorship. It is completely decentralized (there is no person or computer essential to its operation), meaning that Freenet cannot be attacked like centralized peer-to-peer systems such as Napster. Freenet also employs intelligent routing and caching to learn to route requests more efficiently, automatically mirror popular data, make network flooding almost impossible, and move data to where it is in greatest demand.
Ok, here is my plan: Castro is getting old, some one else will have to take over. Why not one of us? (I volunteer to be in charge..) It is only 80 miles from the US, running fiber would be easy. Cuban cigars, illicit data services, it would be great! (And the weather is nice there too I hear) Who's with me?
Then you'll want to read up on the Oceania Project.
They look to create a new country (made out of floating concrete hexagons) near Panama. They've also worked out a very pro-libertarian constitution.
Too bad they don't have nearly enough money to float the first block yet. It could be a good stop-gap measure until we start building space colonies.
Is your only hope to escape any censorship with impunity.
Join freenet and host a freenet server. Then, your information will be distributed via many hosts in a dynamic way.
Use your static server as an index into the freenet content. Let people know what is out there, but dont provide it explicitly on your server(s).
Otherwise, no matter where you are, or what you do, you piss off the wrong people and your site is history. If your lucky that would be the end of it, if not, welcome to big fines and jail time.
Why do you think most major cruise lines have non-US registry, such as Liberia? Liberia is an unmitigated hell-hole on the west coast of Africa, but a lot of fancy ships seem to come from there. Reason? More beneficial laws.
Similar to incorporating in Delaware, I suppose.
How would moving to South Africa solve the problems associated with copyright infringement? South Africa has agreements to protect the copyrights of American companies, otherwise ya'll wouldn't be able to buy your Brittney Spears albums or go see _Battlefield_Earth_ at the theater (when it's released there, that is).
It seems like you'd be banking on teh fact that they'd never get around to prosecuting. Well, in my experience, money changes everything. I think that if MS were sufficiently pissed, a few well placed "political" contributions and the South African Justice system would get its ducks in a row enough to prosecute an enemy of Dollar Bill's. It's not like they'd be asking the government to do anything illegal.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
When Mattel contacted my university, they buckled. So I had to take my mirror of cphack down. So I hosted it at a free website company. First I tried geocities, but they threw me off for 'hacking.' So I went someplace called 50megs.com, where they have yet to give me any trouble.
Check it out at my home page.
Sam TH
Sam TH
AbiWord Developer
The guy was my great-great-...-great uncle, ok?
If he was your great...........uncle, then he wasn't one of your ancestors. One of his siblings was.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It isn't semantics. It's not like a typo. If that was a crime I'd be on death row. It's an outright misrepresentation.
I invented the internet.
I am descended from Captain Kidd.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I see a lot of "host your site in *" posts. Well, no government eyeing the ecommerce pie in the sky wants to look like pirate island to the rest of the world, so a cryptonomiconesqe "crypt" would be too difficult to set up, not to metnion easy to attack (one location). Why not set up a distributed vhosting protocol with freenet-like anonymity? It's harder to track down and sue the owner of a website when the http server is a different box depending on where you connect, possibly even localhost. Also, if this vhttp network had it's own top-level domain, or used httpv or something as the protocol, then we can hack mozilla so that the protocol has it's own DNS that will block ownership seeking lookups, so that if somebody in a third world country wants to combat the goverment-sanctioned death squads by organizing a resistance, the death squad will be SOL. We could just say "use freenet", but the people you're tyring to reach with such messages may be intimidated by even the web, so we have to make it simple for use by anybody.
Possibly, this can be done differently by adding the functionality onto freenet, and have users point to a node for their DNS.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Unfortunatly, the "Constitution Party" looks to be just another group of religious extreamists looking to turn the US into a theocracy.
A quick look through their platform finds they claim the country was founded "under god", and they thank their "lord, Jesus Christ". Also, the claim our contry is based on "biblical law". There goes the First Amendment, except for their freedom to practice their religion. I'd guess they'd be selective about which biblical laws they endorse, too. For instance, do their candidates follow all the biblical dietary laws?
They oppose Roe-vs-Wade, so the 9th and 10th amendments get a selective reading as well.
That's as far as I got, before my disgust overpowered morbid fascination.
I live in the Netherlands and I have connection and a secondary website (apart from my main website in the US) with an ISP that has shown a firm dislike of organizations that try to influence the contents of their user's websites, generally not giving in before seizures and search warrants are actually executed. Among others, they host a lot of anti-Scientology stuff and sponsor radio B-92 over the Internet (radio B-92 is the Yougoslavian opposition radio station).
All the politically correct stuff is on my main website, while stuff like DeCSS resides in the Netherlands. As reverse engineering for interoperability purposes is explicitely legal in the EU, I don't see anyone taking /that/ one down.
AFAIK, the only exception in the EU is the UK, where things seem to be really going wrong, but we're more-or-less used to that and basically ignore them ;-)
Here's a vauge thought: the world is pretty
much divided into people who understand the
importance of free speech, and people who
understand the importance of economic freedom.
So if you decide to try running some sort of
off-shore "data haven", I recommend making sure
that it's also a bank.
Some of the sites I host include:
Key is to know your rights as well as having some money to burn...sadly the more money one has, the easier finding hosting becomes. In regards to location - I find it comical as well as downright scary when I see others advocating that the safer places for hosting is Russia...wow that really goes over the top!! Have things changed that much since the Cold War??
As some other posters have pointed out, while some people here in the U.S. are looking offshore, many people from all around the world host their content on servers in the United States. If a U.S. citizen has to worry about hosting legal, but contraversal, materials on servers here then perhaps it's time for another Revolution.
In regards to your hosting choices:
Verio - Big hosting company (world's largest?). They have numerous divisions and each is somewhat different in what they allow (some allow adult, but most don't) though in general Verio has a hands-off policy.
Valueweb - An economy host. Service is what about what'd you expect for the price. I've hosted protest sites there and never had a problem - I even got a Cease and Desist letter for a site I had hosted there and they kept it running.
Concentric Networks (formerly 9 NetAve) - good rates and decent virtual hosting, but avoid their dedicated hosting since they've had problems. In regards to freedom of speech...many controversal sites are hosted with them...however if a site is adult and/or draws a lot of bandwidth, expect to pay MUCH more. It's too early for me to say how them now being owned by Concentric Networks affects things - so far I've seen no change.
Rackspace - Good service and they generally mind their business and leave the content upto webmasters.
In regards to who to avoid...the free hosting places (Tripod/Geocities, Go Network, etc) as well as small Mom and Pop hosting companies in general since they'll usually cave in quickly since they're often at the mercy of their of their upstream provider(s) as well the owners may have strong personal opinions of their own.
If one is looking offshore, I'd recommend NetNation - many sites, in particular many illicit drug related sites, have moved over to them as a result of the possible passage of the Anti-Meth bill.
Hope this helps...feel free to contact me if you have further questions and/or want to hear my view regarding a particular website you plan to put up.
Ron Bennett
yes, they were in there, but not in the manner they're used today.
The Congress shall have power.. To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
In other words, the constitution only includes patents and copyright to a reasonable, non-unlimited extent, and "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". This isn't what we're complaining about. This is a good thing. What we're complaining about is patents and copyrights used as weapons for corporations to silence individuals, something that was added much, much later, far after the first amendment bits.
What was originally there is more or less to _protect_ people-- i.e. to stop someone from taking the work of others at the expense of the original creator, such as burning 3000 copies of "Dre 2001" and selling them on the street, in which case Dre is in a very real way failing to recieve money that was his due, because 3000 people who would otherwise have bought the album from Dre bought them from the guy on the street. Making the case that the patent/copyright stuff in the constitution was intended to prevent people from taking ideas and concepts from a work and using those ideas and concepts to create a new, independent work, as is done in the case of a parody or the music of Negativland.. well, that doesn't seem to use the same spirit as the parts of the U.S. constitution, seeing as a new work as such would be progress of useful art, and the original creator suffers no loss.
You'll also notice the bits in the original constitution do not contradict free speech, really, and i see NOTHING in there to support the idea of preventing the spread of information-- i.e. preventing information about a technology from being spread. The idea behind the patents was originally to encourage the spread of information-- that in order to convince someone to allow science to progress, they would tell the world how their process worked, and in return would be granted a limited-time monopoly on that process. The idea that something like the DMCA could prevent someone from spreading information they found independantly about a process-- say, cyberpatrol's encryption scheme-- is completely antithetical to the original idea of a patent and what the constitution says, even if the information about said process is in a language other than English (say, C++..)
You'll also note the "for limited times" bit. Current copyright/patent laws extend far, far past the useful lifespan of the ideas they encompass, and the lifespan of a copyright seems to get longer every time that the date of the expiration of Mickey Mouse's copyright comes within the forseeable future. You think it will _ever_ be legal for me to distribute a Legend of Zelda 1 ROM, no matter how long i live and no matter how many years have passed since Nintendo has gotten a penny from that game? Ha.
So yeh, copyrights and patents do predate free speech in U.S. law to an extent, but not in any manner that is antithetical to the idea of free speech.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
A ship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.
Seems there is a loophole - transfer of ownership. I.e. a few guys selling the ship to each other. And you don't have to do this too often, it takes some time for a country to put real pressure on the government of your "convenience country."
..someone building a platform in international waters and running a bunch of high-speed i-net lines to it from several different countries and then offering free, anonymous access
Note that this don't guarantee free speech, your webpages are at the mercy of the owner of this installation instead of some government.
The problem is exactly the same - what if I want to publish something extremely nasty about the platform owner and/or his sponsors? Or publish "how to make a homing torpedo using junkyard parts."
They are probably not real idealists if they can raise money enough for such an operation.
Well, since one can generally spray pirates off your rig with a nice powerful fire hose and most rigs are equipped with such hoses (they drill oil, it's a hazard) I don't think it's a problem.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Try the Netherlands.
Contrary to English law, there is no law which make webproviders liable for the content they host.
I have one word for you. NORIEGA.
--Charlie
i've been saying this for a while.
effectively a wan,
over our own hardware/fiber,
and/or connected to the regular net,
but all running encrypted traffic.
a limited number of controlled interconnect points.
cost is an issue on any hardware,
as would be security on an open source option,
since the decryption routines would be visible to all.
has anyone heard of any projects like this?
i'd seen one a whiel ago, but i think it died.
-tk
-Tannin Kal
http://www.strongnet.co.nz control the rights to the .cx (Christmas Island) domain. You might want to have a word with them. Tell 'em Suz & Vik sent ya.
:v)
Vik
I never saw the point in this. Yeah, the *concept* of a libertarian state/data haven is very strong, but why spend $1 billion to build something that floats? There are tons of tiny little countries that are poor but own hundreds of islands. Just go to one of them, offer them a couple million dollars for an uninhabited island of a few square miles, and secede from their country (with their permission). Declare yourself a new country, in possession of dirt. If you need more space, buy a couple more islands - they don't even have to be in the same ocean.
Hosting overseas, say, on an island that doesn't recognize US law may not help you at all.
If you live in the US, and you are the owner of a web site, it really doesn't matter where you host it. If you are making the stuff available to Americans, and you yourself are in America, you are accountable for your actions under american law. Perhaps the US courts can not force the overseas provider to yank the page, but they can force YOU to yank the page (or go to prison for violating a court order)
Think tax evasion. You start up an offshore company to keep your holdings. A very *VERY* important part of this process is making sure that the offshore company can *NOT* be tied back to you!
Actually... bans on spam rarely went beyond the 2nd level provider. Major backbones were not in a position to ban spam, as far as I know. They charged by the byte, and were dealing with lots of money. To this day, you still can't complain to MCI because some 3rd level provider beneath them is spamming. They don't care.
Generally, first level providers care (your ISP), and second levels MIGHT care (large ISP)...
Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission.
And just because the CRTC isn't going to regulate it, doesn't mean sites can't be regulated. There is a difference between laws and regulation.
Regulation serves to make sure something stays usable and good for all people (ie: without telco regulation.. telco's would NEVER have been where they are today.)
With Internet, there is not need to regulate.
If you use your site to do something illegal, it *can* be shut down. It is merely an insturment of your own actions.
a project to build a mobile libertarian haven
What makes you think it's going to be a libertarian haven? From what I've seen, this looks like a overpriced floating combination of a rich folks retirement home and a time-share condo complex.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The government don't own the skies, you could host your servers in a balloon!
--
RumorsDaily
Everyone else in the world is moving their censored web sites INTO the USA.
Also remember anon.penet.fi the anonymous remailer service. In the relatively free land of Linus and Nokia and saunas, the US government was unable to get the service provider to cut them off. But the US government was able to get an Interpol search warrant to get information on alleged child pornographers who were allegedly being shielded by the service. The Finnish police stormed in and anon.penet.fi was history. As I remember, the guy who administered the server, later wrote that the server had become way too much trouble for him, and who can blame him. Nobody, anywhere in the world has set up an easy to use public anonymous remailer since.
You can still be shut down by your DSL service provider in the same way that your web host provider can shut you down. Nothing has changed.
Remember how in the old days, the internet was designed to discourage spam/commercial activity. When you got internet access, you promise not to do a bunch of things. One of them is spam so let's use spam as an example. The penalty for sending spam is that you get your service pulled and your account terminated. Your service provider had the same kind of contract with it's service provider. If your service provider allows it's customers to spam then it's service provider can cut it off. This continues down the line to the backbones. They have the same kind of contract. The agreement states that they will exchange data as long as there is no spam. The penalty for a backbone allowing it's customers to spam is that the other backbones will cut them off, they will not exchange data.
Remember the Spam King and the Ageis network? The Spam King became his own service provider connected directly to the Ageis backbone. It seemed like an ideal solution. The problem was that all the other backbones threatened to cut off Ageis' access to their backbones. Ageis was forced to pull the plug on the Spam King even though they didn't want to. If the other backbones had cut them off, they would have gone out of business.
Think about this globally. The US can pass a law that the US backbones cannot exchange information with "rogue networks," networks that don't follow US law. The US can pass a law that they will not trade with countries that don't pass similar laws. The UK can do the same. Pretty soon, there is no where to go.
If you don't think that this can be done, remember that until very recently, the US phone networks were prohibited from connecting to the Cuban phone network so you couldn't easily make a phone call from the US to Cuba. Yes, I know that the internet has obvious ways to route around this kind of block but big governments can put a lot of pressure on service providers.
Remember that service providers are corporations. Like it or not, they are amoral. Their loyalty is to shareholders not to your freedom of speech. If the CEO of a corporation puts your freedom of speech above shareholder value, he can be sued and he will certainly loose his job.
That wouldn't last long.
http://www.offshore.ai/ offers offsite hosting on some former british territory...also lots of banking services...
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
I think the market would be considerable, to say the least. I know I'd pay gladly for freedom of speech. Lord knows we don't have it here.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
To make an analogy, the separatists who formed this country didn't have freedom until they won.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Then sit back and enjoy the ensuing show as more than a handful of people realize what we have done!
--
The Speedy Viking
The Speedy Viking
For US citizens, paying a Cuban entity to host your web site is probably a violation of the embargo act. If the point is to avoid legal trouble, I don't think Cuba is the way to go.
I was interested in the tax benefits of off shore companies and IIR its perfectly legal to create an off-shore shell corporation (as long as you report all earning to the IRS). Many countries do not require you disclose the owners of the country nor do they make them public (which is a big attraction for many people).
Some of these countries don't even require your name to setup the company - just a legal contact who can be a local lawyer. These shell companies can then get ISP space in that country and serve web pages. The local lawyer will also (for a fee of course) forward all of your snail mail back to the US so you have an instant foreign headquarters.
A US company could sue you, a US resident, as an officer of the company but they have no way to determine who you are or what country you belong to. I read an article about sex.com, which was stolen from someone else. The domain is worth hundreds of millions so naturally they are trying to get it back - but sex.com was sold to an offshore company which is believed to be owned by the same guy - but no one except the IRS can prove it. I don't know if there are any procedures for getting at IRS records - but I would suspect they are very hard to obtain.
Of course this is all from my very limited knowledge... My research was targeted at legal activity and what you are proposing is semi-legal to illegal. Some of these countries have laws that allow them to disvolve companies and seize bank accounts from known drug trafficers and other illegal types.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I wrote a discussion on how one might do anonymous/untraceable publishing on the internet:
http://jonathanclark.com/diary/anonpub/
I wasn't aware of freedom net at the time, but they use many of the same ideas. They do not do publishing (i.e. only outgoing connections) mainly for fear of legal problems.
Another method I've seen tossed around is to use redirecting proxy servers where URLs look like this:
http://site1.com/XXX
where XXX decrypts to -> http://site2.com/YYY and
YYY decrypts to http://site3.com/actual_content.html
The only trouble is getting people to run the proxy servers.
One other idea I have played around with is to use spoofied ping packets to transfer content semi-anonymously. It work by the connecting party somehow requesting the content and the posting their IP address. Then you, the server, send it to some random machine on the internet inside of a ping packet with a spoofed return address to them. This can be used to make the chain of computers between you and them very long - also making it travel through countries that are hard to get search warrents.
The main problem is making the initial request, but that could be done with a Gnutella like network.
The other problem here is the receiving computer needs to somehow specifiy which packets weren't received (because ping is lossy).
food for thought...
-- Virtual Windows Project
In the US constitution there is a specific clause that allows the government to hire pravateers (read Pirates) in times of war to sabotage, steal from, harrass, etc... the enemy...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
If you do choose the route to go, make sure you are very careful about where you choose to host things. There was a site not too long ago that rebroadcasted television across the internet. Even though they were based on Canada, the US govt was able to go after them because he intially registered his domain in the US, even though he aparently never ran it from the US.
--- My novel, The Mummy's Girl is now for sa
Why bother so much with a satellite link to international waters. Just launch your own satellite and put the stuff there. I guess space is just as international as oceans...
Of course, it might still be illegal for you to place the material on the satellite (for example sending cryptography material from the US)...
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Very interesting ideas, Jonathan. I'm sure you'll soon be getting visits from the guys in dark suits soon. :)
I was thinking the way to distribute data over multiple servers and keep track of connectivity information, and handle all the decryption and forwarding http connections would be to have a (possibly somewhat hacked) Apache with a MySQL or other database to hold the bits of distributed data and the database of other peer/servers, along with Mod_Perl or PHP to assemble web pages and do searches and such.
Sounds kind of like slashdot, which makes me wonder if the answer to Slashdot's copyright problems is some sort of anonymous encryption-based distributed slashdot. Makes me want to take a look at Slashcode and see what I could cook up...
In fact, setting an off-shore web site might be a violation of the DMCA. After all, setting an off-shore web site is a way to circumvent copyright protections... isn't it?
I generally find that the mere threat of lint is enough to frighten off most navel forces. Although when you're a small fleshy cavity, you can't apply much force anyway...
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
> Of course, that would be far to expensive, like they said, and someone would probably
> get ticked off enough eventually to go blow it up.
I'm sure that sooner or later, people will be willing to listen to Reason.
I wonder if setting up a satellite-based ISP on a boat or something in international waters would work. Basically a big floating server farm, with high-speed satellite links. If the Simpsons has taught me anything (and it has), it's that anything is legal in international waters :)
Make sure your ship is not flying the flag of any nation you might offend (or the enemy of any nation you might offend.)
However unlike the old pirate radio ships you'd be relying on a third party for the satellite link and if you did annoy a nation with a half decent navy some anti-ship missiles & torpedos might be needed.
Not to mention since our blatantly telling the Govt. to shove it your in international waters I doubt they are going to be in a big hurry to save/help you when some pirates realise the value of the equipment onboard.
Hence the need to have something which can defend itself. Which isn't going to be cheap. (Also need to make sure that the satillite links interoperate with the radar systems.) Pirates are going to be easier to scare away than a navel force.
Pirates still do exist. (dont go sailing in the south pacific with out many many guns).
Radar and missiles wouldn't go amiss either.
Cool. I'll build a weapons platform with a (well advertised) nuke on it! If anyone dares to attack, they'll take heavy losses. If they succeed, their prize will be nuked as will any nearby vessels.
That just leaves any state with long range missiles and bombers...
Are there any oil rigs near the many underwater communications cables strung across the oceans?
A gas plantform is probably a better option than an oil platform. AFAIK there are no generators which run on crude oil, whereas gas powered ones are commercially available.
Unfortunately, the "pirates" in this situation may not be interested in claiming your station, just stopping it broadcasting/relaying information, and so might just torpedo it from a safe distance...
Difficult to fire a torpedo by "accident", however all sorts of things, including bombs have been known to fall off aircraft.
Using Prisoner's handy dandy Internet guide, you too can be free of the pesky bludgeon of Big Business (tm) (c)! Just follow these easy, painless steps, and you will soon be an Internet Liberator:
/.
1) Join an IRC server and make many friends in the Silicon Valley.
2) Learn inside information from said friends about the companies they crac... umm, are subcontracted by.
3) Use said information to make a killing as an eTrade/Datek/[insert online brokerage here] Day Trader (tm).
4) Take that fortune and set up the infrastructure of your very own ISP, backbone and all!
5) Buy all the Linux servers you can afford.
6) Donate money to the EFF.
7) Make sure you publicize all of the above on
8) Sit back and earn the praise and respect of the online community, not only for your benevolence, but for sticking it to Big Business (tm) (c)!
Be the first on your block to save the Internet! ACT NOW and get a free Linux drink coaster at NO EXTRA CHARGE!!
Don't you think it's sad that somebody in the US has to go someplace in order to get free speech? Just goes to show you how bad things have become in the former land of the free.
Ironically your best bet will be to go to china, russia or some other country that we used to think of as opressive.
War is necrophilia.
Better yet, throw a server up _on_ a satellite.. Lets see them cut that off.. :)
A dining cryptographer network allows you to communicate data without anyone being able to determine where the data is coming from.
It does require sharing a lot of bandwidth.
However it seems like some Gnutella like clone with a dining cryptographer based protocol would be a very useful tool for free speech. Then you only need servers operating in LAND based countries.... Get enough of them and since no-one knows where the data is actually coming from, no-one can attack it...
It would help to have laws that made it hard for the local governments to attack a website participating in such a network based on the fact that there is absolutely no evidence that any given site is hosting the data.
While you might lose some servers in the less free countries, if you have randomized replication, and multiple countries involved, you'd have a very robust information service.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Computers run better when they are cold, so why dosn't Greenland, Norway, or some other cold climent country make a good buck by hosting illegal stuff?
I just put them in my Hall of Shame.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A lot of those changes have been extremely positive.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
That's why you register with one of the flag of convience countries. You know those little Carribean nations that do little but serve as banking havens and such (the Caymans jump to mind).
Well here's a couple solutions for some of those problems. Set up a large greenhouse and grow your own food. Set up solar panels and wind rotors to get your own power (with some backups of course). There are all kinds of companies supplying this kind of equipment for not that much of a investment. Orbital recorded a entire album using solar power to run all the equipment. As for water and storms drilling rigs today support all kind of computer for running things. I'm sure they have some kind of way to deal with the problems. It would just be a matter of finding out (any offshore oil drillers in the audience care to speak up).
And if your worried about being attacked or harrassed you can always broadcast what is happening to you over your connection (unless it gets taken out). You could do the same with a ship. Bruce Sterling talked about a ship with these kinds of ideas (free food and energy, etc) in a short story called Green Hills of Brunie (I know I misspelled that). Get enough bandwith and you could also be looking at setting up a service like the Crypt in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (you ever notice how some of the great ideas are covered in so called "escapist" [Sci-Fi] writing?).
I hope that someone does put this into effect. And I'm hoping I can get a job with them.
Instead of an island, what about an old oil rig in, say, the Gulf of Mexico? As long as it's farther than 12 miles offshore, you're in international waters. You've got to worry about storms, but you can always buy insurance for that. Sure, it's far-fetched, but it would be a blast to build.
However, they couldn't be considered to be in any shape or form "floating" - they are solidly attached to the seabed that is only a few meters deep at that point :+)
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Hmm. I always thought it was so they could keep their tankers running about when they amount to rust & string & several million barrels of crude... The Americans have actual safety regs for ships that want American registration I believe...
Intolerant people should be shot.
After the Neckerberry bushess on it, didnt anyone see the 99 sports illustrated swimsuit zine? It had an added bonus as an article on Richard Branson. That dude is very very cool and i wouldnt be suprised if he pulled something like that, virgin has plans to put mp3s on their websites as it is. Hire me as your network admin Richard, I couldnt think of any better job in the world. :)
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
How is Jay Stile able to host porn and scat on his site without it getting shut down? Does he hide it on a obscure server in russia or what? On another note why hasnt anyone come up with something the equivelant of fidonet or wwivnet in a style like freenet where you could pull documents (compressed websites packages in tgz even) anonymously over email or whatnot from obscure servers hosted off inexpensive machines (386 or 486). Itd be an incredibly lengthy information exchange but it would work on VERY cheap hardware (practically free) it would allow free speech to enter very restricted countries and be very difficult to censor. Ok, thats just my wishlist.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Threats from Black Beard aside (I refuse to make the computer/piracy joke - c'mon trolls), what about the conditions? I'll be the first to admit I know nothing about houseboats, but how far out can you go before you're in international waters, and how far out can you go before it becomes dangerous?
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Well, you could build yourself a freenet-to-web gateway, & host it on freenet ( http://freenet.sourceforge.net ) and then no one could ever tell you to take it down. :)
--Remove chicken to e-mail
I'm not sure if someone is already doing this (gnutella?) but what we need is a RAID5 of webservers, i.e. you download a java applet which then contacts n servers, each server only has a part of the data, the applet uses these parts to reconstruct the original webpage, thus shutting down any one server doesn't affect content, indeed no server actually carries all the content. As one gets shutdown, a "hotspare" automatically starts up and reconstructs its part of the data from the remaining webservers.
...is that they suck. Hopping the pond on either side of us incurrs 100ms of latency, and if you have to hop a sattelite link, you're looking at 500+ms. All the time. Internet around the world just isn't up to snuff compared to what we have in the US right now (at least connecting from the US->the rest of the world and vice versa). So be aware you're going to take a performance hit when you more offshore.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
I understand very well your want to evade stupid laws and have your life and the life of your site remain hassle free. Unfortunately, however, this thread itself suggests that there are very few places left to run to for the kind of freedom we want.
If we continue running to the fewer and fewer places on this planet, we are reneging our rights as citizens of "free" countries. This is wrong and we should not allow it. We should stand up for our rights now, while we have the background and the gumption to do so. Running will only insure that our respective governments can continue to limit our options until we have none left.
-Marcella
That's an interesting idea, but it does seem to be security through obscurity to me. :)
Another idea is to assemble a group of trusted hosts, with all traffic stopped by firewalls, keeping inbound traffic only from other trusted hosts.
In effect, you'd have your own network within the internet, about as secure as it could be. This way, unauthorized access would be near impossible. If you wanted to host important, sensitive, or controversial traffic, it wouldn't be open to inquisitive eyes.
Since all data is for internal purposes only, there's no reason not to use strong encryption. Even if someone did happen to intercept a packet, it would be useless to them.
Of course, if you want to host open information, the gopher idea is workable. Most people have never even heard of gopher, so they wouldn't know to look there if they were trying to cause trouble.
The fact that the idiots who make policy for the government with regard to computers seem to favour making it a crime to publish information on computer crime i.e. publishing on the internet the fact that a security hole exists in their OS would be a crime, as well as extending laws for the criminal acts themselves. (Of course it is explicitly legal to tell somebody, or to print in a newspaper that a security hole in said OS exists).
These suggested reforms don't seem to have anything to do with events in New Zealand, but are driven by US and other countries policies.
They seem to favour a situation which ensures nobody in this country actually knows anything about their computers, and then makes them responsible for using them intelligently.
Why don't we just unplug them all, go back to the farm and fuck sheep until our economy corrodes away to nothing, and then our entire country can be bought by some giant US corporation. Yeah, thatd be great.
Of course its in the US's best interests to bog down everyone else in restrictive 'digital copyright' and 'computer crime' laws, while their own government departments openly flout all of them under the auspices of 'National Security'.
And of course US 'National Security' extends to every other country in europe and the pacific where Echelon etc. exists.
This is like the US-led WTO calling for 'Free Trade' and then generously subsidising it's industries so they can compete.
This is like the US demand for India and Pakistan to lay down their nuclear arms when they happily point their enormous nuclear arsenal at Russia.
If our government wasn't so deluded, then maybe this country might stand a chance of benefiting from the IT revolution, instead of being trampled into the mud, like every other small country by the US.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Excuse my speach, but FUCK that! If your loosing your rights of free speech, then you NEED to make a stand. Maybe it IS time for another revolution. Not that Im in favor of it, revolutions always suck and people get hurt, but if you cant speak your own mind it's time to rid ourselves of the new menace as we did Hitler. It use to be you had to fight to prove something shouldnt be free of speech and you notmal lost, now it's a given that it isnt free speech and you have to fight to the contrary and normaly lose. It's time for something to happen thats for damn sure!
I'm still trying to figure out if this is a "Snow Crash" reference?? :) --Ben
"AOL, CIA, NSA, whatever, they all collect information, and they are all out to screw the american public"
Wouldn't it be ironic if, in order to protect things like free speech and free enterprise, sites had to move to places like Russia (perceived lack of free speech) and China (haven for software [etc] piracy). Wouldn't it be ironic if sites had to flee the US, with it's supposed protection of free speech, open enterprise, and innovation. Oh the irony...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The idea of a floating island or a boat city or something is very sexy, I agree. Unfortuantly it is very expensive and hard to maintain. Can you imagine the logistics of trying to keep a structure big enough to hold 10k people floating? It would also be difficult because of it's size, it'll be more prone to being destroyed by weather, so it will always be on the move so it's ahead of some squall or hurricane. Plus you have to worry about data connections because since it is not a solid land mass, you cannot have undersea cables. Then there is getting fresh water, maintance, danger of submarines, mad bombers who can attach a small bomb to the hull, etc. There are too many problems with the idea.
The best idea is to buy an island. There are quite a few people on this board who make very good money. We can start our own island, our own government, and we can do things right this time. We can have true democracy through technology, instead of having representatives who don't represent the American people, they just represent whatever companies give them a nice chunk of change.
Check out my site at http://www.techendeavors.com because I have put a lot of brainstorming into this idea. I have an island picked out, estimates of costs, some ideas on transportation, tax, legal, and governmental systems. There is a message board so you can leave comments.
tasty and delicious
I quote:
1. Ships shall sail under the flag of one State only and, save in exceptional cases expressly provided for in international treaties or in this Convention, shall be subject to its exclusive jurisdiction on the high seas. Aship may not change its flag during a voyage or while in a port of call, save in the case of a real transfer of ownership or change of registry.
2. Aship which sails under the flags of two or more States, using them according to convenience, may not claim any of the nationalities in question with respect to any other State, and may be assimilated to a ship without nationality.
That is from section VII of the United Nations publication on the law of the sea. Check out the entire law archive at http://www.un.org/Depts/los/unclos/ closindx.htm
tasty and delicious
Unauthorized broadcasting from the high seas
1. All States shall cooperate in the suppression of unauthorized broadcasting from the high seas.
2. For the purposes of this Convention, "unauthorized broadcasting" means the transmission of sound radio or television broadcasts from a ship or installation on the high seas intended for reception by the general public contrary to international regulations, but excluding the transmission of distress calls.
3. Any person engaged in unauthorized broadcasting may be prosecuted before the court of:
4. On the high seas, a State having jurisdiction in accordance with paragraph3 may, in conformity with article110, arrest any person or ship engaged in unauthorized broadcasting and seize the broadcasting apparatus.
To read more, check out the UN's internation maritime law conference section at http://www.un.org/Depts/los/unclos/ closindx.htm
tasty and delicious
Artificial islands, installations and structures do not possess the status of islands. They have no territorial sea of their own, and their presence does not affect the delimitation of the territorial sea, the exclusive economic zone or the continental shelf.
Basically what I am saying is that they do not have to treat you with 'kid gloves' like most countries treat other countries. They won't hold back or care about protocol.
tasty and delicious
The problem with Geosync is the latency. Due to speed of light limitations, a point-to-point connection between to locations on earth, going through a geosync satellite is at least 500ms.
If there's no earth-sat-earth, but simply earth-sat connection you still have a 250ms latency.
The other problem of course, is the actual setting up of the web farm. If you are simply relaying through the sat, you still have all the jurisdiction problems. If you have the web farm on board, then you have the costs of building it, rad hardening it (not a minor cost), and acutally finding someone to launch it (I suspect you'd have to use SeaLaunch... I doubt that NASA or ArianeSpace would launch for you). This is a capital investment of several tens of millions of dollars, possibly more.
A nice idea, but highly impractical.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Various countries are fine about this.
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
I suggest St Helena/Ascension to reg' the ship. They're "kinda" British, but not quite, so the flag is a flag of convienience. Also, if you station yourself there, Ascension has this really fat pipe...
Failing that, simply get a load of flags, and decide which one to use, depending on where you are and who is bothering you.
Remember Radio Carolina?
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Powered by potatos... :)
I vote along with what another person said --
paraphrased: "the enemy of your enemy is your friend"
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Surely the good ppl of Cuba or China wouldn't object to a little "Bash the American Corporation, morality and ethics" angle. :-)
If it's liberalism your looking for, try out Amsterdam (Holland).
If it is complete freedom, then get some friends together and buy a small Island in the Pacific...
Then again, seeing as the US and Western Europe are democracies, then surely they should be working for the people...
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
I've followed some of the comments here, and would like to make some observations. I have extensive experience in hosting servers in Taiwan, and have been involved in projects in several other countries (HK, PRC, Philippines, Singapore, etc.).
1) It is not necessary for one of the Major Powers to cut Internet connectivity to your offshore host. It is merely necessary for your host organization to consider (by themselves, or with outside prodding) the consequences of having their net connection shut off. Your host organization will probably decide that your business is not worth the potential consequences.
2) With development comes stricter IP laws. The old pirate havens of Korea, Taiwan, and Hongkong have all been pressured very hard (and effectively!) to enforce IP in their territories. Other countries (Indonesia comes to mind) are still something of a piracy haven, but acquiring bandwidth will be difficult, and I don't know if I would want to host a "free speech" site in a country with a two-year history of multi-party democracy.
3) Banking privacy and copyright are two different sets of laws. I would be wary of current or former British colonies. Most have rather nasty "prior restraint" laws which could complicate your life.
4) Other things to look at are the existence (and viability of) libel/slander laws, etc. These are much more commonly used in most of the overseas territories I've had the pleasure of living or traveling in.
5) There was a wonderful site on the web for several years at taxbusters.org which offered services to get numbered bank accounts, second passports, etc. The owner of the site always seemed to have trouble keeping his site hosting, no matter what exotic corner of the world the server was parked in.
6) Most importantly, prepare for sticker shock. Dedicated T1 connectivity gets very expensive (i.e. around US$60-70,000/month) when you're almost anywhere in Asia. I can't speak for other parts of the world.
In summary, I'm not very optimistic about this avenue of exploration, but wish you all the best just the same.
j.
If I actually do as I propose, and host a site in a country which truly values free speech, I'll definitely have to "break the link" to my U.S. origins.
I'll probably just open a shell corp in Anguilla (for US $200), which won't require me to register the board of director's names. With that, I'll have a moderately secure blanket of obfuscation.
Not to mention since our blatantly telling the Govt. to shove it your in international waters I doubt they are going to be in a big hurry to save/help you when some pirates realise the value of the equipment onboard.
I assume you mean "Distraction". I enjoyed it pretty much; it's not everyday you read a SF novel whose "hero" is a ... political campaign organizer. ;^) Also, I enjoyed some of the technology described, such as the self-organizing distributed-labor auto-building houses (sounds weird, but is cool), and of course the throw-away cell phones. Ah, a link to Amazon, perhaps: right here. Remember: you don't have to buy it there...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
Here's a simple solution, how about a throwaway ISP. You can easily start a corporation which gives you the same liability limitations the big dogs get: do what you want, no one will take your personal stuff - unless its a worker's comp suit. If and when the big lawsuit eliminates your company, call it quits and backup all the data to be sent to the next throwaway ISP.
In the downtime users could get a lot of sympathy off-shore mirror servers until they find another throwaway ISP. There's even the small possibility that after enough censored ISPs are taken down it might raise public awareness on the issue.
Lets assume that we don't even need a country. Let's say you build some platform out in the middle of the ocean and offer co-location services on it for people. The machines are actually in international waters and therefore not under any jurisdiction. Theoretically, the government shouldn't be able to touch it. However, where are you getting your connection from? The line has to be running somewhere, and it's most likely somewhere that has very real laws (whether just ones or not). Some might suggest using wireless/satellite connections as well, but the people/companies who own those infrastructures are just as restricted. The only way to get an Internet that is truly free of laws of any form is to create an infrastructure that is independent of corporations and companies. If each individual who connects to the Internet owns their infrastructure, then the entire Internet would be owned by the people. As it is, the physical aspects that make up the Internet (the lines, switches, routers, fiber, and backbones) are owned by governments or corporations.
That is an optimistic point of view, but hey, it's just an idea.
Here are a few reasons:
1) AFAIK there are few laws here regarding the Internet related things. Child pornography is the only one they come down hard on.
2) Even if there were, our Law Enforcement groups are so useless that the only crime rate that is on the decline are traffic violations, which they are coming down hard on.
3) Free speech is very well protected here, especially in relation to our political past.
4) There are a few companies that will host your domain and give you self administration for a very low cost - for less than US$50 per month for 10Mb hosting. This price is dropping as our currency declines along with the situation in Zimbabwe.
The reason I say you'll sacrifice speed is because we still have a monopolistic Telco, and bandwith is _EXTREMELY_ expensive. It will change in the next fews years though...
--- Brian the Wise Friend to Small Fury Animals Everywhere...
Was it always a scam? Or was it a couple of well-intentioned guys who didn't have a clue what they were into? Not sure.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
sorry, i was unclear. the problem is government really CAN influence ISPs - there are certain laws that exist but nobody really follows them because of different reasons. it is ok while you are ok, otherwise this is easily used aginst you to influence/shutdown your activity. .ru
the same holds for tax laws in
no-no, no russian componies... they are ok so far. But... there's such thing as SORM-2 (that's russian abbreviation for special searching and investigation activities). SORM-1 included phone tapping and such stuff during soviet years. Now here is SORM-2 which is about to become a law (or already is). To put it simple it suggests that each ISP should have a dedicated line to FSB/FAPSI (special presidential information agency) to allow certain authorities control/check content flowing thru that ISP. Of course between makin a law and it's realisation in .ru there is huge distance... So for now it's ok, but who knows what will happen next years. I wouldn't rely on current situation.
What this reminds me of, is the James Bond movie with the oil rig. Why not just build a drilling rig in international waters, armed to the teeth, with triple-redundancy systems that is completely self-sustainable? now THAT would be cool. ;)
Hey - I just wanted to post exactly the same message!!!
How much does it cost to send a potato-driven web-server, a bunch of potatoes and some kind of parabolic antenna to the moon?
Seriously: Would the person who connects this moon-based web-server to the internet be responsible for the contents of that web-server?
Just a guess, but what about all these tax heavens? Bahamas, Virgin Islands, ... Surely they allow any money in and out they could allow any packet in and out too!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
I live in Venezuela and police doesn't even know what computers are. We don't even have an internet related law, even though there is good internet infraestructure
People here are suggesting that it would be cool to make some server farm in the middle of the ocean, or in africa/asia away from the nasties of stupid western politics.
I think this is a cool idea -- but people seem to forget that even ISP's have ISP's, and to if you set up your data haven you will need to buy bandwidth off someone, and to even survive you will need mega-bandwidth, and im sure MCI or Sprint or who ever you get your bandwidth off would have no problems disconnecting you if they got a cease-and-desist letter from someone in the right places.
Of course there are cool ways around this that I like to fantasise about, such as setting up a server with a large number of upstream providers (ie. 50+), and using IP tunnels to make the packets harder to track down, and then setting up a per connection round robin scheme to help smear your network topology... But to do that sort of thing you would need lots of money, lots of disparate points of presence and some smarty pants network engineers...
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The reason so much legislation and so many court decisions seem to tilt toward various large corporations is that they have enjoyed a "high tech halo effect," in which they have received credit for the "New Economy." This halo effect exists even though, like most Slashdoters, I disagree that they deserve this credit
Therefore, they have been able to go to court or to lobby Congress, stating that promoting their interests therefore benefits the economy. Congressmen are able to proclaim these companies' virtues on news shows while talking heads have been able toconceala their techno-ignorance by praising them.
Therefore, the recent drop of tech stocks in the NSADAQ, (see, e.g., this article which cites a change in psychology concerning tech stocks, portend much.
It simply will become harder and harder for various lawyers, courts, pundits, etc., credibly to claim the current "prosperity" results from these companies, hence their intellectual propeerty and other interests need to be bolstered.
In the long run, therefore, these intellectual property and other assaults on free speech should weaken.
An easy way round the problem you mentioned would be that one transports the equipment needed to build something that is big enough and floats to international waters and assembles it there. No registration, no laws..
And unlike goverments, large corporations can be multinational. They can assert causes of actions from local subsidiaries or divisions.
Any webhosting company, anywhere in the entire world, when given a choice between fighting a costly lawsuit and cutting off a site, has a very strong incentive to cut off that site.
To people who say "run your own web host", apply all the above to "net connection provider".
Welcome to what happens when megacorporations woke up to the Net.
I've been looking at the Constitution Party as a way of defending my inalienable rights. The Constitution the way the framers intended it, without all the undue restrictions and alterations the past 200 years have added. Freedom is good.
Constitutionally Correct
I did say undue restrictions and alterations. State election of senators seems a good idea to make the federal gov't more responsive to the states it's supposedly comprised of. I don't remember ever learning that's how it was originally done, and I'd be really interested to learn why it was changed. I've never agreed with the concept of income tax. I think many of the federal agencies that run our lives today are in violation of the 10th Amendment, which reserves rights not specifically outlined for the states.
Due process and the others you mention are all good things. But the gov't has enacted quite a few changes that are just as equally bad, IMO.
I knew as soon as I posted the message that someone was going to take it out of context. :-S
Constitutionally Correct
I have to say, why geographically close to the US? after all the Web is global... As for a suitable country how about Brunei? They've got lots of money, and they are also reasonably up to date on technology as well.
Do people really read these?
When the first link is forged, when the first man's speach is quieted, when the first man's freedom taken, it forges the chain which damns us all.
I can't remeber who said that, but unforantly in the land of the free, this is becomeing a reality. But as history has shown over and over people will not stand for this, and they will have their day. This stuff with Napster, DVD,etc, reminds of early christins, they killed Jesus, and many other people thinking that would quiet them, but it did not, all happened is the outrage caused them to grow stronger, gave them a will to fight. Every time one person was quited, everone else just spoke louder, until they where so loud it was impossible to quiet them and everyone heard the message, and then the powers that tried to quiet them could only surrender for there was no way to win.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
For the record, copyright and patents are part of the original constitution. Free speech did not show up until constitution rev. 1.1.
Can I sue resume spidering job boards that republish my resume without my permission?
Can I sue search engines? Do the results of crawlers and indexes count as republishing my content without my permission?
Mike Caprio, mikecap@nospamldbw.com
Mike Caprio, mikecap@nospamworld.stdspam.com
Digital Renaissance Man - Writer, Coder, & Artist
-Pissed off company pays off politician
-Politician whispers to Admiral
-Submarine finds 'annoying free speech ship'
-Headlines next day: Floating Server Farm Sinks After Mysterious Explosion!
Give up all hope for freedom! Big business has succeeded in killing the bill of rights. Rather cheaply too. All done with a little piece of paper that installs the fear or reprisials if the individual doesn't to the "corporate line". The fear has started and will only grow.
Pretty Much once you get out of the Reach of any particular country on the sea, any thing still goes. Even if you dont get out of boundaries as long as you keep skipping between countries you should be fine. Unfortunately there is also a good chance you can be killed. You see the laws that would allow you to do this(or the lack there of anyways) are the same that still allow Pirates. And Yes. Pirates still do exist. (dont go sailing in the south pacific with out many many guns). Since authority ends at the border of their jurisdiction all Pirates have to really do is jump around between borders or in water that no one owns.
You can Also use this rule to go smoke pot, drink beer etc... If your country doesnt allow it (If your in california get a boat.. Sail just beyond the boundaries and smoke till your content. Just get rid of it all befor eyou come back cause the coast guard can bust you if they know you got it and your on their territory.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Btw, Brits - yours isn't that much better - sure it is better, no doubt...but....wellll....too many glue-sniffers, etc, so don't get cocky :)
Eh? Glue sniffers? Sure there are glue sniffers at schools around the UK, but there weren't any in my school, and probably not in most. Methinks you are putting your own country in the way of an open mind, but I could be wrong.
Great ! Does this mean that I can be rude about Dr Godfrey on a server somewhere in the USA, and get all trans-atlantic comms revoked ?
I could probably sell that idea to the Academie Francaise, as a means of stopping American cultural imperialism
Your best bet is to find a host who agrees with your views.
Second best, find someone who might not agree with you, but likes to be trouble to the same guys who might not like your content.
Anti-MS: Post it on /.
Anti-Linux: Go MSN
Anti-[generic US company]: Post it in France
Anti-$cientology: Germany
etc.
Remember that *your* powerful enemies has *their* enemies too. They might not be your friends, but they could be your allies. Just be prepared to move when the wind changes...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Windows Me again I'm a masochist!
Too bad Tuvalu is alredy taken..
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
JOIN US!!!! We'd love to have you! AND TALK ABOUT PISSING PEOPLE OFF! THAT'S WHAT We're all about
We've already been shutdown by a police department and a highschool! IN the process losing alot of our content (I.E. our message board). SO we've basically had to start again from scratch, which sucks alot of ass, and things haven't been going so well.
But those bastards at the santa maria police department won't have the last laugh, we promise you that!!!
In fact any person pissed off at our government for all the nasty shit they do (I.E. politicians putting their campaign finances ahead of the enviroment) is free to join! We whine like bitches and have a hell of a lot of fun doing it!!
We're also working on a for-charity video game, so any programmers willing to work for nothing would be nice!
Thanks, Ned the Rat
----------------------------------
The problem with that is that you will not have any rights either. Anyone that passes can take control of your raft and if you choose to attack the other boat you have declared war on that nation. Hmm, on the other hand; try to get stuff out to the ocean without using a boat from a nation...
THe more money you have, the more rights you have. Everyone seems to have a price
Like our policies against nations whose human rights record is less-than-stellar... no doubt, one day the USA will set up system of 'packet embargo' against nations that don't live up to the government's law expectations. Like a firewall server at every entry point filtering out what the bible belt doesn't want you to read, or what the big money has paid to have firewalled off.
8^)
That, and the fact that U.S. registry is horribly overpriced.
First paragraph of their Overview page:
"Envision an ideal place to live or run a business--a friendly, safe and secure community with large areas of open space and extensive
entertainment and recreational facilities. Imagine that this community levies no local taxes--no income tax, no real estate tax, no sales tax, no
business tax, no import duties."
That pretty much describes a libertarian scenario.
The only way to square that statement with the previous quote that they will fly the flag of a specific country is that they will work a deal with some small country to fly a flag of convenience. This means they are nominally under a particular country's control, but in practice they won't be bothered. For example, imagine
they offer Tuvalu a flat $1M a year for 'ship's
license fees' or whatever. They get to use Tuvalu's flag on their flagpole. Even if Tuvalu wanted to enforce a particular law (which they wouldn't, that's what their yearly payoff is for),
how would they do it when the ship is on the other side of the world, and the ship outnumbers the island population 6:1?
You could base it here:
http://www.freedomship.com/
(a project to build a mobile libertarian haven
disguised as an overgrown cruise ship)
So far, most of the posts on this article have sugested moving to a server either in somewhere such as Russia or China, or into international waters. O.K, so that's your server outside of the US.
However, even with the hardware outside of the US, is the admin still responsible for any content? Could a cival lawsuit still be brought against you for being admin of a site outside of the US (That contravines US law?)
Also, if your server only has one link into the rest of the internet (Via. a US router, for example), can whoever-you-may-or-maynot-have-pissed-off legally have your link disconected (Perhaps with the threat of legal action against whoever hosts the router you're linked too?)
Just wondering if anyone has thought of any of this.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Funnilly enough, these were known as "Pirate radio". It seems that in modern times, the word "pirate" has transformed from its original meaning of a murderous cutthroat to someone who annoys the rich and powerful.
FWIW, while these ships were in operation, the British government engaged in a campaign of constant harassment and intimidation, arresting anyone who supplied them, watching in case the winds caused them to stray an inch into territorial waters, training (big) guns on them and feigning ramming actions. You may want to take that kind of thing into account when you set up your offshore ISP.
Rich
You mean like The Raft in Snow Crash?
Heh...
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
I wonder if there are any web hosting satellites up in space ...
You would need some sort of obnoxious defensive capability. Not a conventional military weapon, but a trap connected to dead-man switches. If they attack, they get your revenge, possibly from beyond the grave. Like 100,000 barrels of crude oil. Laced with PCBs, or better yet, with radioactive cobalt-60. Or in the case of Britain, with the brains of hundreds of BSE-positive cattle. The possibilities are endless...
But violence is said to be the last refuge of the incompetent. Blackmail of a president/prime minister/generalissimo/senator could be just as effective. Perhaps the web hosting fee could be partially paid in verifiable blackmail material? And of course, a shady ISP would provide the perfect environment for collecting such material.
If one were conspiracy minded, one could speculate whether Echelon will be getting into the clandestine web hosting business. Think about it: cloak and dagger, lots of dedicated backbones, morally flexible, datacenters all over the world, etc. (Better stop -- I'm scaring myself.)
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I'd like to extend proposed model. Such liberal-anarchy "country" would be in few steps from being attacked by real govt's - just because being out of _any_ international agreements :(
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The whole Neal Stephenson Datahaven bit is a neat idea. The problem is that while your website may be out of legal reach you are not. It seems fairly clear that the borders of where the HTTP transaction is taking place does matter to US judicial system.
Remeber etoy? Because one of thier memebers lived in the US they were able to be sued here.
Also of note are the operators of offshore gambling sites. They were recently found guilty of accepting bets from states where gambling is not permitted. Those webmasters aren't expected to see the light of day for 5-10 years.
Just because they can't take your site out doesn't mean they can't take YOU out.
In the Netherlands they tend to be more respectful of the individuals rights, and you a bit more realistic when it comes to lawsuits.
Of course, they also had unbelievably bad customer service, and would probably charge you for re-connection after they had accidentally dug out your connection with a bulldozer.
Find funky gifts
I live in the Bahamas, and host OneBahamas.com which actually is on a server in the states. The service is for Bahamians to get free, no ad, web hosting. The reason why we host in the states is that there is no infrastructure to host it here. I have a cable modem, but it only runs at 128kB/s. The telecommunications company is going to be implimenting DSL in the near future, but get this. The cable company, Cable Bahamas, who I get my cable modem from now is going to be running a wide fibre optic pipe to the states. Very soon, you should be able to get up to T3 access in the Bahamas. The poorly implimented copyright laws, as well as poor legal inforcement of anything, along with the fact that no one here besides a friend and I know anything about computers would be an excellent reason to come here to avoid free speech problems. Now the only problem that I can see lies in the TOS of the cable company, but I can tell you this: we didn't have to sign anything when we got our cable modem, so watch for it. The Bahamas will be an excellent place to avoid everything. Email me if you want any more information or anything.
P.S. Bahamian Sunset t-shirt and mousepad here for just $12.99. They're cool, just look at them.
A long time ago, in an Ocean not so far away, there was a privateer called Captain Kidd. Born around 1645, from 1690 onwards he sailed around looking for pirate ships or French vessels for a while, gave up and instead attacked some other ships and was surprised to find himself denounced as a pirate. He handed himself in to the Governor of New York to proclaim his innocence, was shipped to England and hanged there in 1701.
OK, so I know it's not a recent example. So what? The guy was my great-great-...-great uncle, ok?
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
'Nuff said.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Why not set up a web server that would orbit the earth? NASA has already been able to run tcp/ip from earth to a satellite, and I doubt anything that is traveling over the earth at thousands of miles an hour is going to be subject to any sort of national law. However, this may not be the most cost effective idea, unless you sent up a huge server farm, possibly powered on solar energy.
efnet #reconnect r0x0rs =]
http://www.freedomship.com/
(a project to build a mobile libertarian haven disguised as an overgrown cruise ship)
Not Quite.
From the Freedom Ship Web Site (my emphasis added):
Governing Laws
Freedom Ship is only a ship, not a political entity. It will operate under the same rules and regulations as any cruise ship. As a sea-going commercial vessel, it will fly the flag of a specific country (to be determined at a later date), enjoy the protection of that country, and be subject to its laws and regulations, as well as to maritime law. In addition, its residents will be subject to the ships Rules and Regulations.
==
"This is the nineties. You don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first."
2) hack US's ELF submarine communication system to support IP
3) travel underwater wherever you please, use torpedoes/nukes on potential threats.
minimum weather to worry about, enough power to last a few years at a time, travel over 3/4 of the earth, wireless connection.
anyone here know anything about the possibilities of IP over ELF?
-f
http://www.peruano.org/
-f
www.blackant.net
We host our sites over there to avoid liable laws.
blog and junk
FreeNet, Gnutella, HotLine are all VPIs
You can't handle the truth.
"Think about this globally. The US can pass a law that the US backbones cannot exchange information with "rogue networks," networks that don't follow US law. The US can pass a law that they will not trade with countries that don't pass similar laws. The UK can do the same. Pretty soon, there is no where to go."
This only applies to the internet, right? Not all computer networks (gnutella, freenet etc)?
The main thing, though, is that this kind of question shouldn't even come up. It just doesn't make sense that the best, fastest, most reliable form of communication ever known to man should be restricted by a few people with very specific interests in mind. Especially when their interests are so irrational and their solution for everything is a lawsuit. I know that the Internet isn't an American product, but it would make even less sense to be censoring any kind of information by request of the US government, no matter how much rich-guy-number-X may potentially lose because of such information. I mean, hell, we have sacred laws to protect us from this kind of thing. Why are our "lawmakers" so quick to forget that? And in case Echelon didn't pick this up yet, BOMB KILL MANSON ISRAEL OKC.
Oh, and it's kind of off-topic, but are there any numbers on how much the DVD piracy market has exploded since the release of the DeCSS program? Just curious...
-Man cannot survive except through his mind. --Ayn Rand
- plain text - this seems like a personal preference. I for one would not like a non-commerical net to be crippled in a such a manner and I don't see why it would help.
- litigation - you will still be open to it, do you percieve this private net dodging lawsuits by not having enough people read it so the Bad Guys wont know about it? By being unidentifiable?
Perhaps you could define a protocal that requires a license agreement to use (eg to use the non-commerical net DNS service you have to agree not to blah blah blah).You could go to www.coollist.com and set up a mailing list for this and put up a web page.
You still need to connect to someone.
The USA is very powerful, and much of the Internet is in it and goes through it.
If you connect to country A which connects you to the USA, and you piss the USA off enough, they can just start threatening country A- direct net blocking, sanctions, removal from most favoured nation etc.
Soon you'll have to find another country to connect to. And then the process repeats.
Powerful blocs like the EU would be less susceptible to pressure from USA, but they themselves may be even more restrictive than the USA.
And if you piss everyone off, then don't be surprised if no one wants your communications.
Cheerio,
Link.
If the Simpsons has taught me anything (and it has), it's that anything is legal in international waters :)
Including retransmission of a major league baseball game with implied verbal rather than express written permission.
But seriously, this was a tactic used by many pirate radio stations in England in the 60's. A benefit of living on an island is that a lot of the country is close to international waters. Ping times are an issue with satelite links though. A narrow band radio connection to the shore should be possible, but that might cause legal problems again.
In the UK lawbooks, there is a specific clause that says pirates can be hanged. I'm not sure if they still can, but a few years ago this was one of the few crimes that still had the death penalty.
I wonder if setting up a satellite-based ISP on a boat or something in international waters would work. Basically a big floating server farm, with high-speed satellite links.
If the Simpsons has taught me anything (and it has), it's that anything is legal in international waters :)
But seriously. It would have the benefits of being mobile and outside the jurisdiction of everyone. Of course, you would probably have some weather-related problems, plus the fact that you might have to "go down with the server"
Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
Weren't they trying to extend their language laws onto websites hosted in Quebec? For example any english content on a website must also be present in french, or one could be fined.
The CRTC (Council of Radio and Telecommunications) has made it clear that they will not attempt to moderate or patrol the internet in any way, as they beleive it is out of their jurisdiction. Hosting in Canada also works around the time added for trans-oceanic sites (well, only to those in the states). The only condition in which content could be forced off a Canadian site is if its considered hate propoganda. In this case the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) has shut down a few sites. Some food for thought.
If you are here in the US, and there is any paper/digital trail back to you (Domain ownership, etc.) then you can be in for legal battles. Corporations and the wealthy regularly use their legal staff as a bludgeon. Even pointless civil suits inflict monetary damage through legal fees.
Unless connectivity is your only exposure, offshore won't help.
Goto www.elgrande.com to buy all your books. They let you buy direct from the publisher with no middle man charges. It's the cheapest place to buy books online!
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Version: 3.12
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
IMHO, what we need is somewhere like Switzerland is too monetary transactions with the internet. If you could find a country, that had not signed in the the WTO copyright standards with a farely stable democratic government, you could host websites from it, and have completely free speech. Though I doubt this will happen it's just an idea, maybe Switzerland itself could be the center for such a industry/community
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What exactly are the commercial possiblilities of Ovine Aviation?
The only thing the gov't could do then is make the penalties so huge (20 year prison sentences) that people wouldn't do it. And many still would. And monitoring/finding everyone doing it is impossible, and any halfway effective attempt is extremely expensive.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
If you don't fight now, you won't be able to say anything later.
Fight Spammers!
A large company may convince the ISP to shut you down, with the threat of a lawsuit. Or they can just file a lawsuit against you and run up your legal costs.
Even if you win on the basis free speech (or even truth), you would have had paid out large legal bills. That is why the both Massachusetts and California have implemented Anti-SLAPP statutes.
Fight Spammers!
I could claim that someone copied my site w/o my permission.
But having an anonymous site, does not have the impact of a named site.
Fight Spammers!
If you reside, or have asets in a country that will recognize the rulings from a country that makes it illegal, then they can take those asets.
A court can grant juridiction over a website because it is targeted to an area that they have jurisdiction. Since it is then intended to cause the harm in an area that the court has jurisdiction, you can be sued in that court.
If you don't appear, you will be defaulted. If there are assets that can be reached by the court, even though the website can't be, you lose.
If in Boston, you have your death ray satelite kill someone in Boston, they still will arrest you in Boston. They don't have to have jurisdiction in space.
Fight Spammers!
>Think about this globally. The US can pass a law that the US backbones cannot exchange information with "rogue networks," networks that don't follow US law. The US can pass a law that they will not trade with countries that don't pass similar laws. The UK can do the same. Pretty soon, there is no where to go.
>If you don't think that this can be done, emember that until very recently, the US phone networks re prohibited from connecting to the Cuban phone network so you couldn't easily make a phone call from the US to Cuba. Yes, I know that the internet has obvious ways to route around this kind of lock but big governments can put a lot of pressure on service providers.
Actually, there were ways around the phone restrictions as well, and people usually routed through Canada. It may have been a law, but pretty much on the books only. (And we didn't then ban commerce/travel with Canada because of it.) Helms-Burton isn't really in place either, because it'd have the same problematic consequences. That's one business won't allow. What's bad for one business/politition can be good for another, and they'll all have their lobbyists and lawyers.
The best countries for a site beyond US government reach are those with bad relations already. For example, how about putting your content that pisses off US corporations in Cuba?
Now, wouldn't that be ironic?
We call it Maths in South Africa, too. Incidently, I knew a South African girl getting D's in SA. When she went to the US as an exchange student, she thought it was a total joke. She went to tourist destinations, taking pictures and generally messing around, and still managed to get straight A's at the US "school". So much for the US "education system". Btw, Brits - yours isn't that much better - sure it is better, no doubt...but....wellll....too many glue-sniffers, etc, so don't get cocky :)
I'm not going to say that all South African education is brilliant, certainly it's better in some areas than others. In most of the white areas, it is very good, though.no sig
I cant see that taking your serevers overseas is going to help. You want people to be able to access your information from inside the US too. As long as you are in the US and its zone of control, your government is going to be able to get at you. Rember its the want to do the 'crime' that you get done for not actualy doing it (of course if you dont do it its hard to get busted for). That may make no sense but for most crimes the only way they can prove that you wanted to do it was to find that you have done it, so putting you information some where overseas may not break there laws but it may break yours (ie australia commit pedophila overseas as an OZ citz and when you return you will still get busted, NOTE: thats an example not a problem in my mind). The only solution is to protect you right to free speach, in a democratic land we can only blame our selves when the law doesnt work out when we dont like it.
You keep talking about off-shore - what about Richard Bransons island? Can't remember where it is, but I'm sure he'd be more than willing to offer some kind of service. not sure about how you'd hook it up though.
:) :)
:)
Well, anyway, he's got a number of things going for him
a) Shameless self-promotionalist
b) Likes money
c) Enjoys taking on the big boys (Virgin - Airways, Records, Net, and today, Virgin Cars in the UK
d) Mad enough to do crazy things (balloons for one) to get press
e) Enjoys a joke on the powers that be.
f) All-Round Great Guy (TM) - for evidence watch 'Derek and Clive get the horn' to see Mr Branson wearing a big furry coat and smoking a spliff
Ahem. Anyway he gets my vote, now who is going to approach him?
Think of the publicity - 'Richard Branson gives Big Brother the finger'
IANA Journalist, but you get the idea.
Wow, this is a great idea, I can't believe I thought of it
~~~ huh?
SLAPP stand for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. A term used in Political Science and Journalism circles. What /. is going through with Microsoft is in my opion A kind of SLAPP. It is a way of suppressing free speech by suing people to censure them selves. Moving to another country to stop this is a very good Idea. Corporations do it all of the time. Veri Sign use to sell encryption boxes out of Israel back when was illegal to sell it out of the US. This kind of thing simply works. They can still get you if you are really sealing and impacting their bottom line, but the process is greatly complicated by going over international lines. The Idea is that it is not worth all of the effort for something as non-impacting on the bottom line like someone's embarrassing speech. What everyone wants is to be free of the harassment of big corporations that use the fact they have almost unlimited resources to sue and most people and many small companies live paycheck to paycheck. This means that most people and most small companies will do exactly what the big company wants. The Idea is that 99% of the time it never gets to court. And if it does and you win? So what!!! It cost the corporation almost nothing while you are now faced big legal bills. This may be OK if you are a real criminal stealing from them but it is another when it is about your free speech they don't like. When this happens it is a SLAPP clear and simple. This is becoming the preferred way that corporations deal with speech they don't like. Normally when it is not too blatant they will pull some kind of agreement you may have with them. The click through "contract" Microsoft has for example. But most of the time they don't even bother. They do this because it cost them almost noting to do it. It is just too easy and works too well. They pay for the lawyers anyway. To protect your self you need to make it as hard and costly as possible. Make them have to heir a lawyer in that country. Make them have to research their laws. Take way the DMCA and you will find the number of SLAPPs will drop. If you have a country with a real press that will expose corporations that harass people you will see SLAPPs really drop. Don't know where the best place would be but Great Britain and the US are among the worst. I would look at places like New Zealand, and Australia, Finland for starters. We should have a rating system for countries for SLAPP violation somewhere. Remember it is not about copyright law it is about stopping SLAPPs.
This is an example of what to look for. If California has this Other countries may as well. http://www.sirius.com/~casp/feedback.html Other pages for info on SLAPPs http://www.thefirstamendment.org/ http://www.thefirstamendment.org/Civil.htm
Until we reach a state where *both* the content hosts *and* users are free from controlled internet access, a "nationless" website is impossible.
I look forward to the day when internet access is taken for granted, personally... something along the vein of the Sub-Etha in Hitchhiker's.
until then...
Ham on rye, hold the mayo please.
thelocust[dot]org
It's possible to create such a VPN reasonably easily with Linux systems running PPP over SSH; the routing is fiddly and there may be scaling problems, but it would likely work as well as Fidonet did.
...) You might want _several_ such anonymous networks, for different types of data (IRC, email, news, piracy of large binaries, games, web-like services &c.)
What you'd have to set up carefully before starting is the social rules of such a system, making it explicitly clear what you did and did not want. Do you want absolute anonymity or non-repudiation? (They are good for different things
Nothing to sell, no banners... yet my crappy univ considered it hazardeous.
FYI, the admin thought perl was a kind of java and dynamic meant it used parts from other sites with frames.
This all sounds strangely familiar. Its just like the Data Haven proposed in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"
Seriously, the Libertarian party is the only one dedicated to all personal and property rights, including the much-abused right to free speech and the trampled right of protection from unreasonable search and seizure. Sure, it won't be overnight, and it probably does make sense to set up something overseas in the meantime (I'll be looking into it) but please take to time to also get out there and vote!
And if it feels hopeless and overwhelming, remember that there is a fast-growing party out there of like-minded folks who are actively paving the way (there are now over 300 Libertarians in public office, all of whom are fighting to end this kind of rights-trampling crap).
Please Rate my comment (and help support Fre
You can't copyright individual words or even phrases (though you can trademark them sometimes -- that's a different issue). The copyright on a dictionary applies to the whole compilation and presentation, not to the words in it or even the definitions.
--
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What? WHAT?!! Oh.
Why not? What are you going to do, force them?
Look at any graph of the net - there is almost no way to cut off a rogue subnetwork without interfering with legitimate traffic, and the degree to which the interconnectedness meshes, crosses, and routes around national boundaries is increasing. These networks are privately owned - none of the "treaties" you've discussed really have any basis or hope of ever being usefully enforced.
Your proposal makes about as much sense as a proposal to block telephone calls from China if we get too many crank calls from one of its citizens.
Interesting premise, considering that the interconnectedness of the net these days makes it virtually impossible to isolate a substantial subsection of the internet.
There will always be some sort of offshore latency; since the index of refraction in glass is higher than 1, the light travels slower than 300000000 meters per second. IIRC, a "standard" piece of glass has an index of 1.5, but I have no idea what they use in fiber optics.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
We set up a haven on a rig in international waters. If we tow the rig to the right place, there is alreay a fibre optic backbone running across the pacific ocean (a loop, actually) and backbone crossing international waters in other places too (between New Zealand and Australia for example).
Splicing into a fibre optic cable isn't easy, but it's a _lot_ easier than laying our own cable or launching a satellite. Best of all, due to the loop design (to keep the connection running if one part of the cable breaks), we can put in the splice without cutting off various countries.
Now - anyone here have an uncle with an old, disused open-sea rig lying around that we could, er.. borrow?
Quite a few international news sites are banned there. How? Not sure, I think they may stop traffic at the router level. They can (and do) police every net cafe, and every server farm. My girlfriend just got back from there. A while back it used to be possible to get www2.bbc.co.uk, but then they got wise to that. Does anyone know if you can get around it by using proxy servers outside China?
At first blush it would seem that some smallish country with a stable (not necessarily legitimate) government could make a killing at this.
A longer view might suggest that any such country isn't likely to have the communications infrastructure necessary to make a Web haven work.
For all Neal Stephenson's merits, the idea in _Cryptonomicon_ of a data haven is a huge stretch. Let's see, all we need is an independent country, geographically close enough to the U.S. to make business trips feasible, and ruled by an autocrat with lots of money and a technology fetish. That'll work.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
Moving a server to Russia or some other non-US/non-EU country may sound like a quick fix, but remember most of the reasons these countries won't care about censorship: money. You're basically paying them to look the other way when a big corporation smacks its fist down. Now what happens when that corp pays them MORE money to take it down? They will, without a second thought. If you have the actual server in their country anyhow, say goodbye to any notion of server security. Again, a little money might just allow your corporate friends access to the server itself.
Pretty scary...if it were me, I'd spend the cash on finding an ISP who would be willing to fight to keep my site up, regardless of the opponent.
Desufnoc
webhosting.freedomsite.org
There is a dearth of details on their site, however: They don't say specifically what they'll do if someone makes a DMCA claim against you.
Surely there must be others who won't just turn the lights out on you.
Honestly, what is needed is a non-profit hosting service willing to take on controversial sites. The site would charge competitive rates, but pump its profits into a legal defense fund that would be supplemented by donations from free-speech advocates.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing a sig reminds me of signing office birthday cards: I can never think of anything witty to say.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I would recommend that you get a high speed DSL/Cable connection to your home and use one of the free DNS providers to ensure that people can always reach your IP from a domain. Many cable/phone companies have explicit provisions that prevent you from operating a server using the connection, but you should be able to find one in your area that does not. This way, you are your own host and you are thus solely responsible for your content.
/. when it is completed!
If this solution is not practical, check out Russian hosting companies. They are immune from US/UK censorship and are generally reasonably priced. I am in the process of designing a similar site and have decided to go with a well-known US ISP. If they decide to take down my site, it will result in bad publicity directed towards them that will probably accomplish more, as far as drawing attention to the problem of Internet censorship, than the site itself.
Good luck, and post the URL on
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Heh, if only it was true. Then maybe, Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about this whole anti-trust case.
Too bad that America is no longer a place where you can state your mind without fear of reprisal. Especially from lawyers and big businesses. If I ever come to power, those groups will be the first against the wall.
Death to the fascist capitalist pigs of today's modern civilization!
When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
I guess it was only a matter of time before corporate america killed independant george. ------------------- Trim the fat!!!!
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
I'm sure every inch of those rigs is currently in use, but one could perhaps build an addition without adding much weight. The equipment and manpower required for web-hosting would not really take up that much space.
Unfortunately, like most of the more creative solutions being offered here, the costs would be huge... so there would need to be some big-money demand for uncensored service before something like this would ever happen.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Sounds like what you need is one of Willam Gibson's data havens, ala Neuromancer.
Trouble is, I don't think such a thing exists yet.
No time for
the obvious problems are language, and the fact that these services are similar in caliber to what was developed here in the US 3 to 5 years ago.
There are basic problems in reliability, among other things.
Although I am amused by the idea of a free speech site protesting corruption in some city in the USA, being hosted in, say, russia or red china.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've got to chuckle a little about this, The idea of taking a server/ISP/connections overseas or onto/within a wholly owned domain (physical or net) subject to censorship by yourself only was an idea I thought Microsoft were going to do. Screw the DOJ, buy a nice little South Pacific island, spend a few billion laying either undersea cabling or launch a few sats, call it Microland or GateWorld if you insist. Browbeat/Bribe a poor Asian or African nation with good USA ties into accepting your 'ownership' of its telecommunication or net infrastructure.It wouldn't be hard as most poor nations would jump at the chance to court a large international company into their borders and if it's in a region ,lets say Taiwan, where US interest's are considered 'sensitive' would they be willing to try to strongarm a country into rejecting/refusing or even severing a company like Microsoft's access to the rest of the world/web if based from there or nearby? I suggest that if you could play the interests of the countries against the income/oppurtunities such a site/domain would create you could possibly succeed. But the resources and clout you would need to have as 'bargaining' chips would have to be vast. Maybe the fellow building the online free university has had to deal with some of these problems? Or perhaps these are issues he will run into. "The best buckets a SCREAMING one" in lieu of no .sig
" The best Bucket is a SCREAMING one "
It is one thing to endorse 'free speech', but 'free speech' is not freedom to break the law. Regardless of how you feel about a law, the internet is not an excuse to violate ordinances, codes, or do any other act that would be considered illegal within the country that you reside.
Don't ship your site off-shore, you are still legally responsible for the content on it - unless you move there also and never come back. Get the laws changed that you don't like.. or better yet - rethink wether the content of your site would ever be feasibly legal. I haven't seent the site - so I wouldn't know..
Play with fire and get burned
..someone building a platform in international waters and running a bunch of high-speed i-net lines to it from several different countries and then offering free, anonymous access and web site hosting and having the policy of not cooperating with any goverments. ^_^ Of course, that would be far to expensive, like they said, and someone would probably get ticked off enough eventually to go blow it up. But it is an idea. Oh well.
As for your question, who knows. Everyone seems to be trying to censor everyone else these days. It's like a giant game of tattle-tale, with the goverment being the 'parent'. "MOMMY! Little Timmy said a no-no word!" Etc. People should just lighten up. The Internet is here for many reasons, one of them being free speech. If you don't like what a web site is saying, don't go to it. If you don't like what someone is saying, leave the chat room/message board/etc. or, if the place has it, use their ignore feature. People have rights, (Last time I checked they did, at least. But the goverment's been working on that, so I don't know!) That's my $0.02
Surgically remove pole from ass to E-mail.
I don't think that offshore is the answer. The Internet is a GLOBAL community. I think that big business is just that, BUSINESS. They are in business to make money and anyone that thay percieve is attempting to take away their fair share of the pie is subject to their intervention. How do we create a global community that is not subject to big business intervention? I propose a VPI. (Virtual Private Internet) Has anybody done this yet? Maybe Big Business is reading this right now and will steal the idea. Free speech is a constitutional right. Copyright is not. The only way to prove copyright is with sufficient documentation and witnesses to stand up in a court of law. I declare this message copywritten in my name. That is all the notice I need to put on this work to copyright it according to US law. International copyrights are a different matter. Now if anyone tries to use any of the words in this post I could try to sue them. (maybe Merriam Webster should sue the entire english speaking world) It won't stand up in a court of law, but I could still try. Once again I think a VPI would be the way to go. "hackers" could support "hackers" and exclude "big business" from infringing on that "net". W3 was a good idea. How about a new consrtium? VPI1?
These domains can be run from these island countries with very little interferance from anyone. The US juridiction is limited in some cases, say like in the case of China. Although this is not a good place to host a website, it would provide a buffer against liability, at least until China enters the WTO. Island nations are still your best bet with quite a few ignoring US jurisdiction allowing offshore accounts, offshore gambling, and numerous smuggling opportunities. Fantastic if you have criminal activities in mind, but even better if you want a little protection from laws against your free speech.
Since the military isn't in space YET, it seems to me that you could scrape up some funding and build a small, cheap space station, something like many people are talking about using as space hotels, and transmit directly to the ground. There are a lot of possible problems with this, but one way to get around them: USE HAM RADIO!!!! DUH!!!
No, I am middle class white trash! I know this - I know myself, and I'm quite glad of the fact, it gives me something to work and improve upon. Believe me, knowing who you are is an eye-opener.....
Oh arse