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HavenCo Doing Well
davecl writes: "The off-shore datahaven, HavenCo, is doing well, according to the BBC.
HavenCo is based on a WW2 gunnery platform several miles of the English coast. In the 60s it was outside the 3 mile territorial waters, and a retired Army officer moved there and proclaimed it the independent state of Sealand. In the 80s territorial waters were extended to 12 miles. Sealand's nation status is this unclear, but this hasn't stopped HavenCo setting up their data haven. Customers are largely gambling sites, but an increasing number of political groups, such as the Tibetan Government in Exile, are based there in an effort to escape government censorship. More regulation of the web means more customers, and business is booming. Wonder if others will see this as a way of making money out of beating censorship?" We've mentioned Sealand several times before -- it's great to hear they're defying the skeptics.
Just incase anyone is interested in Sealand
http://www.sealandgov.com/
It was a group of Dutch and German businessmen who were upset because the King of Sealand had refused a business deal they had proposed. They assaulted the island while the King was away and took the Prince (the King's son, obviously) hostage. Eventually the King returned and led a counter-assault on the island with the assistance of several friends. They held the businessmen as prisoners of war for several weeks and only released the German after an envoy from the German government was sent to negotiate. This was basically de facto recognition of Sealand's soveriegnty, and is highly touted in their historical records.
By the way, for my final project for AP Speech class I did a 40 minute presentation on Sealand from the viewpoints of 5 different (well 6 including the introduction) characters. It was pretty awesome. I'd post it online if I wasn't afraid of someone totally ripping it off.
They advertise a 3 ms ping time to London, so latency should be quite a bit better, now. I believe somewhere I read about a sat link for backup.
The courts of England once ruled that Sealand was out of their jurisdiction for a potential criminal case. Weapons violation, I think. It should make things interesting in the future.
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Wonder if others will see this as a way of making money out of beating censorship?
Here's a list of some companies making money out of beating censorship.
International law explicity excludes territorial claims on the basis of man made platforms. Otherwise countries would be building them to claim mineral rights.
The English courts rulled that the platform was outside their jurisdiction. So is Glasgow, but that is certainly not recognized as an independent state. The ruling says nothing about the claims of the British crown which are considerably more extensive. Very little of the North Sea Oil is within the 3 mile or 12 mile territorial limit, but the UK claims sovereign rights with respect to the minerals.
The rulling of the English courts was based on the then law which set the territorial limit at 3 miles. It has since been expanded to 12 miles.
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There were a few minor inaccuracies in the article; we don't actually host the Tibet Online site (we were going to, but it was just an organizational confusion, and it ended up not happening); we don't rely exclusively on satellite; etc.
:) I actually get to go to Burning Man this year, too, heh.
:) Would need to come up with precisely measurable conditions, specify a judge, etc. I suppose I already have a pretty large bet down in favor of "will survive 10+ years".
:) Total cost for that is probably about USD 1-2m, but we don't want to kill our short term cashflow to do it, so we might have to wait a while, unless we get extra funds from investment or customers for the service.
I'm going to be at H2K2 in NYC and at DEF CON X in Vegas. Avi Freedman and I are speaking about HavenCo at H2K2; I'm doing something else at DC X
Basically, we're now at the point where the company is entirely self-sustaining and growing financed by revenues, which is ideal; we had to put off some interesting stuff earlier due to lack of time and other resources, but we can finally move forward on these things. (Everything is basically automated, too, which is always good -- I'm considering releasing some of our colo management software under GPL later this year)
Our policy about what we'll host is unchanged; basically anything goes, as long as it doesn't endanger our network connectivity (it's unlikely anyone will invade/destroy Sealand, far more likely they'd get our addresses blocked at a bunch of routers in various countries). Spam and hacking would get us blocked by network admins themselves, so we prohibit those; child porn would too, so we prohibit that. If we were hosting alqaedaunlimited.com or something, we would probably be forced to shut down the server, but since this would destroy the contents, it's really no worse for a site operator than a permanent DoS attack. (we actually have no "shady" customers of any kind, since they would tend to just use a cheap server somewhere with a stolen credit card or something, or keep their servers on their own premises -- also, they tend to use consumer services, which we don't offer.)
As for a betting pool on HavenCo/Sealand's survival, this is a great idea. I'd suggest using a system like ideosphere if you're not interested in doing it for money; otherwise, I'd be happy to host such a service
We're mostly using Appro 1124i servers (good quality 1U), although we've got a fair amount of Sun and some other stuff. I am looking at blades, and it might be a way to offer a USD 300-500 low-end server, with fully metered bandwidth (such that if you max out the server, it costs you more than a 1U, but for a small site, it's cheaper).
One of the other 2002-2003 projects is bringing in a BIG pipe so our bandwidth cost drops to US carrier prices, + $50/Mbps or so. (Right now, we have 25-50% capacity utlization, selling 256Kbps to each customer, with very little oversell; however, our cost on the bandwidth we do have is pretty high per megabit, so bandwidth is actually a loss for us.) We could then host huge data archives, porn sites, streaming audio and video (non-multicast, a bunch of unicast streams), news servers, etc. The main thing I need to do for that is get 500-750 Mbps of customers signed up ahead of time for the link; it should be about 4 x 10 Gbps initial link capacity, so you guess what tech it is
HavenCo + infinite bandwidth would be really exciting -- the tax and physical security advantages alone would be enough to make moving servers out there worthwhile, if the price is the same as anywhere else.
"The courts of England." Please. You make it sound like a concerted nationwide legal consensus. Some random piddling backwater judge decided he'd rather take the long weekend and dismissed the case as not being appropriate for the specific jurisdiction it was brought under.
It was not "some random backwater piddling judge". Read the history.
The first time it was ruled that Sealand wasn't part of England the "King" of Sealand was accused of firing on British ships when they tried to take back Sealand. In case you didn't know, attacking Navy ships isn't exactly a small crime. Random backwater judges don't get cases like those.
Ten years later, the King's son was kidnapped and Sealand was invaded. When he took back Sealand he also held several prisoners of war. When the governments of the Netherlands and Germany (where the POWs were from) asked Britain to intervene, Britain cited the previous court case stating that Sealand was a seperate nation and not under British jurisdiction. Germany ended up sending a diplomat directly to Sealand.
Sealand is not on the list (which can be viewed at http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma /02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html).
ISO 3166 is the "authority" because that's what IANA decided (thus shifting the burden of recognizing nations to another standards-organization). See http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld.htm (where you'll find a link to IANA's decision enabling the .ps ccTLD for the Palestinian Territory). See also http://www.caslon.com.au/domainsprofile.htm
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