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.

Comments

Sealand

[Anonymous Coward]

Just incase anyone is interested in Sealand

http://www.sealandgov.com/

Re:Sealand

[throwaway18]

Ok, I can karma whore too, Ryan Lackey, the sealand CTO has a couple of pictures on his home page He's a cool geezer. He has shown up at london 2600 and DNScon in the past.

Ashcroft

[dattaway]

If they are out of control of the US Government, will be they labled as terrorists and bombed?

Re:Ashcroft

[Zach`]

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.

If they get too successful

[stoolpigeon]

they will get shut down.

The reality of the situation is that Sealand exists because they just are not worth going after.

If they cause too much trouble they'll get shut down. (not 'right' but that is the reality of it)

.

Re:If they get too successful

[DustMagnet]

If the US can invade Panama and seize the president, then certainly England can safely invade a data haven just off her's shores. I love the idea of data havens, but how can you protect one. If you join the UN, then you have to follow it's rules. The only way I see is a huge military, but that takes all the fun out of it.

Re:If they get too successful

[stoolpigeon]

I love the idea of data havens, but how can you protect one.

You put it on the moon that's how. And if the govt. gives you grief you wrap big chunks of rock in steal jackets- launch them w/a magnetic catapult and drop them on the earth. You just keep that up until the earth gives in and you have your freedom as a sovereign planet.

really it's a no brainer.

more info

[cr@ckwhore]

I took interest in the story of Sealand about 2 years ago. There's plenty of reading material available on the web..

try www.sealandgov.com... excellent historical information, including Sealand's first naval battle.

Also,www.fruitsofthesea.demon.co.uk/sealand/ has a decent picture gallery so you can visualize just how small this platform is.

I had an email conversation with somebody at sealand back when I first heard of the place. I kept the email... funny thing, it usually took them a few months to reply. Being that havenco is very security oriented, I'm sure they use latency to their advantage for communications. Interesting rule of Havenco... customers aren't allowed to supply their own machines in the sake of security.

Re:more info

[chill]

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.

Re:more info

[stefanlasiewski]

It must have more to it than it appears... space in the pillars, perhaps.

One pillar holds the server rooms, and one holds the living quarters.

The history page says that 200 soldiers were stationed there (presumably, at the same time), and the little hut on top isn't enough room for 25 and their food and gear, much less 200.

No, 200 people cannot live on that thing at the same time.

Think about it: it was a platform for anti-aircraft guns, and not many guns could fit on that deck. You don't need 200 people to man a handful of anti-aircraft guns.

I read an article once (which I could find the link) which talked a bit about the admins at HavenCo. There are 1-3 admins present at a time (I think they are the owners of HavenCo also), and one of their biggest complaints was that there was nowhere to go on your break. You could go for a walk around the platform, but that would keep you occupied for about 5 minutes.

Re:more info

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Pretending

[Skyshadow]

It's sweet that HavenCo can sit out in the ocean and play make-believe, but how long do you *really* think they could last if they ever hosted something that really caught the ire of Britain? They have no political recognition, no real ability to defend themselves and no sort of general support from anyone.

Really, there are no real protections to be had here other than those provided by British law -- everything else is a mere SAS raid away from extinction. You could set this place up anywhere in the semi-free world and provide the same level of protection -- it's all just a publicity stunt.

Re:Pretending

[AndrewHowe]

They played by the rules. Without doubt, they are a sovereign nation (check the history of Sealand if you don't believe me). Yes, the SAS could raid them, but that would effectively mean that the UK had declared war on another nation. That wouldn't be a particularly good PR exercise.

Re:Pretending

[Skyshadow]

that would effectively mean that the UK had declared war on another nation

In practice, national governments don't get any sort of protection unless someone pretty important recognizes them as being legit -- look at what the US did in Afghanistan, for chrissake.

That aside, you don't even need to be a government to take this place out -- a well-placed shaped charge on one of the supports would send this SOB to the bottom of the ocean, and *anyone* with sufficiant knowledge and motivation could do it.

I'll believe in a data haven when one shows up in a real country. This place is just hype.

Re:Pretending

[JCCyC]

That aside, you don't even need to be a government to take this place out -- a well-placed shaped charge on one of the supports would send this SOB to the bottom of the ocean, and *anyone* with sufficiant knowledge and motivation could do it.

Resorting to violence would be a PR blunder, as someone else has already pointed out. What they can do, however, is sue the pants off (anyone who does business with)^N them. Bye bye, Internet link. Bye bye, revenue. Bye bye, food and water.

Feel free to add any Revelations reference you feel like.

Re:Pretending

[Guppy06]

"Without doubt, they are a sovereign nation (check the history of Sealand if you don't believe me)."

You are not a sovereign nation just because you say so. The only way you can get nation status is if you are officially recognized by other nations. Period. This has been proven in history time and again, and labelling a period of history either as a "revolution" or a "civil war" hinges on this one fact.

Sealand isn't listed in the CIA World Factbook. As far as I'm concerned they are not a sovereign nation. And in this day and age if the US says you're not a country, you're up a creek without a flag. Just ask Ravalomanana when he really became the president of Madagascar.

"Yes, the SAS could raid them, but that would effectively mean that the UK had declared war on another nation."

It would only be seen that way by any countries that have decided to see Sealand as a sovereign nation. And who is that? Anyone? Not the US, not the EU, not the UN, not anybody that has much more than a Red Ryder BB gun.

It's just like when the US "invaded the Confederate States of America." The powers of Europe never saw the CSA as an independent nation, so the entire civil war (as opposed to a revolution) was seen as an internal matter by the rest of the world.

So you go ahead and keep believing that it's a sovereign nation. And you can be as outraged as you want once the place gets shut down. It's not going to change the fact that 99.9% of the world sees it as an internal affair of the British and it certainly won't change the fact that Sealand will be shut down just the same.

Re:Pretending

[Zeinfeld]

It's just like when the US "invaded the Confederate States of America." The powers of Europe never saw the CSA as an independent nation, so the entire civil war (as opposed to a revolution) was seen as an internal matter by the rest of the world.

That is a very good point, during the war of independence the critical turning point was recognition of the US by France. During the US Civil War the European powers were at one point within a few weeks of recognizing the confederate states. Had that happened the secessionists would probably have succeeded. Then the tide started to go the other way and the European powers decided to stay out of the affair.

The Sealand people are no different from the numerous loonies to be found in Montana and the like in places called 'JustUs County' and such. They can argue from dawn to dusk, but at the end of the day Mao was right on the origin of power.

Re:Pretending

[AndroidCat]

*snort*! As I posted nearby, Britain has already done exactly that sort of thing with pirate radio stations. They passed a bill making it legal to shut them down.

If Sealand ever became a pain in the ass, they would do the same thing again. What was it that Machiavelli said about princes always being able to find an excuse? It's still true today.

Re:Pretending

[Zeinfeld]

The UK courts would, I think, uphold the earlier ruling that Sealand is outside of their durisdiction (because it clearly is, under international law).

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.

Nation status seems very clear...

[automatic_jack]

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.

This doesn't seem to be the case. This page on Sealand's web site clearly states:

On 1 October, 1987, Britain extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles. The previous day, Prince Roy declared the extension of Sealand's territorial waters to be a like 12 nautical miles, so that right of way from the open sea to Sealand would not be blocked by British claimed waters. No treaty has been signed between Britain and Sealand to divide up the overlapping areas, but a general policy of dividing the area between the two countries down the middle can be assumed. International law does not allow the claim of new land during the extension of sea rights, so Sealand's sovereignty was safely "grandfathered" in. Britain has no more right to Sealand's territory than Sealand has to the territory of the British coastline that falls within its claimed 12 nautical mile arc.

They might be able to do some damage

[Sanity]

From what I have heard, they have quite a lot of guns on Sealand, and are clearly willing to defend themselves from foreign invasion. Now, one might argue that they wouldn't last long against the SAS - but putting SAS soldiers lives at risk (given that the British courts have recognised Sealand's right to defend itself) should serve as a significant disincentive for any invasion (as would the risk that the British government could be taken to court for mounting such an invasion afterwards).

Censorship

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

Re:Really secure?

[Bogatyr]

That seems more plausible to me than this Sealand thingy.
Plausible? Cryptonomicon was a novel. Sealand is a real and physical creation. I acknowledge your point the datahaven in Cryptonomicon has potentially longer-term chances for survival, but it's simply not real, in that you can't store your data in the fictional underground datahaven. Sealand is real in that they will take your money and host your data. I forget which writer commented works of fiction have to be more plausible than real life, even if they might contain fantastical elements. l

Don't expect Sealand to defend your copyright.

[stonedown]

"I'd post it online if I wasn't afraid of someone totally ripping it off."

Yeah, especially someone hosted by Sealand. ;-)

"Sealand currently has no regulations regarding copyright, patents, ..."

Why no .sea?

[namespan]

Why don't they have a TLD?

Anyone know?

Re:Why no .sea?

[raju1kabir]

Why don't they have a TLD?

For the ISO to assign you a TLD, you have to be a real country, or at least a colony with the potential for eventual independence.

Sealand doesn't have a TLD for the same reason that I'm not assigned a TLD every time I go swimming on the New Jersey shore.

Re:Net connection

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

You just buy the really BIG spool of Cat5...

They have submarine cables just like any other island, and I think a satellite connection for emergency backup.

Tim

Re:Collecting Taxes

[Zeinfeld]

It's not very likely, since Britain's own courts have recognized the sovereignty of Sealand.

That is Sealand propaganda. The court actually rulled that the platform was outside UK territorial waters and thus not subject to UK law. There are many parts of the world that are outside UK jurisdiction, not all of them are states.

In particular under UK law a man made platform is considered to be a ship and not land.

When the UK expanded its territorial limits the platform came under the jurisdiction of the UK courts again. HavenCo have ownership of the place under the UK squatting laws (12 years occupation).

Update & Misc.

[rdl]

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'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 :) I actually get to go to Burning Man this year, too, heh.

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 :) 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".

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 :) 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.

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.

Re:Update & Misc.

[rdl]

We get lots of publicity and wait for people to mail us. We also have resellers in key industries like gaming, but mainly we have smaller customers and consultants who send referrals. Lots of regular gaming, payment systems, etc. companies use our service.

It's mainly word of mouth; we don't really actively try to sell or market.

I'd be happy to have a p2p system as a customer, but the best ones, like MNet, are the ones which have the least need for centralized servers in the first place.

No Question about legal status of SeaLand/HavenCo

[markwelch]

I'm baffled by the occasional references to Sealand and its failed claim to "haven" status. Every court case brought has established that Sealand is not recognized as an independent nation, and residents are not exempt from taxes, laws, etc. of other nations (especially Britain).

My understanding is that anyone foolish enough to "reside" on the platform is pretty much stuck with all the obligations of the nation where they have citizenship (e.g. US citizens can't renounce citizenship by moving there, and still owe taxes and can get hauled into court in the USA).

At the same time, the typical protections of a government are not available -- I don't think the British government accepts any duty to defend or rescue,

In addition, since Sealand is not recognized by any internation body as a "nation," the British or US or any other government seeking to put a "Sealand resident" on trial could probably decide to swoop in with a helicopter and assault team and remove that person. A recent US court case found that it was illegal for DEA agents to swoop into Mexico and kidnap a Mexican national for trial here, but the case rested on the sovereign rights of Mexico as a nation. (Mr. Noriega used the same argument but failed.)

This is one of those situations that doesn't even come close to being a "close case."

Artificial islands dont

[Animats]

1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 60 (8):

• 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. As a compromise in the balance of granting artificial structures some kind of adjacent jurisdiction, and that attribution of a territorial sea would mean a unjustified encroachment of the High Seas, the artificial structures were granted safety zones with the maximum reach of 500 metres. These zones are to be publicised, and all ships must respect them, but these zones are in no sense territorial sea.

Re: Why no ccTLD for SeaLand? (.sea?)

[markwelch]

Until you asked, I had believed ccTLDs were only granted to nations that are recognized by some other government or international body (hence Cuba gets a ccTLD despite lack of US government recognition). But it turns out that once again, I was wrong, sort of: top-level domains are available for any two-letter country code recognized under ISO 3166 (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166m a/index.html).

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