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

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.

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

[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: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.

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: 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