Slashdot Mirror
HavenCo In Trouble?
Evil Al writes "News.com is reporting on the talk given by Ryan Lackey, former CTO of HavenCo, at DefCon. Lackey claims that the company is teetering on the edge due to internal upheaval and lack of customers. Oh, and 9/11, of course."
...it's the more the fact the company only had a whopping six customers.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
These guys never had a workable business plan to begin with. They were selling bandwidth at a huge premium over what it costs just a few miles away in the UK. If you are able to pay that much, you are probably doing something illegal to begin with, and HavenCo won't host you.
This was a solution looking for a problem that never materialized. The idea certainly captured the imagination of slashdotters though.
-josh
and what kind of sites were considered to be havenco material?
There are no valid reasons why anyone would need to host anything at HavenCo. In the UK you can host the same site for half of what it costs at HavenCo... and for even cheaper in the US.
Perhaps they were hoping that Napster would find refuge there?
"The key lesson on this is if you're going to put a 'co-lo' facility somewhere, political and contract stability in that jurisdiction is very important" er, yes, and i thought the political aspect was meant to be one of the main selling points, ie, it wasn't governed by the UK. perhaps they should have sorted that one out before they tried to make their billions. surely they are just a very late casualty of the dot.com bubble?
All I Want For Christmas Is My Constitutional Rights
The "gimmick" for this business was that they could host sites outside of one's own country, thus protecting one from legal liability for the content. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it demonstrated that the legal responsibility for content on a web site lies with the site's owner, not the hosting provider, and thus the owner would be held responsible under the laws of the country where he lived?
It's more likely that the king of Sealand is just exercising good sense. It has been noted more than once that Sealand has no real standing as an independent principality and that the British could take it over in a second if they decided that it was worth the trouble. I think the "king" knows this and is trying to maintain a low profile, probably moreso since 9/11.
Sealand's soverenty will last only until they cross over a line. And the line has shifted a lot closer since 9/11, Afganistan and Iraq. He's certainly no terrorist, but if he annoys someone or some company, they just have to get a court order and send the police over to arrest him. The British love an excentric, but that only goes so far.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
That's all very nice, but it makes the assumption that it had any soverenty to start with--especially when it's not even an island. Not even an artificial island built with land-fill.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It would be similar to the United States attempting to annex Cuba by extending the border a further 90 miles south.
Oddly enough, I can see that happening. The coast guard finds 1 too many ships with Cuban cigars and Bush sends a carpet bombing campaign for 3 weeks straight to "liberate the oppressed masses". This of course done concurrently with a law stating the waters are extended temporarily to 300 miles "in order to protect America from impending terrorism".
Hey, it could happen. I never thought in a million years that I'd see a time where a company is claiming ownership of Linux because of a couple lines of code, America occupying 2 other countries with the same ROE as Vietnam, and the rest of the world becoming more free than America.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Maybe so, but if not enough people need HavenCo hosting for HavenCo to survive, perhaps they need to compete as a conventional provider at least long enough to fill in some of the dead slots. So long as the incremental cost of adding servers is less than the money each would gross, this is only common sense. If the incremental cost of adding each extra server actually approaches $500/month however, then they have some serious problems.
You may think that, but that's not the case. It could only be considered a ship if it was in some way moveable. It's no more a ship than is a load of rock towed out to a sand bar and dumped. It's a fixed emplacement that was built outside territorial limits and abandoned. It may not be recognized by the crown and/or parliament as a sovreign nation, but the courts have definitely ruled that it lies outside their jurisdiction. This is de facto sovreignty, which is all that matters.
Though I agree that, if they so desired, the british government could just waltz in there and say "ours. get off." and basically render the sovreignty issue moot. Posession is all that matters here, really.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I suggest you read the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Part V, Article 60, Paragraph 8:
Sealand has no territory. It therefore can make no claims to territorial waters. Therefore the UK's 12-mile claim is not overlapping with any valid claims. Therefore Sealand is within UK territorial waters and has been for decades.
Sealand has exactly two things on its side, one useless and one which has been to its advantage so far:
The collective wishful thinking of a lot of science fiction readers.
The inertia of a UK government that has not found it worth the hassle to go after some guys on a concrete pylon in the North Sea, especially when those guys are too wimpy to host anything more controversial than can easily be found in dozens of other countries, including the UK itself.
I'll let you figure out which is which.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS