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."
When they first came on the scene, they claimed to not need a fire suppression system due to the fact that their entire facility had been flooded with nitrogen, thus requiring technicians to wear scuba gear to install new equipment. Does anyone know if this was true or if it was BS?
ha, that is true
but if you meant "bombers" as in "port spamming" or such, it is very conceivable. if people can distrubute music and RIAAs requests recieve no action by HavenCo since RIAA has no jurisdiction (this was exactlly HavenCo's stategy), then RIAA would be inclined to use every security hole-IP DOS attack-anything that they could come up with because again, who would stop them? Itd be cool to watch tho, it would be the wild wild west cyber.
From the article:
Tan was prepared to pay HavenCo millions of dollars to host a Web site that would let customers stream movies from legally purchased DVDs, something that was not clearly illegal because only one customer at a time could view each stream, Lackey said. The Sealand royal family balked over the possibility of bad publicity, Lackey said. "I decided as soon as I got out of the meeting that I was going to quit," Lackey said.
No wonder they're going under. They're HavenCo, they should be hosting these types of sites. They turn down hosting sites like this that seem almost custom fitted to their business model! The king of sealand must be a quirky fellow indeed.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
The GoldCasino has been there for a long time. They used to have comm link problems from time to time, but over about the last 6 months or so seem to be pretty reliable - so maybe the current execs are right and Lackey is not?
MultiPlayer Poker at TGC is a great time consumer!
It's legal status was determined a long time ago. here is a good place to start.
"On October 1st, 1987, Britain extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles. At nearly the same time, 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."
Since sealand was outside the initial 3 mile border when it was first claimed, England cannot claim sealand for itself. It would be similar to the United States attempting to annex Cuba by extending the border a further 90 miles south.
"Some nations might have tried to use this as an excuse to try to claim all of the territory of the weaker and not well recognized nation regardless of international law, however, this has not been the case. Britain has made no attempt to take Sealand, and the British government still treats it as an independent State. Prince Roy continues to pay no British National Insurance during the time he resides on Sealand subsequent to a ruling by the British Department of Health and Social Security's solicitors branch. Also, there was another fire arms incident in 1990 when a ship strayed too near Sealand and warning shots were again fired. The ship's crew made complaints to British authorities and a newspaper article ran detailing the incident. Yet despite Britain's severe prohibition of firearms, British authorities have never pursued the matter. This is a clear indication that Britain's Home Office still considers Sealand to be outside their zone of control."
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
The real truth is, you could find a colocation facility in China or other far-eastern country that would host you a hell of a lot cheaper. They are simply not competitive.
Furthermore, if I was hosting seriously illegal content on a huge scale, I would question the militarial resiliance of Sealand too. They are just a small fort, probably with no real defences to speak of anymore. Would a certain country or two we know go as far as invading it because the rampant piracy was hurting their economy? These countries have already ignored the UN's opinion on a certain military campaign very recently. At least only a very stupid country would dare invade China!
They prefer not to know who you are, they advise you use anonymous remailers to contact them, and various difficult to trace means of payment. If they dont know who you are, then how does the goverment of your country even know if you are one of their citizens? They also promise that they will not turn over your data(or did the 'kings' remarks seem to call that into question), and in the event of an armed attack on the platform they drop your disks into a vat of acid and turn over the rest of the box.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree"
Every time I fly over the Thames Estuary I look out for sealand, I've never seen it. Does anyone know if it really exists?
While I'm not surprised that HavenCo is in trouble, I find it weird just one month ago there was a slashdot headline proclaming HavenCo Doing Well. And Lackey himself posted some interesting comments about his upcoming DecCon talk. So rdl, if you're out there, what's changed?
for all those who want to know where sealand is, i found maps.
on the sealand website it lists the location as:
51 53' 42" N;
01 28' 51" E;
which is roughly ten miles southeast of Ipswitch, or twenty miles northeast of london.
the only place I could find a map of that area was on this site, where it is simply labelled "rough twr":
zoomed in map
zooming out we can see it's location relative to the coast:
zoomed out map
I saw Ryan's talk, and he made things sound a bit worse than Declan's article does (imho ofcourse)... He basically said the the whole bussiness was and has always been founded on lies basically, they never had the physical security they said they did, the few servers that reporters were allowed to see were actually *all* the servers ("more in the secure area below" was untrue, he said), they had days and sometimes months of downtime, and the time when their connectivity was the best was when they had 802.11 links to the mainland.
:)
From Ryan's story, it sounds like he was the only sane person there, but be actually probably is insane also. It very much sounded like the "owners" of sealand never understood the freedom intentions ryan had, and were *always* ready to hand things over to authorities if asked. But luckily none of their customers required an actual Data Haven, ryan said they were mostly online gambling companies with too much spare cash who just hosted there for the novelty.
Ryan is writing a book about all this, which I may actually buy. He's also still trying to sell colo service, which I would never in a million years buy after hearing his talk...
There is fraudulent business activity to the extent of criminality, which is why it is made public.
The information I have made public is entirely from public sources, so please read the defcon talk before making assumptions.
I've certainly had no shortage of work since leaving HavenCo, and am well respected in the security and networking communities.