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Has HavenCo's Data Haven Shut Down?
secmartin writes "HavenCo, the self-proclaimed data haven located on the micronation Sealand, appears to be offline. Their website is down, and there have been no announcements from either HavenCo or Sealand. HavenCo has been covered here before; it was mostly known for offering hosting of content that might be illegal in other countries. Does anyone have news about what happened to them?"
Hosting on Sealand was always under the juristiction of the United Kingdom. The territorial waters of the UK were increased to 12NM in 1987. You can't legally host content in Sealand that isn't legal in the UK. If they were suggesting otherwise then maybe Trading Standards have raided them?
We're in the midst of a global economic crisis, you know?? Maintaining an offshore host must be quite expensive, especially if there's no local infrastructure to maintain such service.
Slashdotted.
should really consider setting up a real "free speech" server zone should Sealand be offline. I don't like everything on the Internet, but 99.999999% of what I find objectionable shouldn't be illegal either. Still countries, in general, make the silliest things illegal. Child porn is one thing, and that is reprehensible, but simply criticizing the state?
People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
...according to that Netcraft screen dump in the link they have changed from Linux (I also presume apache) to MS IIS server... no wonder they appear to have sunk.
This presentation outlined a brief history of the deal between HavenCo and Sealand.
HavenCo has to pay Sealand considerable amount to keep the business running there. Therefore, the recently financial crisis would hit HavenCo badly.
From http://www.bobleroi.co.uk/ScrapBook/Sealand_Fire/Sealand_Fire.html : "A security guard has been airlifted to hospital after a fire broke out on an old sea fort in the North Sea." and "More than 20 fire fighters have been drafted in to tackle a blaze at Sealand off the coast of Felixstowe." - I wonder which country's hospitals, helicopters, and firemen helped out here.
Aaah. "Thames Coastguard, Harwich RNLI lifeboat, Felixstowe Coastguard rescue teams, firefighting tug Brightwell, the RAF rescue helicopter from Wattisham and 15 Suffolk based firefighters from the National Maritime Incident Response Group (MIRG) were all called into action to tackle the blaze"
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They talked a good game and had 'coolness factor' going for them but that was about it. I don't think they had all that many clients really. What were their advantages? They didn't offer anything over a normal provider. You couldn't host anything really inflamatory (i.e. normally illegal) there because you'd just get their link cut.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I did work for a firm in 2001-2 that used HavenCo. I recall only one significant outage, which, given the advantage, was worth it for my client. Nor did we have problems with bandwidth. Anyway, I'm sorry to hear of the fire, and hope they'll recover, although I suppose it doesn't look good.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Interesting definition - especially if your replace to words in your sentence: Georgia quite obviously has no chance in Hell in fighting off Russia, they're not sovereign.
I know, this is off topic - but I could not resist.
And thinking about it: If your replace UK/Russia with USA then ~95% of all countries become "not sovereign". That's the ~95% which are not mayor nuclear powers.
So by your rationale: sovereign = mayor nuclear power and signing the "Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons" is signing your sovereign away.
Martin
The Havenco folks were well connected with the Cypherpunks group that hung out in Anguilla back during the 90s boom. It was outside the US, so legal to develop cryptography there when it wasn't quite legal here, and it was a tropical island with good beaches and a friendly English-speaking population. Some of the group are still there, and have been running the .ai country-code TLD from the island for some time (for a few years, the ccTLD's DNS server was located in a bedroom in Berkeley :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Your number is wrong on one count, and possibly another:
Britain does not have independent nuclear weapons.
States outside those five have large arsenals. India for example.
I've just spent a good half hour going through these posts, and nobody knows why HavenCo is absent. Save your time and move onto the next story...
Smivs on the intertubes!
I don't know where you got the idea that the Swiss are an army of Chuck Norris clones, but the Swiss Guard has been defeated by Italian forces before; notably, when Italy conquered the majority of the Papal states, and then Rome, leaving only what became today's Vatican.
However, there are real reasons why it would be difficult to invade the Vatican. One, the majority of the Italian population is Catholic, and would oppose such a move. This makes it a non-starter under the current democratic government, naturally, but it would be a significant problem even for a dictator. In fact, the treaty that established the Vatican City was signed by Mussolini, who was eager to appease Catholic sentiment.
Two, the Holy See has diplomatic relations with 177 states, and there are over one billion Catholics in the world. International opposition to an invasion would result in strong sanctions against the invading country, at the very least.
None of these reasons apply to Sealand, of course. In fact, there is a much closer precedent involving Italy and an island micro-nation. In the 60s, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa built a platform in the Adriatic Sea, right outside of Italian territorial waters, and declared it independent under the Esperanto name of "Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj" (Republic of the Island of Roses). Italy reacted quickly: the Coast Guard established a naval blockade of the platform, the Police occupied it, and eventually, the Navy demolished it using explosives. There were hardly any international protests, and the incident was soon forgotten.
HavenCo moved all customer servers to London sometime after I left, in 2003. Supporting evidence for this, besides traceroutes, is that the big fire, which destroyed generators and other equipment on sealand, did not affect the servers at all. Either you believe they had enough UPS capacity to ride out a multi-month power outage, or ...
(the 1ms pingtimes from routers in London is also a good sign...)