On Thu, 15 Aug 1996, Arun Mehta wrote:
I'm sure this has come up before, but what would prevent a server being located on a buoy or something at sea outside territorial limits (or when satellites become cheaper, on a satellite itself) offering such services?
Something that I thought would make an excellent data haven would be older offshore oil platforms, Their size would allow extended living periods, electrcity and communications are in place, They are generally built outside of the territorial waters of most countries to avoid any damage to the shorelines if oil spilled (possibility for becoming its own country?) and with the hoops that Shell Oil went through to please Greenpeace with its last oil platform. You have to wonder how cheap these could sell for just to get them off the oil companies hands?
Comments or suggestions?
William Knowles erehwon@c2.org
(The machine crashed when I was writing this letter, so if cpunks got two, I apologize.) How would this rig be defended? Pirates still exist. Even if you can give them something to think about with a 30/06 bullet at their waterline, there are always small countries who have navies that can be hired. They may be small and defenseless compared to the US navy, but against a basically unarmed oil rig, do have the ability to sink the rig at their whim. Its ironic that I am playing Devil's Advocate with data havens, but have the only working input/output code for one that I know of. (I have been having problems with it, so until I work some bugs out I haven't put it for offer via FTP.) I think for now try to make something that uses the same technology as a data haven -- An offsite secure storage server. Discussed in this list about a year ago, this uses data haven code, and is equivalent to a sufferance remailer, but at least these can exist. The first step is having them exist overtly first, and having "terms of service", then working on DC-nets, "RAID" DH's, etc. I have a tokenlike system -- "Storage Noodles", but haven't gotten it working reliably yet.