FUCK! WHO REGISTER ME TO THIS MAILING LIST? CAN YOU TELL ME HOW TO REMOVE MYSELF FROM IT? I WILL MAD! OH GOD! TOO MANY EMAIL! At 03:51 PM 1/13/98 -0800, William Knowles wrote:

On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Tim May wrote:

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At 1:23 PM -0800 1/13/98, William Knowles wrote:

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Anguilla seems to be a doing agood job on becoming a country willing on hosting data havens.

Oh yeah?

It's been a while since we talked about this (at least on the Cypherpunks list), but a couple of years ago there was much discusson on the CP list about just what items would be allowable in Anguilla. Vince Cate gave his assessment, which I found fairly nebulous, in that it appeared the Ruling Families would allow what they would allow, and not allow what they would not allow---there seemed to be a lot of ad hoc rulings.

If memory serves me right it was because Vince bounced off the Taxbomber site because it offered second passports, camouflage passports, and other products that was considered a fraud, Which to me sounds odd since there is some other company selling most everthing and then some from an .ai domain which Vince's company has the monopoly on handing out .ai domains

http://www.ultramec.com.ai

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(Given that copies of "Penthouse" are illegal in Anguilla, if I recall this correctly, and given that gun are illegal, and drugs are illegal, I rather doubt that Anguilla would happily host "The Aryan Nations Bomb Site," or "Pedophile Heaven," or "Gun Smuggler's Digest. " Or the even juicier stuff any "data haven" with any claim to really being a data haven will surely have.)

You also have to wonder how far in the future it will be before the special forces of some banana republic drops in on Vince to blow-up his operation for as he advertises publishing censored information on ones ex-president on the Internet, or for that matter I have yet to see abortion information coming from his servers.

What has happened in Anguilla proves that there will be a need for different flavors of datahavens, Different degrees libility that datahaven owners will want to store information on their servers. I would love to open a XXX WWW site in Anguilla pulling in the industry average of $5-10K a month and not pay any taxes there, But it won't happen in Anguilla with the present adminstration!

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And there are likely under a hundred oil companies looking for firms to 'recycle' their old oil platforms and drilling rigs wasting away around the world, I'm sure some might just give you one just to be rid of future liability.

Given the willingness of the French to have SDECE sink Greenpeace ships in neutral ports, how long before a couple of kilos of Semtex are applied to the underside of these oil rigs?

Given what happened with "pirate broadcast tankers," the future is not bright.

Isn't there a microstate off the coast of England called 'Sealand' run from a former oil rig/gun battery for the last 20 years?

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When the first "oil rig data haven" is found to have kiddie porn, bomb-making info, and (shudder) material doubting the historicity of the Holocaust, the U.N. will cluck and the public will cheer when it is boarded and seized, or simply sunk.

As I said in my last piece on this subject, there is no security in meatspace comparable to what is gotten with mathematics.

--Tim May

I agree completely, But there is still room for massively distrubted datahavens on oil rigs, barges, gun batteries, island nations or hiding in Norm's LAN in Cicero IL. All the harder to supress that information.

William Knowles erehwon@dis.org

== The information standard is more draconian than the gold standard, because the government has lost control of the marketplace. -- Walter Wriston == http://www.dis.org/erehwon/