[wordup] Sealand burns, HavenCo no more.

[Adam Shand]

I hadn't realised exactly how messed up the deployment of HavenCo  
was, but this presentation from Ryan Lackey at Defcon11 is fairly  
telling (assuming it's accurate):

http://www.metacolo.com/papers/dc11-havenco/dc11-havenco.pdf

It's interesting to me that, once again, a great idea fails simply  
because of not taking care of the *basics* of business:

http://www.havenco.com/

You can find pictures of "Sealand" here:

http://images.google.com/images?q=sealand&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images

This story has more details on the actual burning of Sealand (beware  
bogus spaces):

http://www.eadt.co.uk/content/eadt/news/story.aspx? 
brand=EADOnline&category=news&tBrand=EADOnline&tCategory=zNews&itemid=IP 
ED24%20Jun%202006%2009%3A12%3A24%3A070

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Adam.

From: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/26/sealand_blaze/
Crypto utopia Sealand ravaged by fire

By Andrew Orlowski

Published Monday 26th June 2006 10:56 GMT

Fire has damaged a World War II gun emplacement seven miles off the  
English coast. Better known as "Sealand", the fort was acquired in  
the 1960s by Roy Bates, who declared it an independent principality.

One man was airlifted from the platform after fire broke out in the  
generator room on Friday. Eyewitnesses reported heavy damage, and the  
blaze was left to burn itself out.

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A public statement from the Sealand government said: "Due to a fire  
in the generation facility of the Fortress structure it has been  
necessary temporarily to evacuate all civilian residents to  
alternative accommodation as a matter of safety. This situation is  
expected to continue for the next 96 hours, and an update will be  
issued within this time."

When Bates purchased the fort, UK sovereignty extended to structures  
only three miles from the shoreline. This has since changed, bringing  
Sealand within UK jurisdiction, and the principality remains  
unrecognised by any other state or international treaty organisation.

But in recent years the ambiguity of Sealand's status prompted one of  
the more fascinating experiments in technological utopias.

Bates' son Michael - Prince Michael of Sealand - blessed an  
experiment to create a crypto data haven on the fort, and became head  
of the operating company HavenCo in June 2000.

To the dismay of investors and cypherpunks, the venture wasn't a  
success. Ryan Lackey had moved to the fort in 1999, hoping to  
establish a safe location for privacy services such as anonymous  
remailers, and experiments such as anonymous digital cash. [July 2000  
Slashdot Q&A]

In a presentation to the 2003 DefCon convention, a former employee  
described how internal politics and a lack of investment backing had  
thwarted the experiment. Contracts were broken, the bandwidth never  
materialised, and the location was vulnerable to DOS attacks. At the  
time of his 2003 presentation, HavenCo had no new customers, and had  
seen several of its existing customers leave.

"Sovereignty alone has little value without commercial support from  
banks, etc," concluded Ryan. Inviting us draw our own conclusions as  
to where the real sovereign power lies. Banks don't like cash they  
can't count or control.