Comments on: On a risk I had not considered

By: Patrick

Patrick — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:17:20 +0000

You would need somewhere big enough to put a server farm!!! Eastern Europe is the only real candidate I can think of, or possibly even an Australian State that was willing to put its own physical connections in and tell Conroy where to stick it – but not sure our latency vis-

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:49:32 +0000

Yep, the “strong infrastructure” bit matters. But it includes legal infrastructure too – you want a good commercial law system for intellectual property, etc. Just stop the buggers from actually shutting you down at the whim of some copper.

That’s probably what stopped Sealand. But Lichtenstein is the type of place I had in mind, though costs might be a bit high there – you need somewhere where server farms wouldn’t be quite so expensive to build and run.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:40:07 +0000

derrida — Sealand (the sort-of-country on an old WWII AA platform) tried that but didn’t really succeed. Maybe somewhere like Lichtenstein is what you had in mind though?

Part of what makes it a poser is that you want somewhere with reliable power and multiple sources of connectivity.

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:34:31 +0000

Some small country with decent infrastructure could gain a nice little earner by passing a law saying working servers cannot be physically seized or shut down except in rare circumstances (which doesn’t prevent court-ordered reading of contents and activity monitoring).

Like Swiss bank accounts they’d attract illegal activity, but they’d get much more volume from those just wanting legitimate security and reliability.

By: Jacques Chester

Jacques Chester — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:08:23 +0000

A similar risk with the same level of oh-crapness.

In both cases the only strategy is to reduce the risk by placing servers with different firms in different locations. In different countries if possible. I’d run a server in Australia if bandwidth prices weren’t so punishing.

By: James A

James A — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:33:12 +0000

To be fair this sort of thing happens in the private sector too - a datacentre held a hosting company's remaining servers hostage after the company started moving to a different datacentre. Although at least in this case you could sue the datacentre, good luck filing suit against the FBI.

By: Tel_

Tel_ — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 05:44:45 +0000

Suddenly the virtual machines are looking a whole lot better.

I guess, while the US govt is paying their debts in freshly printed money they don’t have to worry much about lawsuits making claims for damages :-)