Information Security News: Offshore hosting firm HavenCo lost at sea

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/25/havenco/

By Jan Libbenga
The Register
25th November 2008

Controversial hosting provider HavenCo - which operated from the 
'nation' of Sealand, an old naval fort off the coast of Suffolk which 
was declared a 'sovereign principality' by its quirky owner Roy Bates - 
has finally gone offline.

As of last week, the HavenCo website is gone and the domain is now 
hosted outside [1] the Sealand subnet.

Founded in 2000 by Bates' son and Michael with $1m in seed money, the 
company initially offered an everything goes-policy along with an 
offshore fat-pipe data haven. Child pornography, spamming and malicious 
hacking were strictly prohibited, but with no restrictions on copyright 
or intellectual property for data hosted on its servers, file-sharing 
certainly looked like a possibility.

However, Bates said he would readily "turn customer information over to 
the authorities if there was any serious problem with our stuff".

By 2002 the company was already in trouble when co-owner Ryan Lackey - 
described by Wired once as a MIT dropout and self-taught crypto expert - 
left HavenCo after disagreements with the Bates family over the 
management of the company. He also claimed HavenCo owed him $220,000 in 
cash and additional money in stock.

[1] http://securityandthe.net/2008/11/18/havenco-data-center-offline/

[...]


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