I first found out about The Principality of Sealand watching Dave Gorman's less famous mate Danny Wallace on his mildly entertaining program How to Start Your Own Country. However I couldn’t help but feel that Sealand, comprising no more than two concrete pillars and a somewhat ramshackle iron platform known as Roughs Tower off the coast of Essex, was actually more interesting than the program on which it briefly featured on account of its somewhat bizarre history of grand events taking place on a very small scale.What’s most interesting is that it now appears to have its own specialist industry in the field of morally dubious high security data hosting, care of Haven Co. The country may be legal and beyond reproach under international law notwithstanding that it remains unrecognised by any other nation. But then again Taiwan is not officially recognised by any nation either and there’s no ignoring it particularly given the brand new tallest tower in the world in the nations capital, the appropriately titled Taipei 101.
2 comments:
Various governmental agencies have had a lot of issues with Sealand and the data haven.
Their acceptable use policy leaves an awful lot to be desired. But the problem is that legally, nothing can be done about them hosting bank Phishing sites, pornography and extremeist religion sites - and worse.
There is an awfully large advantage to hosting secure e-mail and servers in a situation where you can guarantee no-one else can have access to the data. They defend this platform with machine guns and artillery!
However - like anything else it is abused by a minority who require these facilities for their own nefarious purposes.
I can't decide if I think this is a good thing.
Yes they are certainly very clever and ultimately they can probably get away with quite a lot without interference from the UK (or other) government thanks to the dubious legal status of things.
But ultimately can't do too much to piss folks off because if the UK government really took a disliking to their activities it would be game over pretty fast hence I think their, albeit limited, acceptable use policy restricting the most socailly unacceptable activities.
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