Kim Dotcom now plans to give New Zealand free broadband pipe to US
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
with such quotes as:
Morgan, who was chairman of Pacific Fibre, said: "I
haven't talked to him [Dotcom] but I would be happy
to have a chat.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony of this comment. I'm unsure of how I could phrase it differently, though.
It truly is disappointing to read comments like this. The content [of your comment] isn't abjectly worthless, it's just wrapped in unnecessary hatefulness that honestly does nothing to further a high quality of discussion. Can't we do better here?
I certainly agree we could do better here but I'm not sure letting this calibre of "journalism" and the people who lap it up slide is the solution.
This content doesn't even fuel discussion. We see it almost every day under a different headline, all it does is trigger some genius to tell us how copying isn't stealing, copyright should be abolished and bla bla bla. It's digg content, and it's written to be agreed with not discussed.
So flag it and move on: if you must comment, you can do so sans ad hominem and still communicate your point.
I don't understand why a complaint about quality should itself be a paragon of lowered quality?
While Kim Dotcom might be willing to fund the cable, the issue of US protectionism doesn't go away. If the US blocked Chinese involvement for spurious security reasons, does anyone think they'll be more enthusiastic to facilitate their piracy nemesis du jour from building a haven for his new business, purportedly using money won from suing the US government for shutting down the old one?
So, yes it's pure PR, to suck in tech journalists.
Why would anyone want to host in a data center with such high latency?
Otherwise, NZ is fine for the AU/NZ market.
Iceland would be fairly ideal as a "datahaven" with 1) better laws (easy) and 2) a few more redundant fiber connections, ideally in diverse routes.
HK or somewhere nearby could work for Asia. China could make an argument that HK has its own legal system, but would be providing enough overhead cover that the US couldn't just blacklist them.
A Caribbean territory might work, too, if it's an EU country affiliated (e.g. St. Martin) with connectivity back to the EU and to the US. Someone other than France would work better, since overseas French departments are the same as Hawaii is for the US. Maybe NA or a British Overseas Territory.
Of all of the datacenters in Iceland, the majority of it is all local business, and although there always seems to be chat of how perfect it would be (cheap power, better laws, strong fiber infrastructure, etc.), the reality is much different.
So, where to start? More specific specialized services? Advertising?
The other thing would be having very clear and pro user terms of service, and whatever changes in national law are needed. Maybe some tech changes (DDoS protection?) + specific marketing to vertical markets (casinos, vpn providers, usenet, torrent sites, ...), but I'm not sure what the current state is in Iceland.
If you're doing colo, it's more knowing people and maybe having a few case studies. For some kind of virtualized/managed/etc. offering, then I'd personally judge based on terms of service, measured service quality, and how secure the administrative procedures are (i.e. no rackspace/linode style administrative override...)
Second, There are millions of people living relatively close to New Zealand, so not everyone will have high latency.
It seems like the idea here is to prevent Mega's "legally challenged" (as another commenter put it) servers from being disconnected by going all the way up the 'chain of command' and creating his own backbone. He intends to give the backbone legitimacy (to forestall any funny business at the PoP) by providing free internet to New Zealanders, thus generating large amounts of 'legitimate' traffic on the link.
Edit: Just to be clear, like rdl, I don't actually think this is a worthwhile thing to do.
You could also build a cable system with huge bandwidth, 99% legit NZ origin traffic (or onward transport from AU), encrypt everything, run the cable to Los Angeles, and then buy a bunch of transport from 1 Wilshire to various locations outside the US. Encrypt your "special" traffic all the way to the various locations, announce your routes there.
None of it is airtight or bulletproof, but you can add layers of obfuscation, some of which also slow legal proceedings (some of which are still civil, some are criminal).
Still probably not worthwhile. Ultimately the best strategy for "challenging hosting" is to replicate the content itself as widely as possible, then build some kind of blacknet to send transactions and command and control. This is capable of resisting arbitrarily strong efforts at censorship.
(A great way is to distribute encrypted data widely, then drop the key at some point in the future. That's the "wikileaks insurance file" approach.)
Just translate some of his usenet postings and you will see it yourself. http://arnold.babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt
Sadly New Zealand has very few billionaires, and the ones we do have are very risk averse. They'll pump millions into tried and trusted dairy farms and shopping malls, but won't touch things like Pacific Fibre. Unfortunately the same people run the government, so it won't take the load either.
I'm not going to comment on Dotcom's legal shortcomings, but at least he is stirring up our very staid political and business communities delightfully.