4 ms·

“high-speed link would make New Zealand an attractive location for data centers” Why would anyone want to host in a data center with such high latency?

• shell0x 14y ago
  Kim Schmitz isn't the smartest person and just has a second lower education. He isn't a hacker as well and not good with computers, so how should he notice it? He had luck that he got rich with fraud, but that doesn't make him a business man. He was and always will be seeking for attention to overact his missing skills and low IQ. Just translate some of his usenet postings and you will see it yourself. http://arnold.babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt http://arnold.babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt
  • jlgreco 14y ago
    He legally changed his name to Dotcom.
  • atomical 14y ago
    A lot of non-hackers are good programmers. Just sayin'.
  • lostlogin 14y ago
    Why does his level of education impact on this? He has made several intelligent and important people in New Zealand look rather stupid - so at a bare minimum he plays a shrewd political game.
• grecy 14y ago
  For starters, at least the US government wouldn't have their fingers in my data. I'd tolerate high latency for that. Second, There are millions of people living relatively close to New Zealand, so not everyone will have high latency.
  • lostlogin 14y ago
    Yes they would. It might break our laws, but when there is a chance to try and impress the US, NZ politicians and bureaucrats are sure to take it. See the current Dotcom saga.
    • bathat 14y ago
      Any pipe to the US would have challenges on the northern end as well. The connection has to connect to something, after all, and the US government could just as easily apply pressure at the point of presence to any backbone provider who peers with "MegaPipe". 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.
      • rdl 14y ago
        There are some international treaties about submarine cables (mainly voice termination) which make it somewhat better than "they'll just unplug the pipe at the other end"). Mainly a cable system which goes from NZ to US might have to carry traffic from NZ to US to MX even if it blocks NZ to US traffic. This may extend to other traffic. (some of this is human rights related, and I mainly know the EU/UK versions since that was what was relevant to me, and pre-9/11. The US is a special case of a country which both can and does do essentially whatever it wants. Running your circuits to a bunch of other countries would make more sense.) 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.)
• rdl 14y ago
  He's going for the "legally challenging hosting" market. 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.
  • s_henry_paulson 14y ago
    As someone who operates a fairly large datacenter in Iceland, I'm open to suggestions on how to cater to the "datahaven" crowd. 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?
    • rdl 14y ago
      I'd probably focus on disaster diversity and "able to serve US-East and EU from a single datacenter". US-West (OR) + Iceland + Asia potentially better than US-West + US-East + EU + Asia. or US-East + EU + Asia. 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...)
• mayneack 14y ago
  It would be fine for something that's primarily data storage like megaupload.