: Be afraid. Be very afraid. : The world morphs before
: your eyes and your Subjects go virtual.
: Those that don't understand the jurisdictional aspects
: of this have already been left behind.
Well, to me, "to facilitate the transformation of a segment (volitional) of the global capitalist system into a new international commercial arena where sovereign individuals, trusts and corporations may operate outside the jurisdiction of any nation-state."
- reads, "kiss goodbye to any form of minimum conditions and pay for workers, ditto any environmental legislation that would damage profits, ditto anything we (the bosses) don't like". Scarcely very original or benign.
Their question "Why do we really need such people (governments) to legitimize our international business operations?" reads as more of the same.
"Surely, somewhere on this earth, we can find a host country to lease us a patch of land and agree to let us conduct our experiment in laissez-faire capitalism completely without government supervision or intervention."
- would this be prime land or damaged land?
- Secondly, will this group attempt complete self-suffiency?; as would be true to their ideals, or are they merely out to create a tax-free libertarian state for themselves whilst still trying to run exploitative business in the "world outside"?
- If they don't rely on a positive trade gap, how do they plan on stopping the net flow of wealth out of the country; and will their commitment to "no borders" remain intact when the net losers start losing their libertarian convictions and defecting to the East?
- Technical problems - they might tout their use of strong encryption; however, they use a fallible system;
"*MailVault uses 128-bit Secure Socket Layer connections and between 2048 and 4096-bit PGP encryption. See the Spec sheet." (of course, there ain't a Spec sheet)";
- so you're effectively just trying to crack a 128-bit key if you're trying to intercept traffic. See an article in last week's Sunday Times - the Weizmann Institute recently cracked a 512-bit RSA key in 12 microseconds. 128-bit is no longer secure...
- and what these people seem to have done is just lifted Hushmail, added encryption a bit stronger and passed it off as their own; obviously intellectual property isn't private in this new state...
- also, the user's transactions will only be as secure as the computer they're doing it on. Given the average competence of most users vis-a-vis security, this is a great big hole; you would merely have to infect their computer with Back Orifice 2000 and you'd be able to see everything they typed into their web browser, regardless of the encryption during sending.
(Everyone who uses a Microsoft OS (i.e. NT, Windows 95 or 98) is vulnerable to this one; since macro viruses can be written to send and autoinstall a BO2K payload using Outlook Express without alerting either the victim or carrier; another good reason to use a real operating system rather than one of Bill's abominations...
(no corporate body has ever produced an operating system worth two beans; the only two reliable and secure OSes in existence (*nix/*BSD and GNU/Linux) are the result of open collaborative projects)
Still, let these people do what they want, as long as they don't try and live in their paradise while sucking resources out of this one. And if it collapses, as it probably will, people will come to the realization that, well, maybe capitalism doesn't work.
Farinata.
