Re: Anti-Electronic Racketeering Act of 1995 (fwd)

[Ray Arachelian <sunder@escape.com>]

On Thu, 13 Jul 1995, Jon Lasser wrote:

> How about "not respecting international copyright law, and not having 
> extradition treaties with the US" ... set up a data haven, we now know 
> why we need it soon... charge by the Kbyte, automate the billing, and relax.

Seriously bad for my financial health.  I write code for a living (though 
I'm a Netware LAN Admin in this incarnation of a job.)  Going somewhere 
where I can't make money writing code because 10 billion folks will have 
it after one pays is my idea of jumping out of the microwave oven into 
the boiling lobster stew.  :-)

If such systems would be maintenance free, it would be cool going around 
place to place installing data heaven servers all over the place.

Hell a 1Gb hard drive is only $350 or so.  A cheap XT, or lap top hooked 
upto such a drive, say 4Mb of RAM and a 28.8Kbps modem would be good enough.
Say some junky assed machine no more than $500 a pop...

I would guess we could get a small enough package to hide in say... under 
the subway tunnels, or in the sewer system, and hook'em up to existing 
power lines....  Now if we could hook'em up to a phone line easily, it 
would be a great thing to have.  But how do you hook into the phone line 
without the local MaBell getting interested?

Enough of these things hooked up all over the place would be cool.  
Everyone can ftp to the server, write or read, but nobody can delete.  
When the drive is full, the server goes read only.   Instant (free) data 
heaven.  Get a few million of these up, and hey, you've got instant, 
unstopable info servers.  Very hard for any government to catch all of these.

On the other end of el-spectrum d'data heaven is the pay service.  You 
upload, you pay $5 a meg, I burn your megs on the CD.  You want the data 
back, you pay me $50 a meg and I make it available again.  :-) You'll be 
rolling in cash in no time.  I don't need to know who you are or what 
files you sent me.  Just tell me the date and time stamp of the file my 
server got your file and after I get the $50, you get to download the file.

Pay me in cash, e-cash, or no-name money-orders. :-)

Excellent business, no?  Hell, you could probably set something like this 
up in the USA right now...  Even more easily with a 1-900-$5/minute number.
As long as what you send me is something I can't see, I don't have any 
risk and neither do you.  Or you can snail mail me a 1.44Mb floppy with a 
special file name and I'll take the post_mark date and the file name and 
your $5 and burn it on the CD.

Expensive enough to keep pirates away, cheap enough to make corporate 
data worth backing up remotely.

Cost: ~$10K or so...

 Good pentium server running Linux $2K, 28.8Kbps modems ~$220
 each, need no more than 2Gb of hard drive space... (650 of which you set 
aside for the CD burning.)
 CD Burner ~$1700.
 blank CD's for $8 a piece in volume, etc.

 Good sized data-grade fire proof safe $????

You can hire high school kids to burn the CD's in or your relatives, or 
do it yourself.  Very nice setup.

=================================================================93=======
 + ^ + |  Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_    _-/  |
  \|/  |sunder@escape.com| Where day by day, yet another   |  \  --  /   |
<--+-->|                 | Constitutional right vanishes.  |6 _\-  -/_  6|
  /|\  |    Just Say     |                                 |----\  /---- | 
 + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!|     \/      |
=======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/
      /  I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet /
     / another freedom vanished before my eyes.  How soon before we see/
    /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest /
   /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/