Hello from Argentina! And welcome to the Official Asgardian forums. We are very glad to have all of you here. You are invited to join the discussions and to participate of the debate, and to start your own topics. But, before doing it, I suggest you read the Posting Rules ( ). Thank you for being part of this community! :) Happy holidays to you too. Kind regards.

I totally agree with you. Just like all country's have ports for ships to bring in trade. If you are going to have to be anchored in their bay you have to pay anchorage fees then when you finally dock you have to pay docking fees. If there are problems getting your cargo off then you tied up to the dock longer you will pay more fees. If your an ocean going tub boat towing a large barge then you may be required to hire a local tugboat to help dock your barge safely. That's more cost. Of course if we have our own space stations with the capability act like a port with a dock then yes we could charge all those fees too. Plus once we are out in space I imagine that they will be able to claim an area that in a close distance from the station is theirs an will be able to charge anchorage fees.

Being a sailor, it is correct that every nation charges a fee to visit. Most travellers don't notice this because it is usually included with the price of an airline ticket. A perfectly legitimate method of revenue collection. Trouble is, we have to have some borders to cross to start with. :-). In time and when we do - I agree.

My wife is big on Christmas. I do not do holidays, personally, but do not begrudge those who do so.

There's also GPG - same thing, pretty much, but GNU. Not entirely new, decades old. Personally, I'd be using X.509 to secure communications and or provide for authenticity. PGP/GPG is good for additionally signing posts, however. For example, I already use per-client X.509 certificates to authenticate to and provide unique encrpytion for my VPN. Attention can be roused, that's not going to mean a great deal overall. Ultimately the easiest way to circumvent it would be to sign up and scrape the public content - it's going to massivley be a waste of their efforts as we should be of no interest or doing anything of any concern to them - they want to waste their limited resources then they are welcome. It needs to be encrypted to ensure privacy, not just from hostile foreign .gov and it also makes it a lot harder to mess with it en-route... You don't know what to change, where, and attempts will prevent it from decrypting. Encryption really doesn't add that much overheads. I can layer up and bounce three times around the globe with only adding about 150 or so ms onto a round trip, which is about as good as native 3G in mid to poor reception. The width remains as wide as my host - thanks to compression, actually wider. DNS poisoning only really impacts people who have no clue - so most of them - There's ways and means round this, mostly involving using another service - like using google's DNS services - or some proxy service to make lookups for you. Setting up your own inside a filtered zone wouldn't get the "missing" lookups, outside the net would work but if they was doing it properly, then that'd be isolated. Not by IP, the very lookup response itself will be rewritten as it moves thorugh. Then they can push you wherever they want. Things like DNSCrypt can actually encrypt the lookups themselves, making them hard to filter. "Better" than a namesever as easily isolated as the lookups prevented, would be to deploy OpenVPN, due to the bandwidth consumption of an entire nation, I'd sugest restricting it's scope to that of the Asgardian services. DNS then isn't required and could be local to that tunnel, which will "bypass" the interwebs and the local user's ISP.

Has anybody heard of PGP? It is a double ended PKE system that is available for all OSs. This allows each user to contain their private keys and we could have Asguardia,space hold the directory of public keys for lookup. A set of instructions would be needed for users to add/edit their entries (possibly keyed to their Asguardia ID) with their public keys. The level of encryption is likely to arouse attention from various authorities. Next question is why is the data needed to be encrypted. It does have a burden on overall throughput. Emails & files are easily encrypted and passed along with existing technologies. Getting past snooping or man in the middle issues requires more than trust in the existing CAs such as double encryption. A current trend worldwide is DNS poisioning by various governments for specific sites they do not wish their population to visit. Changing the client DNS settings to Googles can by-pass that but won't last forever. Setting up your own caching name server also solves this issue but would be beyond most people. I would suggest Arcadia setup a caching name server and make it known within the forum. This would allow the by-passing of any nations DNS issues except the banning of specific IP addresses. Food for thought.

Thanks Ryan. I'll be following closely, even if I don;t always chime in. I will definitely begin outlining some ideas and share them with others here in the forums, thank you. I hope to be integral to the Ministry of Arts & Culture, if it does in fact become an official Ministry. Any reason why it was labeled without that title?

Hello Grey Matter, Once the forums are fully implemented and we can begin organizing various projects, I certainly believe that one is worth the time and effort to organize.

Hello all! I wasn't sure if an Arts & Culture Ministry would be developed, but it seems there is something like it. Why is Arts the only non-Ministry entry in the forums? I was hoping to be involved in developing an arts council, however if this is already done, how can I be involved directly? I was willing to organize it, but would be glad to be led by others. I have a lot of experience not only as an artist, but as an organizer of art programs and events. One of the larger ambitions, which I've seen others discuss on Facebook, was the development of a repository of Asgardian art. This would be similar, I believe, to something akin to Creative Commons meets Library of Congress. Somewhere or something that enables Asgardian artists to submit art, music, animation, video, etc. to the repository for licensing and documentation purposes. I will hold off posting my proposal if this forum answers my questions. Can't wait to see what develops!!