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China Wants Out of Spam Blocks
SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "Apparently, China is feeling the effects of the e-mail blocks Western ISPs are placing on Asian mail to prevent spam, as previously reported here. A group of Chinese legislators is calling for the blocks to be lifted because they're making it difficult for them to communicate via e-mail, and a signed article in The People's Daily is calling on China to ban spam. Maybe now some of the lazy admins of these spam-spewing mail servers will clean up their acts."
This, the country that works to keep free thought and communication away from their citizens? :confused:
This will make them force their admins to lock down the machines and ban spam. Later versions of sendmail still compile on very old versions of Unix, so having old hardware and software is no excuse. If they run some crappy Windows program, maybe they'll switch to Red Flag Linux, or at least some other crappy Windows program that works better.
However, at least some of the EU and USA ISPs respond to spam complaints. None of the Asian countries above have responded to spam complaints. It's not just a language problem either. I get (or used to get before my spam filters went up) technical requests (in English) from Asia as the result of USENET postings and FAQs I wrote.
I'm hopeful that one or more of the Asian countries above will clean up my act and I can remove my spam filters.
"Maybe now some of the lazy admins of these spam-spewing mail servers will clean up their acts."
Maybe some of these admins ARE the spam-spewing individuals.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The word China in Chinese means, "Center (sic) Country"
That's because, when they named their country (when the whole of the USA still belonged to the natives of America) they were the central country of their known world. Japan, Korea, Mongolia, India...
They have a very arrogant view of theirselves
No more arrogant than the US and certainly less judgmental.
I live in Hong Kong and because of them I can¦t get e-mail through to some of my family and friends. Now I¦m a decent person, I post to /. send in bug reports for open-source software and I¦ve never spammed anyone in my life but I still have to suffer these restrictions.
The whole joy of the internet is that anyone can communicate with anyone else. If an ISP were to put a blanket ban on certain websites because a few of them throw up annoying adverts there would be outcry. Freedom of communication is considered important enough that people just have to deal with the annoying side effects themselves. Why is this not the case with e-mail as well?
I hope that China does something about spam mail but this really is not the way to encourage it.
This is my sig.
Does anyone else find it ironic that China is complaining about internet traffic restrictions?
Pot. Kettle. Black.
For example, when a Californian governor-wanna-be spammed his voters (and apparently lots of Canadians), his spam provider routed the spam through a hapless Korean elementary school.
First the spammers polluted usenet, then email, now they're dicking with international relations. What a lovely bunch of lowlifes.
Reuters has an article on this topic as well.
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
Well it didn't take a very long time for this to get noticed and actioned by the Chinese. Just goes to prove, fear is a very powerful tool.
Why do we always tiptoe around China's sensibilities?
We aid them block so called subversive sites from their entire country, we tolerate crackdowns on their populace, we paper over the facts, we supress demonstration when their officials visit our countries, we tolerate the occational nuclear secret heading their way and we've forgotton about Tienemen Square.
Why? Are they as bigger threat as Russia was? Are they capable of collapsing the Western economies with the stroke of a pen? No! Their near slave labor, poor working conditions and semi-rural economy is the cheapest place to make our goods. That's all. If you want the support of the west just open up your market, keep prices cheap and keep production up.
This spam blocking is another way of making China comfortable. Maybe we are doing the right thing and eventually (because of the increased trade) they'll become just like us. We'll just have to wait and see.
e4 e5
You know, it wasn't that long ago that someone pointed out how hard it is to be removed from spam lists.
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button. I get about 10 spam mails a day. It takes about 1/2 a second to read the subject, realize it's spam, and hit the delete button. Over the course of a year, I lose 30 minutes. That's not such a big deal to me.
What does irritate me is I'm a victim of spamguards, on both ends. My web hosting service (yahoo) for unknown reasons is listed on 1 spam list. I've tried - there seems to be no way off the list. So, occasionally, I run into an institution which has walled me off.
What makes me even more angry, is that my school where I did my undergrad, (UWaterloo) has implemented global "spam protection." And so now, I can't receive emails from some of my contacts.
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered. I'm willing to give up those 30 minutes a year in order to communicate with people. As someone pointed out, that's the beauty of the Internet. If I want spam filtering software, I'll install it myself. I don't want someone else to make that choice for me. We, as users, are losing our freedom too. I'm shocked that noone seems to notice or care.
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
Probably along the line of china, the admins probably don't speak english
Idea: can somebody who speaks chinese write a standard complaint about an open relay in chinese? Just leave a blank where we can fill out the IP address.
If we've got such a standard template, the language barier is effectively broken and we're a (very) small step closer to a clean internet.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
So we've used the stick and got their attention now. The aim of the spam guards isn't to hamper communication but to enforce compliance.
So now how can we help them comply and get *.asia out of the spam blocks?
What is needed are some good translations of a HOWTO which explains the problem and how to solve it. I don't speak an Asian language but I'm sure there are some who do. Step forward now and help translate such documents!
Chinese system administrators may be leaving their mail relays open on purpose, to escape liability for not filtering "properly." If they actively make decisions about who has access and who doesn't, then they're liable for those decisions, which could be dangerous under an oppressive government. So they refrain from making those decisions at all, and leave everything open to the four winds...
They also may be trying to allow access to outsiders whose own networks may have been restricted somehow. All we see are the spammers, but there may be some important political or other communication going on here too, which they want to help keep flowing any way they can.
They want to use email, but can't accept that people don't want crap to be mass-mailed to them. This is a sure sign that China's only interest in the Internet is monetary, and that it is our duty to block off abusive .cn mail servers to show them that this bullshit doesn't play on the open Internet.
The artical is talking about China banning spamming outright which is a lot more then any leader in the US is even willing to think about. They do accept that people don't want spam and are looking to an internal solution to the problem.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You should read up on China's Internet restrictions.
All web based email is banned. You just can't go to the sites. Many political sites are banned. Many TOPICS are banned. They're on the cutting edge of scanning email for inappropriate words. Which is amazing considering email/internet is packet based.
Why do you think there was the big crack down on cyber-cafes? Did they ever let them open up again?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I've seen several threads on this story talking about the rights of the Chinese people, the rights of the Chinese government and people's right in general to communicate. But what about the rights of the ISPs that are getting spammed to death by open Chinese relays? Bandwidth costs money. Disk storage costs money. Admins taking time to play "whack an open relay" costs money. Responding to abuse complaints costs money. In our rush to protect the rights of indiviuals, lets not forget this issue isn't just about the rights of the Chinese people. It's also about the cost doing business and protecting the rights of people on this side of the pond.
Wang Wei (pronounced Wrong Way) is the guy who crashed his own plane by flying around too close to the American plane. You know that. And bombing the Chinese embassy was a mistake--perhaps your country should have evacuated it during the highly appropriate bombing of Belgrade. I guess China just wanted to be known as a supporter of genocidal maniac Milosevich. Oh well...
So typically American - force your viewpoint and "morals" on others. Why, if they don't adhere to the practices that you deem acceptable then they are barbarians!
Personally I think the US should be much more liberal with the death penalty, and actually carry it out once it has been issued, and not wait the usual 15 years. Maybe then it would be safe to walk the streets at night in US cities like it is in every mainland Chinese city I've ever been to.
Of course you, never having been to China, wouldn't know that. So much easier to pontificate, isn't it?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
I had this propblem when I tried to return a new laptop I bought (it was a mega POS) but the guy could suddenly not speak english, so I made it appear like I gave up and was just looking arround the store. so he started yapping to his buddy in Japanese (yes i can speak it decently) about how dumb and clusless I was. Well after a few minutes of this I walked back up to the counter and asked in his own language if I could return it now that he was done insulting me.
:)
The look of shock is one that i will never forget!! I also got my money back.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
The other advantage of name@yahoo.com style email addresses is that the email address is more likely to look legitimate to many users of the internet.
However, these emails are not coming from yahoo.com; usually the Yahoo address in question points to a Yahoo address that does not exist. What the spammers do is this:
- Send a forged email which has a false yahoo.com return address.
- Find an open relay somewhere on the internet to spew the email in question.
- Send off the email to zillions of netizens.
- Laugh as Yahoo instead of the spammer responsible for the spam gets the majority of the complaints.
As a matter of fact, Yahoo has a system which stops people from automatically getting new Yahoo email addresses.Now, as it turns out, SpamAssassin is smart enough to see whether a return email address with yahoo.com in it is forged; one needs to look at the "received:" headers to determine where the email really came from.
In conclusion: Yahoo is not in any way, shape, or form responsible for spam which has a yahoo.com return address on it; perhaps spammers should start spewing out large quantities of email with your domain as the return address on it so you know what it is like to be falsely accused of being a spam haven.
Now, if only DNS had an "outgoing MX exchange" record which made this kind of filtering easier.
- Sam
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