Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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.