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."

Comments

China just doesn't get it.

[Joe Groff]

The Chinese government has constantly shown how terribly naïve they are with regards to the Internet.

• They want to reap the commercial benefits without accepting the other consequences of a global computer network: namely, the inevitably open society the Internet promotes. Their feeble attempts at firewalling and sheltering their people are eventually going to collapse under the insurmountable weight of the reality that information wants to be free.
• 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.

China's always going to be in an awkward situation with regards to the Internet as long as they cling to their obsolete totalitarian, isolationist regime. Write your senators and tell them that all this dicking around with China is a farce, and must be stopped. Don't allow them on the Free Internet until they become a Free State, I say.

Re:China just doesn't get it.

[PoshSpod]

China's always going to be in an awkward situation with regards to the Internet as long as they cling to their obsolete totalitarian, isolationist regime. Write your senators and tell them that all this dicking around with China is a farce, and must be stopped. Don't allow them on the Free Internet until they become a Free State, I say.

Oh, boy. Where to begin? I think my favourite part of you post was the last line. You misunderstand the idea of freedom if you assume that you must be free to oppress others. China has a dictatorial regime, true; but if the internet is free then it should be embrace it, just as it embraces pornographers, neo-Nazis, gun nuts, religious zealots and all of the other dreadful things that we tolerate under the banner of free-speech but really wish weren¦t there.

Second point is this idea that we can force change onto countries by ignoring them. The Americans don't seem to have learned much from Castro in the last 30 years. If change is to be brought to China then the only options we have available are

to allow it to come fully into the free world and evolve

war. I know which option I prefer.

Chinese laws: genuine effort, but ineffectual

[dananderson]

"[In the] People's Daily, Xu Detian called upon the National People's Congress to pass a law banning the sending of junk e-mail."

This reminds me of my days in grad school in the early 1980s. I had two Chinese roommates. They subscribed to People's Daily to learn English (even though it had spelling and grammar errors, it was probably a good idea).

Anyway, after a while the paper began to sound repeative. It would continaully brag about some "new effort" to do something such as "end corruption" or "end pollution" or "improve education." That was done by passing laws saying "don't do this" or issuing a directive to "do that." Nothing would actually hapen, it appears, as I would read about a very similar effort a few months later.

So, although the Chinese are beginning to realize they need to do something about spam, don't hold your breath. Hopefully, they will come around some year to doing something effective . . . such as having ISPs actually respond to abuse reports and close open relays, for example.

Korea anyone?

[JPriest]

I'd say about 80% of my spam is from Korean schools. Here is a post from an abuse NG with a possible explanation for it. Myself and many others have tried a # of times to contact some of these schools for the last few months or so with no success.

Subject: Re: Korean Schools Proxy Project?

From Joel:
"> It is possible that Appleton, Wisconsin, High School has an open connect proxy on port 3128 and the Tuscaloosa Unified School District has an anonymous mail relay.
But, apparently, one group wired every K-12 school in South Korea and they made the same goddam error EVERYWHERE."

RE: from Rob
Thanks for explaining this, Joel. Somebody sent me a couple dozen spams (morts, credit card, work at home) in the last week, each relayed through a different Korean elementary school. None bothers to record the originating IP. Amazing.

A letter to the ambassador is in order.

Re:Common sense! NO open relay = no block

[gnovos]

If you have a problem you fix the problem.
We fixed a problem of recieving spam from their open relays by blocking them from sending to us.
We asked them to close their relays and they said no or didn't respond, so we blocked them.

I wonder if the trick might be to write mailservers that backtrack the email's headers and check for open relays before passing it on. No need to have an actual list, it would be automagic!

Censorship Firewalls & Spammer Blocking - Sigh

[billstewart]

It's really sad. China goes to all this work to suppress free speech and free thought for their people by hiring big American companies to build censorship firewalls to limit their access. Does that work? We can't tell, because the flood of spam that they *are* shipping out drowns the real speech by Chinese people, and is encouraging far more sites in the free world to block Chinese email than the Chinese corrupt oppressive government was successful in doing. Open email relays are easily used to forward spam, but are also useful in evading censors. It's really shameful.

Of course, if I wanted to put my Tinfoil Conspiracy Hat on, I'd say it was collusion between the unelected George Bush and the thugs in China's government to prevent cooperation between our democratic-leaning peoples, or some such rot. And if either side wanted to accomplish that, this might be the most effective way to do it. Truth is unfortunately stranger than fiction....

Two wrongs don't make a right..

[jcr]

If the spam still continues, start sending mass-mailed anticommunist propaganda to random Chinese addresses through the same open relay. This will get that open relay shut down real quick.

Sorry, tempting as that tactic may be, it's an abuse of the random addresses in question.

Depending on how much monitoring the thugs do, it may suffice just to send yourself anti-communist screeds periodically through the open relay.

-jcr