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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."
I wonder if I can convince the EU to block all mail from USA. That is where I get almost all of my spam from.
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Look at thyself before thou judge other
- 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.-Joe
dear america,
this legitimate e-mail is not spam, it is a message from china to the united states, that has been repeated 5 billion times, once for each citizen in our overpopulated ineptly run third world country.
due to the fact that we're too poor to build nuclear missles, submarines aircraft carriers etc, we have instead come up with the following excellent products for you
1. PORN! (hell EVERYONE LOVES PORN)
2. herbal viagra, (ancient chinese formula)
3. aluminum siding (houseing value-added feature)
4. free vacations to hong kong (beautiful city, except when it rains... a lot)
please enjoy these gifts and products courtousy of china.
this message is not spam to be removed from this mailing list...
a bit more about me http://www.advogato.org/person/trelane/ or my private page http://trelane.net
...that as much as you might joke that spammers should be lined up and shot, that gets a lot less funny when you're dealing with the Chinese government.
Mike Hoye
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.
Now they want us to unblock them and the answer seems fairly obvious to me. NOT until you close your relays which is why you are blocked!
Quote: "Peter Lovelock, director of Beijing-based consultancy MFC Insight, said the National People's Congress might be swayed to pass laws calling for more rigorous management of Internet-linked servers in China in order to avoid international embarrassment."
If it's such a problem that your "Chinese legislators" are getting involved they should stop complaining that they're bring punished and fix the problem.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Here is the actual article ( if you can read chinese, sorry ) http://www.southcn.com/it/ittout/200203050573.htm
-- I doubt, therefore I might be.
Spam is not free open communication: a bilateral exchange of ideas, or even a onesided thoughtful discourse. Spam is advertising. Democracy is based on the freedom to discuss ideas and differences. Especially its about allowing the expression of ideas that we aren't so fond of ourselves. If "spam" were thoughtful and attempted to express thoughts or ideas in a meaningful way, then we'd call it "journalism" or "literature", and *pay* to have it delivered in a timely manner. Its not. We don't. End of rant :-)
Given that, why is it that they can't be bothered to check their spam relays, to make sure they are "inaccessible from outside"???
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"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.
What the hell does this have to do with Poland, other than the second line?
jedrek
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.
Hm. "Send spam, get shot in the back of the neck." I like the sound of this.
Finding God in a Dog
All those emails trying to be sent but they can't because they are blocked... Keep on doing this for a while and they may just blow up.
On a different tone, if we can't ourselves pass any meaningful legislation here, why do you expect them to clean up? Given the fact 99% of the fucking spammers are from right here, the gun loving US of A, the problem with the open relays in China is just a side effect. If we had the proper laws here, maybe Sendmail would not come with relay disabled by default. We would all spend all the time dealing with this crap doing something more useful.
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.
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.
is the country that spams me the most. Usually get between 1 and 10 per day from there, half of them porn. I mean spam is bad enough but Korean porn? Give me a break please!
Probably along the line of china, the admins probably don't speak english or else couldn't give a shit to stop the spammers because I just keep getting it.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
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
but please blame the spammers, and the lazy admins who don't stop them, not their victims.
Spam basically makes email useless, it is certainly not the near real-time media it used to be. Blacklisting can make email almost useable again. Of course, it is nowhere near as useful as before the spammers took over, but at least the signal no longer totally drowns in the noice.
Unless something effective is done to spam at the political level, we probably soon have to either give up email entirely, or switch to whitelists. With whitelists, only people in your address book can send mail to you directly. Other people may be able to come through after various kinds of verification. This will cut of many once useful features of email, but at least some core functionality will survive.
Please do not blame the people who try to make email survive in spite of the spam onslaught. Without these people, email would die.
I've been blocking China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, and Korea, for nearly 2 years now.
First of all, I am not blocking mail from China; I am blocking mail from SMTP connections with a source address in the IP assignments to China, regardless of where it comes from. My preferred method of filtering is to prevent the delivery of spam in the first place. That means I block it by IP address or validated domain name. Mr. Zeng Xiaozhen needs to understand that the issue is about open relays, which intermingle mail originating from China, and mail being relayed by spammers.
More of the spam from Chinese mail servers originates from other countries because the servers are open relays. They need to outlaw open relay servers, perhaps with some very harsh penalties.
Also, since most of the open relays are older versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, it appears that software piracy is a big key here. I would assume that software systems Microsoft has sold in China came with documentation in Chinese. Pirate software often comes with little or no documentation. And what it does come with may not be the Chinese version in the first place, making it useless unless the administrator reads English (assuming most pirated software has some of that). If the Chinese government were to crack down on not only misconfigurations of mail servers, but also the use of any pirated commercial software (especially that connected to the internet), I think it would go a long ways to solving these problems. If the businesses doing this cannot afford a licensed copy of Microsoft Exchange server, maybe they need to switch to a system like Linux and use one of the Exchange-like clones, or ordinary mail software.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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);
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.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
"The majority of the junk mail (is) not created in China, so why (should) they block mail from China?" said Zeng Xiaozhen, a professor at Jilin University
Because it's being relayed through your servers, Zeng.
(Don't you just *hate* it when people just don't get basic concepts like this?)
Mr. Xiaozhen, Please take an hour, RTFM and close your open relays. Tell your friends to do the same. Until then, get yourself a Hotmail account - you're gonna need it.
-- My Weblog.
...charge the cost of the bullet to the spammer's family! :)
I like it. It's...elegant.
It's also unfair that Chinese mail servers leave the door open for spammers, whether in China or outside, to send huge volumes of junk. It's also unfair that people like yourself who live in China are not doing more to get the problem fixed. The news article this whole thread started from does indicate some people are recognizing a problem, although they still don't seem to fully understand it. Maybe it will be hard for you to get the Chinese government to crack down on the open relays. It won't be any easier for someone from the United States to do so.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Second, if you get 10/day, you actually don't have much of a spam problem compared to usenet regulars etc. I get hundreds of pieces of spam per day which is less than a lot of other people get. I manage to filter about 75% of it but the rest still takes much more than 30 minutes/year to deal with.
Third, even if it's just 30 minutes a year, which 30 minutes is it? A pinprick to the butt is much less annoying than one to the eyeball. An incoming email is an interruption almost like a phone call, breaking your train of thought and interfering with your work. A 5-second interruption several times a day is much worse than, say, no spam at all during the entire year except you're required to spend 2 hours on April 15 (tax day) looking at spam.
My filters get rid of lots of spam but occasionally catch a legitimate message, so once a week or so I spend a few minutes looking over the filtered messages. Batching them like that reduces the spam annoyance factor a lot, but it destroys the immediacy of the legitimate email.
The reason yahoo is on spam lists isn't unknown--it's obvious. Insane amounts of spam comes from yahoo addresses and has no signs of slowing. The obvious solution for you is get an address from a more responsible provider.
Recently I was helping diagnose a problem with mail delivery to a friends machine. It soon became apparent that incoming connections to the SMTP port were being blocked. After contacting the ISP it was confirmed that it was a default anti-spam measure, but they'd be willing to test the server to ensure relaying was disabled, and then unblock the port.
/forced/ to do the same thing it'd make clearing up the mess a lot easier. Legitimate, non-relaying servers would be opened back up, and it would leave the accidental servers inaccesible to spammers around the world. In fact, wouldn't this be a sensible policy for ISPs around the world?
If Chinese ISPs were
smash
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
202.0.0.0/8 contains IP assignments to many other countries. Why not go get your own list of what IP addresses actually are assigned to China.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This phenomenon is known as the "ethikul biznisman" problem. Buy a PC in a shop in China, and the salesman's English will be quite adequate, and he will also understand what you are saying. But bring it back one week later because of a defect, and he no longer understands a word of what you say, and his accent goes to hell.
As long as they want something from you, or they want to sell something, no language barriers exists. But as soon as you want sth from them, or have a complaint, then all bets are off.
Best include a link to the above-mentioned People's daily article (translation) in your complaint mail. They do understand your language, but they might not (yet) do understand the consequences of their (non)acts.
Say no to software patents.
The problem is a huge number of mail servers in China are coming online wide open for relaying. China is just in the past couple of years moving quickly to the internet. When the US started it's big growth many years ago, spamming was less sophisticated, and fewer people were involved. And the US didn't have to deal with a huge online base of foreign spammers wanting to relay through. Most new servers installed by someone for the first time on the net even in the US were open relays. The problem for China is they are just now doing all the internet expansion, and there are now a whole lot more spammers outside of the country taking advantage of the openings. Combine that with China now allowing businesses as opposed to the prior state operated socialism, there are many Chinese people wanting to find some way to get rich in business, without really understanding how to do it since it has been suppressed for so long (other than Hong Kong).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Differing from Congress how exactly? Or the UK's current parliament come to think of it.
Cheers,
Ian
There are lots of free web-based email servers out there, like yahoo.com. Get an account there to send mail from.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course, it *would* help if somebody would translate a bunch of anti-spam configuration information into Chinese and Korean.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
What a sad day, when people on /. suggest Hotmailä of all freemailers.
Seems this plaace is getting opverrun by linux-wannabes
Moritz
The key point is how effective this tactic has been, how often have we manage to 'persuade' a legislative to our view, within a week by conventional means (lobbies/petitions).
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.
Until then, quit wasting our time.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Server 1: open connection to server 2, wants to send mail.
Server 2: gets request from server 1, opens connection to server 1 to check for open relay
Server 1: gets request from server 2, opens connection to server 2 to check for open relay
Server 2: goto step 2, repeat ad infinitum.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
How did you set that? I'd like to do the same Maybe I'm missing something obvious - but wouldnt you have to make a filter for EACH asian character to accomplish this?
Don't Tread on Me
Actually, it is quite easy to make it happen: if you get a spam from a Chinese open relay, first warn the admin. Give them a week. 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.
Say no to software patents.
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.
If you produce counterfeit bills and try to spend them at my store, and I ask you to leave saying "your fake money's no good here", would you really want to try to sue me into accepting your funny money?
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.
US leaders have more than thought about it. With the junk fax law (part of the 1996 Telecom Act), the United States has already banned spam sent over a phone line.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seriously there's really not much racist slang in Chinese .... "Ghost man" is right about the most racist thing you can get there
/doesn't have it's own racial problems, but to pretend that mandarin is somehow exceptionally lacking in racist jargon is ..well..pretty racist.
Tell that to the minorities. As late as the 1950's Chairman Mao had to order the beaurocrats in southwest china _not_ to refer to the non-han minorities (miao, gui, naaxi, etc.) as "dogs" in official edicts i.e. laws.
This is not to say that the US didn't have
btw -- not sure what this has to do with closing down open relays in china. that seems like a pretty politically neutral common sense thing.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I've been having tons of Korean spam lately.
in KMail, I set up a filter (under 'settings')
if a message contains
ks_c_5601-1987 or euc-kr
it goes straight to the trash.
You can never equivocate too much.
find an open relay in the states and route all mail through it. hmm.. maybe a couple of open relays.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I admin multiple servers and would love to block all of China. Personally I've been doing on my own mail spools for years and I've never filtered one piece of mail that wasn't spam. If they ever want out of my blacklists, they are damned sure going to have to earn it.
I doubt that will happen. Perhaps Bernie will hire someone to translate his resume into Chinese and repeat what he did here to offend every IT professional on the planet.
I have a major problem with my country, the United States, because I think we are too arrogant and too judgmental.
That having been said, the above poster's statement is completely ridiculous. The United States more judgmental than CHINA? Where on EARTH are you getting your information? Yes, we are going through an extremely jingoistic phase right now, but we ain't got NOTHING on the Chinese government. Hell, the fact that I have the freedom to post this, including the first paragraph, automatically shows that the United States is less judgmental than China.
A sense of perspective, please. The United States has its problems, severe problems, but we are not Communist China nor are we Nazi Germany. Just because some of us unfairly put this country on a pedestal is no reason to unfairly dump us in a gutter.
No more arrogant than the US and certainly less judgmental. My god, what a silly statement.
God is real unless declared integer
Will the Chinese government crack down on open relays? Will it become a criminal offense? What if the Chinese government comes to view the problem as one of national security?
The spam blocks, especially the DNS blacklists, are supposed to get the attention of the operator, so he will notice the problem and get it fixed. But it seems that it is the Chinese government that has taken notice. Is imprisonment a suitable punishment for neglecting to close an open relay? How about execution? If the Chinese government moves in this direction, how much culpability for the human rights abuses that would result do the operators of the DNS lists need to bear?
I am not attempting to hand out blame, I am just asking some interesting questions.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I wish the junk fax law would be applied to email, but for now we're getting things like making it illegal to forge headers and allowing an opt out list and that's it. And those are only state by state things.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This isn't a fatal flaw with the idea at all. In fact, if this happened, it would mean the guy who wrote the mail server was a nitwit because he didn't take the most obvious precautions to prevent loops. There are several trivial ways to do it:
Keep a list of servers that you're currently in the process of validating. If a relay check request arrives from one of them, send a response without bothering to send out a redundant second relay check request (this is just common sense). This would always stop the loop on its second hop.
OR
- Get request from server X
- Check to see if X appears in local cached list of blacklisted servers.
- If not on list, generate random number t between 0 and 1.
- If t is below some fixed threshold, open connection to X to check for open relay. If t is above the threshold, just forward the email even though it might be spam.
- If X is found to be an open relay, add X to blacklist. Otherwise forward the email.
Loops would still occur but they would go extinct fairly quickly. Some spam would get through at the beginning but a torrent coming from a single relay would get that relay added to the blacklist cache almost immediately.
I agree, the Chinese government is extremely arrogant, but in some ways the U.S. government is worse. The U.S. government interferes with the governments of other countries, and kills people with whom it disagrees. Here is a collection of links from respected news sources that supports that assertion: What should be the Response to Violence?
All arrogance covers up an inability to relate. We need more socially skilled leaders.
Bush's education improvements were
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I sympathize with your situation, but I have to disagree. These blocks were put in place because the offending ISPs refused to do anything about spam. I've been out of the anti-spam discussions on Usenet for a few years now, but when I was there, Hong Kong ISPs were some of the world's worst. Sending a complaint to them would either get you no response, or, worse, the ISP would just pass it along to the spammer, who would then likely send you a few thousand messages for your trouble. Faced with that kind of attitude, responsible sysadmins did the only thing they could: block these ISPs outright.
Now we get to the part about removing these blocks. Do you know if your ISP still has a spam problem? If it does, call them and express your dissatisfaction with their service. You pay your hard-earned money to these people, and you deserve a clean, professionally-run operation. Do they have an abuse desk that responds to spam complaints in a professional and timely manner? They should. Do they have their mail servers secured? They should. Do they know who the local troublemakers (spammers, script kiddies, etc.) are and refuse to keep letting them sign up for accounts? They should. In short, when they get their house in order, the blocks will come down. It may take a while, but it'll happen. They may want to get someone to post to a newsgroup like news.admin.net-abuse.email and let folks there know that they're working to get their spam problem under control. That will get them unblocked sooner.
If you really want to get the attention of your local ISPs, look into forming a Hong Kong chapter of CAUCE. This has been done in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and India. Go to www.cauce.org and ask them how to get it up and running. If there was ever a time to do this, it'd be now.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
If you were to look at the full headers, sure, maybe the spam originates from a dialup in the US, but without an open relay in Asia it goes nowhere.
The vast majority of spam is bounced off open relays in Asia, predominately Korea, and China...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
The U.S. government kills people all over the world. The Chinese government kills its own people. They are both terrible.
Bush's education improvements were
I won't. If they stop the open relaying, I'll remove the blocking of their mail servers. I'm not blocking their mail servers because of Chinese government blocking web sites; I'm blocking their mail servers because I don't want to have spam delivered to my servers, and I happen to know spam comes from their servers. To me it's strictly an orthogonal issue. I'll leave my hidden SSL proxy open for my Chinese friends, though.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
unfair? yes
ineffective? no
The problem in China is that a very high proportion of the servers online are open relays. I dare say this could well be in excess of 90%. To simply block them one by one when spam arrives is ineffective. More spam comes from the next one as spammers (substantially in the US) just move on to the next relay. This proportion is staying high because system administrators do not close the relays. Certainly this can be due to the language barrier. I cannot write in Chinese, and they likely cannot read English. Moreover, because of their inability to read English, they may not understand the nature of the spam going through their server (from the US, back to the US, peddling junk). If they even notice at all, they notice an overload that at some point dies down. The server likely gets DoS'd for a while and the spammer stops using it and moves on, probably not coming back to that one for a long time. To the sysadmin, it was just a day or two the server wasn't working right. Now their mailbox is full of complaints containing spam, none of which they are able to read. So the problem does not get fixed. The percentage of servers that are open relays remains high. Spam still comes through. Sysadmins in other countries get tired of constrantly tracking a moving target and pull out the big guns, download the APNIC or TWNIC assignment tables, load the database, and watch the spam load drop in half in one day.
I have not been able to identify a single good ISP in China. Every one I know about, I know of because they leak spam. Certainly there are some I don't know about, and there could be a good one in there. And it's certainly not fair to them, as I'm sure they'd love to expand their customer base, but their good deeds still don't get them anywhere.
The problem is pandemic to China, Korea, and Taiwan. It's easy to conclude its a cultural thing. And you know what ... I haven't ruled out that this plays some part. A lot of that spam actually originates right there in China (or Korea or Taiwan). I simply have no idea how widespread it might be perceived as just a normal way to do business.
I do make an effort to be sure I don't block other countries. I get the assignments and then aggregate the assignments by country code. The assignments for CN, HK, KR, and TW then get extracted and used to build the hash table my Postfix daemons use to block the mail, in addition to other data, including some other IP ranges, many dialup domains, ORDB, ORBZ, and any server which fails to have a reverse (PTR record) DNS name which resolves forward (A record) back to the connecting IP address. I'm getting an average of 1 spam in my inbox each day, and hundreds per day banging on the locked door (counting all of them, not just Chinese or Asian). If I were to today open up China, I'd probably get 40 times as much spam as I get now (since I have most all of it effectively blocked now).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem with that idea is that most of those are either already closed, or are blocked. Of course there are still some open relays. You'd have to find a fresh virgin one if you want your mail to get through.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's nice that they are fighting open relays but I prefer to fight spam another way
http://www/lenny.com/spam/
Im all for any method that fights spam
http://Lenny.com
Are you available for rental? That kind of thing would come in handy a lot, and I suck horribly at languages.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You don't have any right to decide whether the service handling your mail offers an unfiltered inbox. It's their choice. If they decide that for whatever reason (say bandwidth, or disk space, or customer preference) they only want to offer filtered mail service, well, that's their right, and you can go be someone else's customer (or run your own server) if you disagree.
I care very, very much about protecting legitimate rights. On the other hand, people who claim "rights" that don't truly exist (such as "rights" that are truly nothing but obligations on the part of others) annoy me to no end.