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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 :-)
"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.
Hm. "Send spam, get shot in the back of the neck." I like the sound of this.
Finding God in a Dog
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.