Slashdot Mirror
China Blocks Spam Servers
clafarge writes "I just read in the AP's LiveWire that, as reported by Xinhua News Agency, China has blocked 127 mail servers which it identifies as major sources of spam. Oh, happy day. They also published a list of 225 spam servers around the world just last month."
Guess they're following through on
this.
That's IT? Jeez, me, myself, and I (plus my wife :) @ home have gotten about a dozen emails today (legit).
Didn't _see_ any spam, but the logs surely show 685 rejects from known previously spammed us IP's.
169 IP's made it known through various methods (ie: we don't KNOW anybody outside the US...) that they would probably spam us.
55 messages/IP's (slow day, typically a couple of hundred) were harvested from trap addresses.
To date I've had to unblock one (1) such IP at home (work is up to maybe a dozen now) that got caught in the traps. As email flows in, and not blocks, those IP's are reverse-harvested as OK. A problem child will become evident quickly. Damn, still trying to build the perfect mouse trap as a people, eh?
IP's that have made themselves KNOWN to be a problem for us? Up to 117,469,666 as of midnight tonight. Yeah -- that's 117 million IP's blocked. Only about 3% of the total ~3.9-4 billion IP's assignable.
127 mail servers. Bah -- child's play...
Oh -- and the number of spam's that I personally saw today? I think one, which the Mac highlighted for me and dumped it. I know the wife got worried her pecker must be too small a couple of times today...
So now China can only get mail from the rest of the world, but not from inside. That's the deal, isn't it?
Wow, between this and the Aussie who voluntarily decided to stop sending SPAM a few weeks ago, things are really looking nice for the rest of us. For now, anyway.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
YAY CHINA!
Wait, that doesn't sound right...
All my asian college friends can no longer send me a suggestions on how to increase my breast/penis/bank acount. I guess there are always Carribian islands.
So is China evil because they censor the Internet? Or are they good because the block spam?
:)
Hard to see the world in slashdotter green-and-white, is it?
Being in China myself, I can't wait to see if this measure will block the 200+ spam emails I get every day. That would rock, evil-communist-empire-decree or not.
...but you're missing out. I just refinanced my mortgage for the third time this month, helped get a chunk of change out of Nigeria, and finally broke nine inches!
This last week has been slow for spam.
The Sobig.F is just eating my bandwidth though.
Yay Exim, at least I can fight back.
Is it possible that these "spammers" are actually servers with legit users sending "illegal material" to China via e-mail? "Illegal Material" in this case would include anything that speaks out against the Chinese governent, or reveals news articles from unapproved sources.
If this is the list of servers they admit to blocking, just imagine what the list they aren't showing the world looks like.
Uh huh. Blocking "spam" servers. Wonder how long it'll take before this becomes the convenient excuse for blocking servers espousing such dangerous ideas as freedom and political/ideological dissidence. Not that they don't do it already, mind you, but it would provide a nice, PR-friendly reason. After all, everyone wants to stop spam, right? Screw the constitution, get your shotgun, and let's go find the spammers?
Spam, child porn, and terrorists seem to be the current Horsemen of the Infocalypse. A couple of the old favorites, money launders and drug dealers, don't get so much press these days.
For the predictable /. of the story:
China Moves to Block Spam Servers
The Associated Press
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; 11:47 AM
--
In its latest battle against junk e-mail, China has blocked 127 mail servers it identified as responsible for spam, the official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday.
"This has been the first large-scale spammer blockade launched by the Chinese Internet industry," Ren Jinqiang, an official with the Internet Society of China, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
The crackdown came as Chinese Internet users complained they were being bombarded daily with hundreds of junk e-mails, Xinhua said.
Ren said e-mail messages from 127 servers will automatically be refused. Xinhua said the sanctions would be lifted after the servers stop sending junk mail for three months.
Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere, Xinhua said, without providing other details. It did not say if other countries were being inundated by spam from the same servers.
Internet service providers in the United States and elsewhere sometimes resort to blocking specific servers in their war on spam. Those efforts succeed in curbing the number of junk messages reaching subscribers, though they can kill legitimate e-mail as well.
Ren said the blacklist resulted from a month of monitoring by the state-run Internet Society of China, a group of 140 members drawn from private companies, schools and research institutes. The Beijing-based group aims to promote the development of the Internet throughout the country.
Last month, the group published a list of 225 spam servers around the world.
With 68 million users, China has the world's second-biggest online population after the United States, according to government statistics.
Internet use for business and education is encouraged, although the communist government censors chat rooms and tries to block access to foreign sites run by dissidents, human rights groups and news organizations.
Spammers will ALWAYS find a way to send their unwanted garbage around until SMTP is upgraded/replaced with something more secure.
If China really cares, they need get Chinese companies to stop hosting these asswipes.
So where is this list. I'll block the same servers.
I guess that China's GNP is going to drop by 25% as one of the biggest Chinese exports. I wonder where Ralsky will go?
Fight Spammers!
I think that it's sometimes a quite good idea to block spam, but I should leave this to corporate or private spamfilters, for maybe you block a server that acutally also relays "normal" mail traffic. If this spam blocking is done in China, it may very well look like censorship, because who guarantees that - accidentally if course - no mail servers that support civil rights activists are listen on the block list?
Here in Austria most ISP have Spam filters, but it is up to you if you use them or not, and I pesonally have my own customized Spam filtering. I my opinion gouvernment controlled AntiSpam solutions produce too many false positives to be useful, and especially in this case, it looks like censoring mail, all under the cloak of "protecting" the people from unwanted spam
".Sig Stealer" was here
Future Assassin
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere, Xinhua said, without providing other details.
Now we see the real agenda here. This is just another round of annoyances that China is imposing on Taiwan. Nothing to see here, no real spam blocking, just more propoganda.. or perhaps (tin foil hat on) they are blocking political messages/organizations from Taiwan and elsewhere?
I think that is actually more likely.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
That's in contrast to efforts to contact the named administrators of a given block of IP addresses in other countries. Not always responsive but it's been known to happen which creates a contrast.
Good to know they'll try to quash what they see as SPAM when it affects themselves. Be nice if they'd "act globally" and put a halt to practices regularly carried out by servers in their balliwick against users and servers elsewhere.
Quoth he
"It's all academic anyway..."
I guess when they upgraded from an 8 bit OS, they can block more. :)
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
If ever there was a market for penis enlargement...
Effective solutions to the problem of spam will need much more sophisticated approaches than just blocking based on the content of email headers. I have read some proposals, but none yet that seem both effective and easy to implement.
Think of all the small penises neglected.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
Wow... that must have been the hiccup I saw in my Inbox between 07:08 and 07:11 while pouring cream into my coffee...
Mnem
"It takes a special man to water his lawn with an eyedropper."
I had complained countless times to the Chinese whois contacts without positive result.
n l, inf2@fmprc.gov.cn, chinaemb_in@mfa.gov.cn,china@opendf.com.br, webmaster@chinaembassy.bg,chinaemb@soficom.com.eg, info@chinaembassy.org.nz,consul@chinaembassy.org.n z, administration@chinaembassy.org.nz,culture@chinaem bassy.org.nz, science@chinaembassy.org.nz,defence@chinaembassy.o rg.nz, education@chinaembassy.org.nz,chinaeco@paradise.ne t.nz, webmaster@chinaembassy.nl,adm@chinaembassy.nl, culture@chinaembassy.nl,commercial@chinaembassy.nl , jiaoyu@xs4all.nl,military@chinaembassy.nl, scitech@chinaembassy.nl,culture@chinese-embassy.no , webmaster@chinaconsulate.org.nz,webmaster@chinaemb assy.org.tr, webmaster@chinaembassy.org.zw,webmaster@embajadach ina.org.pe, press@chinemb.fi,consulate@chinemb.fi, culture@chinemb.fi, edse@chinemb.fi,office@chinemb.fi, fin.shangwu@kolumbus.fi, chinaemb@simnet.is,chinacom@islandia.is, chinaemb@012.net.il, info@china-embassy.or.jp,consular@chinaembassy.org .np, culture@chinaembassy.org.np,embchina@adetel.net.mx , chnempng@daltron.com.pg,embaixador@embaixadachina. pt, conselheiro@embaixadachina.pt,politica@embaixadach ina.pt, cultura@embaixadachina.pt,militar@embaixadachina.p t, chancelaria@embaixadachina.pt,consular@embaixadach ina.pt, chinaemb_sa@mfa.gov.cn,political@chinaembassy.se, consular@chinaembassy.se,administration@chinaembas sy.se, military@chinaembassy.se,culture@chinaembassy.se, science@chinaembassy.se,moftec.swe@swipnet.se, info@cnedu.nu, protocol@chinaembassy.se,webmaster@chinaembassy.se , CHINA-EMBASSY@BLUEWIN.CH,chinaembassy_tr@fmprc.gov .cn, sinoem@zol.co.zw,chinamission_un@mfa.gov.cn, fmco_mo@mfa.gov.cn,minister@legalinfo.gov.cn
I managed to get a Viagra shill site yanked. That happened after a mail filter misconfiguration caused over 4000 e-mails to be sent to to the host (china-netcom.com)
I've heard that people have had some results by CCing their complaints to every known Chinese ambassador contact address:
chinaemb_in@mfa.gov.cn, secretary@chinaembassy.nl,political@chinaembassy.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Damn, they should've used an unsigned char. They could've closed 255 instead of only 127. Or they could've used an int and closed 2,147,483,647.
I don't think an unsigned int, nor a long long would've been necessary.
*begin tongue in cheek mode*
But where will I get my viagra? How can I loose those extra inches I dont' want and gain the stronger thicker inches I have been promised? How will I ever live longer without my supply of DHEA - or how will I ever find term life insurance or a good mortgage rate?
*end tongue in cheek mode*
*begin rant*
Any help is appreciated - but I'm afraid that unless you take the consequences to the spammer out of the cyber world and put it into the real world nothing will stem the flow of SPAM. For example; when a spammer is hurt in his/her-> it's pocket book, or they get jailed with a large inmate who calls them "my personal love chicken", then and only then will they stop. I favor baseball bats and the angry mob approach, your mileage may vary.
Pressure must continue to be exerted on ALL spammers and their customers. Lets face it China did this because enough mail providers had blackholed the entire continent of china and chinese business men were resorting to hotmail/some other method to communicate and it cost them MONEY. It took the consequences out of the cyber world, and put them into the real one.
*end rant*
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I think most people have something like "DENY * FROM *.cn" in their firewalling / mail filtering (including probably many people in China)..
Why don't they just make it a crime to run an open mail relay? I mean - you can get locked up in China for reading a web page why not increase the scope to running an unsecured mail relay?
Why are you comparing spamming to white-hat hacking or file-trading?
Spam is theft of service and trespass to chattel. It is a crime where there is a clear victim and clear damages. In file-trading the damage is much less tangible and with white-hat hacking it's nonexistent.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Mail?
He was a Bad King, but a Good Thing
No, I'm not arguing that spam is "free speech". I hate it as much as anybody, and I'd kill for a simple solution to it. But if you believe in free speech, you do not want any kind of central authority controlling who is allowed to send email.
Spam is a problem because individual recipients have no control over who can send them email. The only solution is some kind of digital certificate system, so a spammer can't establish a new identity simply by opening creating -- or forging -- a new email address. Any anti-spam measure that isn't based on recipient control, not server control, is going to be both ineffective and dangerous to civil liberties.
Uhmmm... Pardon me, but just by posting these guy's emails publically didn't you just let them in some of the spam 'goodness'? :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Imagine that. You are blocking IP on your email server.
Only if there was a central repository of known spammers so that I too could get a hold of that list. Think of how cool that would be. It would also be handy for people who got blocked by mistake. They would only have to one place to get themselves unblocked instead of complaining to hundreds of people.
Maybe we could call them RealTime Block Lists (RBL) for short.
Nah it would never work. As soon as people started using the list the spammers would attack the servers with a DDOS or something and the whole thing would be useless.
Now only if there was a distributed system like that...
War is necrophilia.
Now, does the belief that my penis is to small count as opinion? what if the mail consists of the characters 'tretretrdytreye' - opinion? what about if the mail consists of a self-replicating Word macro. Is that an opinion? and would it be a restraint of free speech to turn macros off?
Not intended as a flame, but there are interesting gradations here. It could be argued that spam, like the person who shouts 'fire!' in the movie theatre, is actually a DoS attack
(Not available in Florida.)
>Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, .tw servers should be no problem for .cn, but it's not blocking any spam not going to .cn addresses ?
.cn - great!
:-)
blocking
>eight were from the mainland
wow! 8 servers from
leaves how many still open ? 2^24 ? more ? less ?
>and 29 were from elsewhere,
that surely will save us from lots of spam NOT
nice of them to tell all the world that thy block 127 servers from sending mail to THEM, but i am afraid that won't save the whales or the rain forrest in the very near future
The Outlook 2003 filter seems to do a good job at recognizing spam from not spam. Still a few emails get through that are spam, and ocasionally some legit emails get put in the spam folder (I noticed that the OSDN Newsletter gets put in the spam folder - .. is'nt that funny ;) ).
I heard that earlier whole netblocks from china/asia were blocked by ISP's in the West as there were lots of spam relays there that the admins would not shut down.. maybe this will change now.
China may not have a good human rights record (nor does many other countries though) but maybe in the war against spam a communist country is the cure.
// instant - "I for one welcome our new Decaff Coffee-Flavoured-Coffee Overlords"
I'm not so sure I like the idea of the Chinese going haywire blocking spam sites, even if spammers are evil, and even if our mail servers have most netblocks registered in China blocked to start out with. As several other posters hint at, free and unfettered access to information is a good thing, and something that can only help Chinese (and every other society)--if the government is encouraged to start blocking sites, I can see the potential for abuse. Not like they do that sort of thing already.
What I wonder, though, is whether the spam site operators will fall into the category of repressed individuals, and start using some variant of a distributed proxy (just the other way around) to get around this sort of restriction?
In any case, I think the Chinese government should be encouraged to use more traditional means to deal with spammers and their ilk--after all, let's face it, it's what we've all been dreaming of doing to Sanford Wallace and the rest of the DMA.
"Now you too can choose from the best quality peoples' labor camps, right on the internet!" Bang.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Phone?
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
You've gotta applaud the Chinese government for censoring spam mails given that the populace cant even read the bulk of them (yet). Thankfully the chinese language spam market is still fairly limited and hopefully this will nip a potentially very big problem in the bud. Having lived and worked in china i can say with confidence that their internet filtering systems are weak at best and easily circumvented, even by accident. Most of the time they just filter according to URL, e.g. www.cnn.com would be out but europe.cnn.com would work. No content based blocking occurs at all, for example if you find that you cant read CNN in china (which is usually the case) you just go somewhere that you would expect to pretty much mirror the content (e.g. The Sydney Morning Herald) and read away to your hearts content. As well it is interesting that chinese language taiwanese news sites are censored but english language taiwanese news sites are not. Having said all this i must add that most (read 99.99%) of the internet population in china couldn't be the least bit interested in reading american-biased news or cheap CD offers, and trust the US government almost as much as most USians trust the Chinese government.
Companies turn to alternate options like chow-fun and won-ton
Desi Noise, Live!
I believe the real issue is censorship to promote freedom (or rights that value such as equality, peace and yes - no spam). If this move by the government does reduce spam and doesn't stop any information from being sent, then, it is a positive move.
After all, if my penis grew by 100% overnight, I think my wife might complain :-)
You'll find the list of banned mainland addresses HERE, the list of banned Taiwan addresses HERE, and the list of the other banned addresses HERE. There's a long report in Chinese about the blacklisting HERE; it notes the special effort China's made to close open relays nationwide.
Here's the list of 29 banned addresses outside the Mainland and Taiwan:
1. 200.84.154.28 dC8549A1C.dslam-01-1-2-01-01-01.acr.dsl.cantv.net 2. 24.29.146.158 (RoadRunner) 3. 64.15.239.131 mail.bigfoot.com 4. 65.54.247.110 bay2-f110.bay2.hotmail.com 5. 66.218.66.101 n33.grp.scd.yahoo.com
6. 66.218.66.103 n35.grp.scd.yahoo.com 7. 66.218.66.106n38.grp.scd.yahoo.com 8. 66.218.66.66 n11.grp.scd.yahoo.com 9. 66.218.66.72 n17.grp.scd.yahoo.com 10. 66.218.66.73 n18.grp.scd.yahoo.com
11. 66.218.66.77 n21.grp.scd.yahoo.com 12. 66.218.66.80 n24.grp.scd.yahoo.com 13. 66.218.66.84 n28.grp.scd.yahoo.com 14. 66.218.66.92 n8.grp.scd.yahoo.com 15. 66.218.78.131 web40514.mail.yahoo.com
16. 207.199.160.40 (Crosslink, US) 17. 216.33.121.8 www01.rfaweb.org 18. 195.147.87.107 ip03.afrocari.adsl.gxn.net 19. 80.49.187.11 pd11.ostroleka.sdi.tpnet.pl 20. 61.41.62.138 (Mobile Leader, Korea) 21. 203.251.44.102 (Taejon, Korea)
22. 210.121.220.77 (Woosung, Korea) 23. 211.186.145.100 (Thrunet, Korea) 24. 211.198.226.96 (Korea Telecom) 25. 211.206.199.2 (Sunchunac, Korea)
26. 202.144.67.19 (Satyam Infoway, India) 27. 193.162.153.2 (Tele Danmark) 28. 24.81.222.210 h24-81-222-210.vc.shawcable.net 29. 202.163.130.7 (Online Training, Australia)
Do as my Professor: reject all emails originating from .com adresses!
.com emails.)
(This is not a joke! He really does reject all
Unfortunately, I'd guess that almost all of those sites are sending spam in Chinese. I get very little of that - almost all the spam I get from China is in English, though there does seem to be less of it than there used to be.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Come on, guys, everybody knows that the spam capital of the world is the beautiful Boca Raton, Florida: in spanish and in english.
China ha nothing to do with this.
Res publica non dominetur.
I blocked the 218.0.0.0 class A long ago. Most of 202.0.0.0 as well. I see tens of thousands of failed attempts every day from those chunks of the net. I don't care what the propogandists say - they're only getting out of the blocklists when all the connection attempts die down.
If you like censorship then this is great news! Otherwise ask some privacy and to be left the hell alone as We the People are the Internet.
if we can just block AOL, Yahoo, and MSN from doing spam at a corporate level.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
> Why isn't spam free speech?
For the same reason shouting at 2 AM is not free speech.
Why isn't spam free speech?
Because it costs the recipient money. Why isn't it free speech if I spray-paint the number of my autobody shop on your car while you sleep? Why isn't it free speech if I take your credit card number and use it to pay the postage when I send you an ad in the mail.
Spammers have a right to express themselves -- just not at the expense of others.
Does anyone have a good list of verified open proxies? DSL and Cable connections that should not be running SMTP traffic? This seems to be the main source of Spam.
This feels good...
I've been using Spamcop on my personal accounts for a while now, and blocking all email from China, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Analysing the held queue now and again, it was amazing how much of this crap was coming out of China.
Guess it shows that if enough organisations are prepared to ignore their torrents of junk, things start to happen.
Information wants to be beer.
If you post more than 3 -1 comments in a day you're banned. You get a message saying that "it's your turn to sit in the corner. If it wasn't you it's a chance to haunt them down" and then gives an MD5 of the IP/date/time.
It happens to me all the time.
So stop this anti-china crap. They say: either hunt down the spammers or you can't post in china.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=linford-A379E 8.17102005092003%40news.supernews.com&oe=UTF-8&out put=gplain
The shyster representing the spammer's org tried to drop his frivolous case. Spamhaus won't let him! Not unless he pays legal fees! Aritcle in today's Wired.
Oh, the URL above, a post by head of Spamhaus, lists the home address of the shyster's atty:
MARK E FELSTEIN
2207 S CAROLINA AVE 22
TAMPA, FL 33609
Sorry no email address provided. Sure would be a shame if someone got mad at him and signed him up for junk snail mail.
In Communist China, it's not the spam bugging you, it's you bugging the spam.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Don't get me started on this...
Free speech doesn't include STEALING! Effectively, spammers STEAL directly from their recipients. We all pay some fee or another for access to the Internet. ISP's must pay their employees and purchase equipment and bandwidth. As more and more human and electronic resources must be dedicated to the stopping of SPAM - including the upgrading and installation of gear to filter the stuff, or simply to handle the traffic, expansion of bandwidth resources to keep themselves above the threshold of that used by SPAM coming in, increased customer support due to the onslaught - ISPs have to increase their rates. This is the simple way to look at this. SPAM costs ME money, while spammers themselves have little or no expense from actually sending the stuff - and are, in fact, usually MAKING tons of money sending it.
This is not to mention the time we spend dealing with the SPAM that constantly takes more and more of our mailbox space.
There is a difference between soapbox orators, in the park speaking to those who will listen about whatever they feel is important, and those people who are invading my privacy with their offensive smut. The difference is that in the first case, I can walk away. In the case of SPAM, it is becoming more and more difficult to simply walk away. These folks do anything in their power to evade blocking, deceive you into reading their junk, and hit you with as much SPAM as they possibly can. So long as the guy isn't committing a crime, the government is, and should remain, powerless to keep him from expressing what he wants, no matter how offensive it may be. However, if the guy on the soapbox kicks in your front door or follows you to work, all the while screaming in your ear at the top of his lungs, you'd have the bastard arrested, right? A good restraining order might be in order. This is because he'd then be committing a criminal act of harrassment. This is akin to how SPAM affects us. Then, if the soapbox guy starts taking money out of your wallet, you'd have him locked up for a while, right?
Free speech: the right to express one's opinions publicly.
Yes, but when free speech crosses the line and starts impinging upon other rights, it is no longer free speech. People who riot and loot in protest to something, the speech may be protected on its own, but the crimes comitted result in jail time. Once you've stomped on someone's right to life, liberty or property - or in the case of SPAM, the right to privacy - it ceases to be free speech, and becomes something different.
Think of what would happen if you approached a kid on the street and yelled "Want free sex?" You'd be hauled off to jail quicker than you can say "Oh, shit." Spammers indiscriminantly send much the same message to any mailbox they find. Many of these are accounts used by kids. How come they aren't held by the populous to the same standard?
Then there's the argument by the Direct Marketing Association that Spam is no different from direct marketing through postal mail. First, postal junk mail costs me nothing, period. The time it takes for me to sort through my postal mail and separate the junk is barely equivalent to the time it takes me to walk from the mailbox to the trash can (my mailbox hangs right outside my door, and there are about 10 steps from there to my PC room, the nearest can). Further, the US Mail regulates what can be on the outside of the envelope. I don't have to worry that my kid (I don't presently have one, but hypothetically) will grab the mail from the box and see "sex," "Viagra," "Huge BOOBS" of other, more vulgar expressions printed on an envelope. The same doesn't hold true for SPAM. The subject lines of an email can contain whatever a spammer wishes.
The mass sending of faxes is regulated in a way that protects businesses and individuals from having to bear the expense of mass faxing. Why isn't email regulated in a similar fashion? The costs to the end recipient are certainly real enough.
Sorry for the tirade...
From the article,
>>Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere
They're hardly doing anything about the flood of spam coming from China - only six percent of the blocked servers are in their own country. It smells to me like just another excersise in Taiwan-bashing.
The PRC does not have our Constitution. Their government plays by different rules. They've decided to take a stand against having their country blocked (nearly) universally by people like myself. It's not going to help, since most of the traffic from China is going through mismanaged net-connected computers, rather than specially set up "spam ISPs"...
Nibble, nibble!
I'm amazed... between this and the worms apparently forcing people to actually close open relays, my spam has gone from ~20/day to near zero... any chance of russia also shutting down spammers?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
try 'those terrorist' instead. You gets more funding that way.
Oh well, china does more than the US goverment in protecting people from spam and all spam-hating americans jump on the barricades because when china blocks spam they sence a violation of human rights and free speech.
This is so american that i don't know where to start... but I know the end.. it's terrorism.. and maybe right so..
Wow... I never thought I'd see anyone make an intelligent "In soviet russia" style joke, especially on
Congradualtions, +1 Vitrual Mod Point for you
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
It is too bad the USA and Russia couldnot get a clue here, and China has to lead the way. The solution to ending spam has always been simple, but the US admins/govt keeps throwing up their hands. he way to do it is
1) make spamming in the USA completely illegal, worth jailtime in federal pound-me-in0the-ass prison.
2) make it mandatory for border routers to block all traffic to and from servers on a black hole list which any network which is the origin of spam automatically gets added to.
If ISPs find out that if they allw spammers to have accounts wth them their whole network will be blocked, they will give up the spammers to get back in business. This is the only way to deal with these terrorists.
From my experience living in China, I'm hesitant to think that these servers really are responsible for the spam they claim. More likely they simply found servers that were responsble for some manner of free expression... -ex
On the other hand, you must be THIS tall ------>
to put a machine on the Internet.
If you can't handle the basics, don't be on it.
At the least, these sites should be behind a NAT box, at best, behind a firewall.
Putting a windows box (or any unsecured box) on the internet directly is irresponsible and wrong.
I'm not letting MS pass on their Hole-Of-The-Week feature; I'm not letting the american spammers pass on their theft of service and hacking that's clearly illegal - I hope they go to jail. Or get caned and sent to jail.
But I'm not going to let off the people who chose to put machines up and let them get hacked.
I'm sorry, we're going to block you, we're going to hold you responsible.
Buy a killer pit-bull on my street and I'm going to blame YOU when my pet gets injured.
The biggest problem has been the total lack of response (aided by the language barrier) and our inability to even REACH the people from whom the spam comes. So if they want to do business, perhaps they'd act as better partners and not be a menace to the Internet.
I've been hired for several months ONLY to make a company's infrastructure strong enough to handle the 60%+ of mail that is spam; to buy servers and software to help stop it; to implement it. What should take two light machines to handle requires 3 DMZ machines and a pair of (redundant) spam scanner machines. 100% of my contract (I don't work cheap) is from their budget to ease the spam pain. How many $100,000 of thousands is EVERY fortune 1000 company paying to slow spam? How many MILLIONS are .gov and .mil and public .edu sites paying of MY TAX DOLLARS to stop spam. So hell, I say shoot the spammer. Perhaps just in a typing hand.
Perhaps they'll start to fear stealing resources from the Chinese.
If it's a 17 year old taking some cash, all the better (but get the payer too).
I think someone may have misunderstood. (or not read the article...) Read the following from the article.
Of all the blocked servers, 90 are from Taiwan of China, 29 from outside China and 8 from China's mainland, including the popular Internet service provider Shanghai Online (www.online.sh.cn).
As they could not have blocked transmission from 8 from Taiwan or 29 from outside China, it seems like they have blocked these servers from sending anything TO China rather than out of China. So it wont help most people on slashdot who are hoping they willl see less spam because of it.
Did they block 127 mail servers, or just 127.0.0.1, because the amount of spam I'm getting hasn't diminished.
China gets things done because the ratio of workers to lawyers is exceptionally high, in contrast to the United States. Maybe this ratio should be used as a marker of how 'developed' a country is.
It would appear that as societies become 'fat and happy' with success, a class develops to create problems to enrich themselves and slow growth. What was the worker/lawyer ratio of the Roman empire at the fall of Constantine? Business decisions are no longer based on right or wrong but how much the legal fees will be. That's the starting point of the discussion.
When a class of society is built solely to find (ostensibly to resolve) problems but create zero value, then I can't help but think we're self taxing ourselves out of the competition. And survival, micro or macro, is nothing but a grand competition.
those were always my favorite movies.
(well, it wasn't Roeper then)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
unveiling from my AC cloak
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.