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.

Comments

Bah

[krray]

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...

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

127 mail servers. Bah -- child's play

Come on now. It's a start. If this helps other countries and ISPs to admit that unsolicited commercial email is a real problem, then this is good news. 127 mail servers today, several thousand tomorrow?

And to pre-emptively strike at those who claim that spam is "free speech" and only godless communist countries would block it:

No, unsolicited commercial email (aka "spam") is NOT free speech. The burden of storing received email falls squarely on the recipient, thus sending email is a privilege not a right. In the exact same way you don't have the right to call someone up as many times as you without it being harrassment.

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a intelligent replay and posted anonymously :(

You are right. Sending me email is a privilege, NOT a right. My bandwidth, heck my mail server, my network, my workstation, my time.

Just as it is not my right to view any web site I wish. Some are paid subscriptions, some require user info, some may just not want me view their info for whatever reason (browser type, thinks I'm an ass, or feels violated because I block their email -- whatever).

Bing - first spam of the day. Nothing there. Oops, bayesian eaten. It _was_ to the HOSTMASTER no less -- those absolute dumb idiots. What, that's not going to piss off the wrong people? rotflmao

Literally. Really. That's my "spam out" programming's name: rotflmao

NOW, recently, spam doesn't really bother or phase me. It's been more fun to watch their methods. Useeless attempts really. Fun to watch none the less. Yet -- I still get/send my email as "freely" as before.

Simple and effective rule: one strike and your OUT

Re:Bah

[SlugLord]

Hmm, well no I suppose spamming isn't free speech, but who defines what spam is? I'm not sure the government itself should be blocking the ISPs. I mean they can publish as many lists as they want, but if they're actually blocking those ISPs, that could be censorship. It's actually good that they only have blocked 127 ISPs, since that would almost suggest that they have only blocked notorious ISPs, not ISPs who also host useful material. Remember that there are servers that do nothing but provide webpages through email (you email a request for a webpage, it emails the request back) in order to circumvent censorship.

In general, spam is bad and not free speech, but that doesn't mean that any government should have the right to block it. Then again, US citizens who are also terrorists are bad, but that doesn't mean the US government should have the right to detain them indefinitely as non-citizens and try them without a jury of their peers.

So yay for anti-spam, boo for potential censorship.

Re:Bah

[Seehund]

No, unsolicited commercial email (aka "spam") is NOT free speech.

Be that as it may. OTOH, does anybody honestly believe that this will not be used as yet another excuse for the Chinese authorities to suppress real, non-spam free speech?

Add spammer/open relay to the list containing out-of-the-blue accusations like "counter-revolutionary activity", "banditism" or "drug smuggling" and all those other capital offences.

It won't just be the widows of spammer scumbags that will be picking up the bodies of their loved ones at the police station after having payed for the one used rifle cartridge... I can imagine the name of the offence being the easily and arbitrarily applicable "counter-revolutionary computer banditism" or something along those lines.

Re:Bah

[whereiswaldo]

I suppose spamming isn't free speech

Why isn't spam free speech? What is free speech, anyway? Check this out:

http://www.spectacle.org/899/free.html

It is important not to make the common error of assuming that speech is "unfree" because disfavored. ...
"Free speech" in fact is a phrase like "free gift". There is only speech, and government opposition to it. Speech lies on a spectrum, and government is only good at binary determinations--the law is so often a sledgehammer where a scalpel is required. The more useful lens is our second category: lets not speak of "free speech" but of "freedom of speech"-- the desirability or not of various proposed rulebooks for determining government responses to speech. The nature of government and law as a sledgehammer influences the outcome of this discussion: it implies we must either smash speech or tolerate it, and that there are few nuances or choices in between.

By definition:

Free speech: the right to express one's opinions publicly.

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

The contents of the spam is speech and protected, and nobody minds if spammers read aloud their messages to inform people that they can enlarge their penis or provide generic Viagra. In fact, I thank them. (I'm up to three rock-hard inches as of last week!) But their message delivery method uses other people's money and resources without permission. That's why it's evil.

Re:Bah

[nagora]

Why isn't spam free speech?

Because there is no freedom to not listen to it. Free speech is something you can walk away from. Once the "speaker" follows you it's harassment.

TWW

Re:Bah

[Capt'n Hector]

Express publicly all you want, email is private.

Re:Bah

[AlecC]

Free speech: the right to express one's opinions publicly.

Indeed. My mailbox is not a public place. It is my private property. Spamming is like shouting your political opinions through my letterbox.

Free speech on your website - of course. Free speech on my private hard disk - certainly not.

Re:Bah

[Malc]

If somebody stands in the street yelling at my home, I will eventually call the police and have them removed. If somebody keeps calling my telephone and spewing crap, I will take steps against that too. Why shouldn't I expect similar protection on the internet? I don't appreciate the intrusion in to my life. I don't appreciate, no matter how small, subsidising these people through my ISP's service charge (my ISP has to pay for the resource usage, and for the additional costs of their upstream providers). It's not a matter of free speech - it's a matter of my right to privacy, and my right to not have to pay for something I don't want. People who are apologise for spammers using this free speech argument are deluded or just plain stupid.

Re:Bah

[Dannon]

That brings up an interesting question. What about people who print up flyers, then walk around a parking lot sticking them under windshield wipers? After all, the cars are private property.

Or, for that matter, someone who wants to advertise babysitting, pressure-washing, or other services by putting business cards or flyers on every mailbox in a neighborhood? Heck, I constantly get unsolicited menus from Chinese restaurants on my front door, and I'd consider my front door to be private property. And then there are the occasional empty-bag-left-at-the-door canned food drives.

Is there a fundamental difference between e-mail spam and these "real world" forms of unsolicited advertisment, other than the degree to which we are annoyed by each?

Re:Bah

[Anonym1ty]

Why isn't spam free speech? What is free speech, anyway?

Well lets look at it from a much simpler angle here

I have to pay to receive spam there for it cannot be free speech

END OF ARGUMENT

What exactly is so difficult for you people to understand?

China Blocks Spam Servers

[RinzeWind]

So now China can only get mail from the rest of the world, but not from inside. That's the deal, isn't it?

Re:China Blocks Spam Servers

[cioxx]

The funny part is, communists will have much more success with stopping (or at least substantially curbing) the spam problem than western democracies. All China has to do is to look at the current situation, cut the lifelines of these companies which send bulk mail, and execute a few people to set an example.

Re:China Blocks Spam Servers

[Zocalo]

If only it were that simple. According to the article the bulk of the servers are in Taiwan, what a coincidence, given the emnity in that relationship. Now if they were firewalling off the 127 top servers in China that send spam, then the rest of the world might see a benefit too, but no, they are just stopping servers mainly outside China sending email in. In short, this only stops the Chinese from receiving spam/propaganda depending on what you believe.

Of course, just because the bulk of my spam comes from China doesn't mean that the bulk of spam the Chinese get comes from there too. Maybe theirs really does come from Taiwan - any Chinese national care to comment on the demographics of your spammers?

eh?

[pergamon]

YAY CHINA!

Wait, that doesn't sound right...

Nooooo!

[GarbanzoBean]

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.

Re:Nooooo!

[btg]

All my asian college friends can no longer send me a suggestions on how to increase my breast/penis/bank acount.

You have a breast account and a penis account?

Eww. Squishy.

Hard to decide, is it?

[Enoch Root]

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.

Re:Hard to decide, is it?

[abelsson]

How 'bout China's evil because they censor the Internet *and* they're good because the block spam?

People and countries can do both good and bad things.

Re:Hard to decide, is it?

[Enoch Root]

Dunno... Doesn't sound like a very American point of view of the world to me...

Re:Hard to decide, is it?

[wheany]

Hey, they're either with us or against us! They can't be both good and bad.

Suit yourselves, China...

[Derlum]

...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!

Re:Double Whammy

[bobdown2001]

Actually it was a guy from New Zealand who did this...... Let's make the distiction that Australia and New Zealand are two totally seperate countries, how would you like it if I called you a Canadian ;-)

Are these *REALLY* spam IPs?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Spam? Ri-iiiii-ight...

[suky]

After all, China has never done anything that even remotely hints at censoring communication from the outside world that the government deems "subversive" and a threat to the Communist party...

If this is the list of servers they admit to blocking, just imagine what the list they aren't showing the world looks like.

Riiight.

[PsionicMan]

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.

Re:Riiight.

[kubrick]

A couple of the old favorites, money launders and drug dealers, don't get so much press these days.

I don't think you got the memo. Due to the fact that terrorists have been known to launder money and deal drugs, all money launderers and drug dealers have now been reclassified as terrorists.

Ashcroft Logic (tm). It's easy when you know how!

Article Text

[BenFranske]

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.

Close but still missing the mark...

[Rathian]

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.

*snip*

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.

Nevermind that ~70%+ of the spam sites I have been reporting are HOSTED in China. I had complained countless times to the Chinese whois contacts without positive result.

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.

Re:Close but still missing the mark...

[2Bits]

Nevermind that ~70%+ of the spam sites I have been reporting are HOSTED in China. I had complained countless times to the Chinese whois contacts without positive result.


Here's maybe something you want to know.

We have been asked recently to help figure out network and server problems by two companies (one travel agencies, one of the fastest growning in China, one textile company), and two government agencies.

All were complaining that their network is slow, even during the evening when nobody's using, and they don't know why. These people are not in the business of managing networks and servers. Their system has been built up by patching here and there as the needs come up. Their email servers are very old software developed american companies (ah well).

They brought us in to do diagnostic. We took a look, and the network usage is at 90% during non-working hours. We took closer look, and found that the email server and a few machines were sending out tons of messages. We traced again, and found that 5 to 6 (in each company and in each agency) machines have been owned, and are sending out spam (!) using the local email server. Well duh....

Then we stayed up about two evenings trying to see if someone will log in. Sure enough, the spammer logged in, and uploading new spam message. We traced their IP, and here's what we found: one from Indianna (US), one from Texas (US again), one from Florida (US again), the last one from Mexico.

So, what do you think?

You can blame the Chinese for relaying spam or for not securing their network/server, but these are the people who are trying to cope with the growth of their business, and have no expertise to handle this security issue. I bet a lot of SMEs in America have the same problem too.

And if you want to fix the spam problem, shouldn't you fix the root problem first?

Re:Close but still missing the mark...

[anticypher]

This is the main reason China and Korea seem to be the origin of most spam, owned machines. Most of the spammers, probably more than 90%, are physically in the United States, but they crack machines in other countries to make it difficult for prosecutors to go after them.

Many companies in China do the absolute minimum to set up their computers, and to connect them to a local ISP. Firewalls, applying security patches, locking down systems, and other basic sysadmin functions are ignored because the companies directors don't know any better. Most of the press about hacking, spam, security and other problems are in English, very little of that makes it into the local papers and in the local language. So the problem will just continue until American prosecutors go after the criminals in the U.S. breaking into computers physically in other countries.

2bits, did you contact the abuse people at the upstream ISPs in the US and Mexico? Did you send them a detailed report of a criminal activity, breaking into your machines and stealing all your bandwidth? Did you do your part to help get these spammers off the internet, or did you just take money from your clients and not fix the problem.

Its not that difficult to get into the machines spammers are using, they tend to install pirated copies of PCAnywhere or BackOrifice, and not bother with passwords. So then you can check back and see where the spammers are, and mostly they are in the U.S. The biggest problem right now is getting US authorities to file charges against the spammers, because a real cyber-crime case is actually very difficult to prosecute, and the prosecutors tend to be very technophobic.

I gave up a long time ago trying to provide evidence to US Attorneys General to shut down spammers, and many spam fighters are turning to vigilantism now to chase the spammers from the net. Even /. has gotten into the act of exposing spammers

the AC

The list?

[gonaddespammed.com]

So where is this list. I'll block the same servers.

GNP

[www.sorehands.com]

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?

good or evil, that's the question

[jlemmerer]

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

Fortune Cookies

[future assassin]

Maybe the spamers will pay off restaurant owners to spam through fortune cookies. Vigra will make you lucky in the future.

Future Assassin

90 Taiwanese servers blocked..

[molo]

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

Re:90 Taiwanese servers blocked..

[Flwyd]

In Communist China, "Make Money Fast!" is a political statement.

Good to know, but...

[gothicpoet]

It's nice to see them doing something, but I have to note that the times that I've tried to get something done about a server hosted in China that's attacking one of my client's IP addresses have gotten NIL results. Zilch.

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.

Only 127?

[Jailbrekr]

I guess when they upgraded from an 8 bit OS, they can block more. :)

No, No, No!!!

[Mostly a lurker]

Trying to block spam by blocking email seeming to originate from specific servers just does not work. Email headers can too easily be forged. Further, even assuming you could identify where email originated, what do you do about, say, hotmail? Vast amounts of spam still start there. But, everyone I know also receives valid email from hotmail accounts.

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.

Re:No, No, No!!!

[DocSnyder]

Trying to block spam by blocking email seeming to originate from specific servers just does not work. Email headers can too easily be forged.

"Received" lines are written by the receiving email system and can't be forged by the sender. Of course the spammer can use some tricks like inserting faked "Received" lines oder the recipient's IP address as HELO string, but no spammer can hide the IP address the spam has been sent from. And these IP addresses will get blocked.

A shame

[veg_all]

Think of all the small penises neglected.

A whole 127 Servers?

[Mnemennth]

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."

Try complaining to the right people.

[Dimensio]

I had complained countless times to the Chinese whois contacts without positive result.

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.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

Only 127?

[tntguy]

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.

Oh No *sniff*

[cluge]

*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*

Does anyone still accept mail from China?

[skinfitz]

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?

Re:Does anyone still accept mail from China?

[2Bits]

I think most people have something like "DENY * FROM *.cn" in their firewalling / mail filtering (including probably many people in China)..


Hehe, guess what, most chinese portals (Sohu, Sina, china.com, ...) and some ISPs have recently implemented a total block of emails that are originating from an IP not in Asia. Unless you send in the request to open up your IP, I don't know the procedure yet, need to find that out.

Our company is in Shanghai, but our email server is hosted in America. Our mails (very legit, I assure you) get bounced with the error message explicitly stated that the IP of our email address is not in Asia. This "feature" is activated only in the last two weeks or so.

That's nasty for us, because a lot of customers (again, all legits) are using their email at those portals, just like a lot of people in America use yahoo, hotmail and aol for their business emails.

If you have customers in China now, and they are your bread and butter, I bet you wouldn't think blocking the IPs of a whole continent is very nice.

Re:First They Came For The Spammers...

[Dimensio]

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.

Re:Double Whammy

[NanoGator]

"Let's make the distiction that Australia and New Zealand are two totally seperate countries, how would you like it if I called you a Canadian ;-) "

I'd probably use that as an IQ test for ya. You see, as an average Slashdotter, there are a few simple ways to guage somebody's entire intelligence quotient.

- Did he distinguish beteen Canada and the United States?

- Did he refrain from using smilies or internet shorthand?

- Did he use apostrophe's correctly?

- Does he praise Linux and Mozilla?

- Did he correctly spell all the words in his post, especially the long ones that people rarely use?

- Does he hate George Bush?

If any of these questions are answered no, then your IQ is zilch! ;)

Don't take it personally, I'm just going with the flow!

Naive

[fm6]

China has blocked 127 mail servers which it identifies as major sources of spam. Oh, happy day.

Come on people, don't any of you see how inconsistent this attitude is? We criticize the Chinese government for blocking its citizen's access to information -- unless it's information that we think should be blocked.

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.

Free speech or DoS?

[Angostura]

Your argument seems to rest on the belief that most spam contains 'opinion' that has the right to be expressed.

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

That won't block any SPAM from my inbox

[e_AltF4]

>Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan,
blocking .tw servers should be no problem for .cn, but it's not blocking any spam not going to .cn addresses ?

>eight were from the mainland
wow! 8 servers from .cn - great!
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 :-)

They wont know what they're missing

[goodbye_kitty]

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.

Bah again

[BrokenHalo]

Now if only someone would just block all those US spammers...

After all, if my penis grew by 100% overnight, I think my wife might complain :-)

Here's The Blacklist

[Pakup]

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)

The ultimate SPAM-filter!!

[zeptic]

Do as my Professor: reject all emails originating from .com adresses!


(This is not a joke! He really does reject all .com emails.)

What "Blocking" really means

[billstewart]

If you read the articles, it doesn't say that they're stopping Chinese spammers from sending spam to foreign countries. It says that they're blocking mail to Chinese ISPs _from_ 127 alleged spam sites, mostly in Taiwan. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if most or all of them really _are_ spammers, because China has a market for Viagra and Cable Descramblers too, and there'll be spammers happy to fill it. But China's been heavily into censorship for a while, not that it's easily enforced even if you have quasi-monopoly Internet backbone providers.

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.

Spam from Florida.

[vitojph]

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.

Now...

[WindBourne]

if we can just block AOL, Yahoo, and MSN from doing spam at a corporate level.

Why it isn't free speech.

[fmaxwell]

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.

open proxy list

[humankind]

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.

Great news

[tcr]

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.

Lawyer for Spammers Tries To Drop Suit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.