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Spanish Internet Provider's SMTP traffic Blocked
Andrew D Kirch writes "After being barraged by spam and 419 scams from Rima-TDE and telefonica.es [translated], the AHBL has announced that all of Spain's national ISP's e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service. One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?"
Well, I'd say less than 5% of the email I receive is legitimate email...so I really don't care if they decide to start nuking to try and stop spam...do SOMETHING
A few other countries that can use this are found here.
Dude, where's my packet?
It is an extreme reaction; there's no denying that. But perhaps it's the only way for governments to take spam seriously and take action accordingly.
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
It seems to me like this whole concept of Spam blacklisting is a matter of the blind leading the blind.
If you trust your mailservers to automatically block whoever's on a blacklist, you've basically handed control of your mailserver's main function over to somebody else... but those somebody else's are just self-appointed dimwits who eventually get drunk with power and do something crazy like blocking a whole country worth of IP space.
Sorry. This ain't the solution to Spam. It's a band-aid on a system that's much too wounded, but we use it anyway...
It's simple, ban all other country's email unless they have proper spam laws enacted.
I guess the US is screwed unless we remove the legalized-spam act.
This is crazy, blocking an entire country because of spam - while I can appreciate the 'irritation' of receiving spam, the dis-service imposed by this massive block will greatly outweigh the 'service' it's supposed to perform.
It's like back in school, when the entire class would be put into detention because of the actions of one person, it was a pathetic method then and it's a pathetic method now. Ultimately, it comes down to the teacher/blocker being lazy and hoping that such drastic measures will induce the 'masses' to seek out and obliterate the offending party. I never saw such 'action' succeed at school, I doubt we'll see much happen from this either (apart from iritate a lot of people).
*disclaimer: school was more than half a lifetime ago - so perhaps my brain is rusty by now.
... but it's about time that something serious was done to combat spam. It's a pity that some innocent ISPs have had to suffer because of this but maybe they, in turn, will also put pressure on ISPs that host spammers?
The Erogenous Zone
When something drastic as this happens it forces change. I think the Spanish ISP and even lawmakers will take notice and take action.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I don't see this as unreasonable at all. It's not like e-mail service knows national boundaries.
I think the ones who will be shocked by this are the ones who misunderstand and say, "Now no one in Spain can send e-mail!"
Sigh.
some suggested other countries be blocked in the past, but i believe over half of all spam originates from the US... i figure they probably should have tried to get the isp to kill the accounts sending the e-mails instead of blocking the country though... that seems kinda insane, cause you know once the kiddies see that they can get whole countries blocked, they'll jump right on it, and then the blacklist would be pretty worthless wouldn't it ;)
I, for one, would welcome it, living in the US. Get rid of my spam AND my e-mail. Productivity would go through the roof.
I think something has gone horribly right.
Take some responsibility....
yahoo.es mail or gmail.google.es once the thing goes public.
You meant: Spanish Internet Providers' SMTP traffic blocked because, while the title does not make this obvious, it was in fact the entire country that was blacklisted.
A lot of systems use blacklists for protection, either against IPs, malformed inputs, and other attacks. However, most experts agree that whitelisting is safer than blacklisting, as it is possible to get around blacklists, such as using UTF-8 encoding for input attacks.
Wouldn't a whitelist be more appropriate against spam, so that only authorized MTAs would communicate with each other, and registration would need to take place before they are authorized?
One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?
What went horribly wrong is that Telefonica should allow spammers to operate on their network. So yes, blacklisting them would, perhaps, send a much-needed signal to them.
Actually, if it was running a spam blocklist, I'd suggest that administrators using it automatically send out, every 1000 blocked mail or so, at random, an email explaining why an email from this domain was blocked. Eventually, such an auto-reply is bound to reach one of the domain's legit customers (in this case, Telefonica) who would in turn demand explanations from the ISP they leave money to.
Getting ISP customers to fight the spam war they would normally don't give a toss about is, in my opinion, the way to go against spammers.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is amazing really.
All the democratizing functions, promises of free education, free dispersion of information, increased international communication and understanding..... all these things that the internet promised is being brought to it's knees because of penis enlargements, nigerian fraudsters, and greedy marketers all wanting to make a buck!
Don't mod this funny! It's NOT!
(Actually, now that I think of it, TV suffered the same fate. Originally touted as an educational resource, it turned into the junk box it is today. It's just history repeating.)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
It seems that they gave the ISP ample time and the ISP did nothing. Fuck 'em! Let the ISP deal with all its irate customers whose international emails dont go through and they'll change their tune about spammers. I feel sorry for the thousands of users who didnt do anything to deserve this, but I also hate spam.
The article didn't make this too clear, so maybe someone can answer... Is this the only ISP in spain? Is it run by the spanish goverment? Because the way that AHBL phrased it announcement, it seems more like TDE is a smalltime provider in Spain. Can anyone clear this up?
Apple has never claimed not to be evil, they're just very stylish about it.
This is the same reason why organizations such as Spews.org, when leveraging their clout correctly, can get things fixed: they get the regular end users after the ISP to fix their problems. Spain now can't email a LOT of places. Spain. Not just TDE customers, but ALL people there. Now, all of TDE will be complaining to TDE, along with TDE's partners. Their competitors. Heck, maybe the government. They'll clean up their act, or else. If they don't, that's fine too, if they don't want to email anyone.
Remember that no one on the Internet is obligated to accept traffic from anyone. Be it email or otherwise. If I choose to block you from mailing me via my website, or from even viewing my site--or if I decide this of your entire country--that is my decision. My IP address(es), my mailbox, my rules. ISPs flaunt my wishes by spamming me, and they get dropped.
So, again, why is this bad if it forces them under huge pressure to fix their issues?
Dude, where's my packet?
I don't think nuking large countries in an effort to kill a few flies can in any way be rationalized as an intelligent measure.
This blacklist has just made it very clear that they're more retarded than the spammers and that their blacklist should be avoided.
They're advocating more damage be caused than any amount of spam could ever cause.
Spam is not a political problem. It's a social problem. Trying to force countries to treat it like a political problem is just going to result in more stupid laws that don't do anything.
For my e-mail server I filter out domains that spammers use. And I get very little spam as a result. What spam I do get, I forward to my spam@icarusindie.com account (where all "report as spam" spam goes) and take care of it the next update. And with a current list of ~980 domains, that works out to around $8000 or so I've cost spammers. All without inflicting any collateral damage or trying to pull a stupid stunt to try to influence the leaders of a country.
These blacklist runners have just become more desperate and irrational than the spammers. Spammers try very hard to get through my system and I can sit back and drink my Coke and beat the crap out of them without spilling a drop.
I can just see these people out there with a crazed look in their eyes widly swinging a baseball bat and hitting only air.
KNOCK IT OFF!
Ben
Work Safe Porn
e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service
Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.
How many of you actually receive legitimate mail from spain? Were it up to me, I'd ban all of China while we're at it. Insofar as end-users can exempt themselves from blocking so they can still receive mail from nations-non-grata then I wouldn't have a problem with banning mail from half the planet.
Sadly, though, my ISP doesn't give me that option... but they should.
I've been blocking all of china for 2 years now. Basically if its in unicode, my server rejects it.
-Polyhead-
Blocking a whole country should really get people aware that they have a problem, and get them out of the chair to fix it.
Unfortunatly that's whishfull thinking. What will really happen is that any service provider who used AHBL will get tons of complaints from Spanish costumers who can't send them emails - so the service provider kicks out AHBL because happy costumers is worth more than principle.
Banning (sub)nets will not fix the problem. It will only excarbate the problems in the flow of information on the net.
What we need is an international infrastructure supporting unique, traceable and hard-to-forge proofs of user identity on the net. Think of it as a passport or a driver's license. We have real life IDs that are difficult to forge and even if you can forge them, you'd get hit by hefty penalties for doing it. Yes. It could be abused but what can't? At least the system would government controlled and thus a lesser evil than the tyranny of vigilante groups like SPEWS. No ID? your data packets will go to /dev/null. Sent spam? You'll be tracked down by the ID in each packet you sent.
The owls are not what they seem
If you don't agree with a BL's listing criteria or policies, don't use it.
There's a variety of DNSBLs out there. Some attempt to list spam sources (IPs from which spam is injected) with surgical precision whilst others go for the 'spam support' services, typically listing increasing swaths of space as the responsible party refuses to act (SPEWS for one).
In many cases the surgical approach simply won't do. Playing whack-a-mole with a fake ISP/spam support service isn't everybody's game.
Maybe I will just send an email like this to everyone: Dear joe@blow.com: I am not going to try and sell you anything. I am not going to tell you how to make millions either. I don't even want to make your penis bigger. I simply am asking you to give me your money. Please send me at least $10.00 in American currency.
Too many people (usually in end-user magazines which say "Squash Spam Forever!" on three out of every four covers in bright bold covers) state too much spam is coming from overseas. This is a partial truth. The spammers live in the US but they are using ISPs overseas to spam us here. Why? Because Chinese ISPs aren't going to say, "no" to nice, crisp, American currency. Now, there are more and more US ISPs which are blocking *.cn, *.jp, *.kr (China, Japan, and Korea, respectively, but in no particular order).
What's really funny is to see Chinese ISPs who hit US blocks when the US response is "Sorry, we don't accept spam" and the China response is, "Take off Block!" and it goes back & forth until the Chinese ISPs back off.
China is starting to wonder what they should do to reduce spam - in all places - in China. The funny thing is, they don't understand what volume the electronic turds their clientele are sending because so it's not directed at them.
With things like this happening, isn't updating/replacing SMTP with something new to address the current problems, a viable option yet ?
I have noticed that the vast majority of spam that I get reference domains registered at http://gandi.net
I'd LOVE to be able to block by registrar.
Does anyone know how to get a registrar shut down??
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
What can politicians possibly do to stop spam?
This is a social problem. Not a political problem. Trying to make it a political problem is just going to make the situation worse.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The United States produces more spam than any other country.
And if an ISP absolutely refuses to address any spam issues or complaints, what is supposed to be done then? It's like an intervention--if someone has a problem, and will not acknowledge that problem, you get someone else--in this case, the whole country--to get them to correct their destructive behavior.
Dude, where's my packet?
Rima-tde's long time treatment of abuse complaints has lead to them being labeled by many in the community as a rogue provider.
This has continued for quite some time, as evidenced by archived usenet posts (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rima-tde&ie=UT
Getting up there along with the likes of HINET and Chinese state-run providers takes some serious work, and in goes to show Telefonica De Espana's commitment to its spammers!
Congratulations to them on this well deserved moment of (in)fame.
O dios mio!
it doesn't matter.
The fact of the matter is that spammers use common domains. It doesn't matter in slightest that a spammer from X is trying to advertise using Y.com. They could be from Z or Q for all I care. All that matters is that they're advertising using Y.com and so it doesn't get through. Forging a header or using a proxy does them absolutly no good because my quite effective spam blocking technique doesn't rely on the header at all.
And now if they want to bug me they can't use Y.com. They have to fork over real cash to purchase Y2.com and that'll be blocked as soon as they try anything. Repeat until they're tired of wasting money on domains.
It doesn't cost money to get a new IP. There are plenty of proxies in the world. It costs real money to buy a domain and there's no avoiding it. You can advertise a raw IP that hosts the product page but that's just as easy to block as a domain. And static IPs are even less cheap than domain names.
I don't mind that little trickle of spam that finds it's way into my inbox because I found a way to stick it to the spammers without sticking it to anyone else.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
It's on freaking time that someone takes care of rima-tld and telefonica. I've attempted to report several hundred virus-infected emails, received over more than a month, and never gotten a single reply.
To add insult to injury, I continously see the same pattern from the same dhcp-blocks, indicating that it's the same infected user attempting to send my company virus-infected email today, as did it over a month ago.
rima-tld and telefonica are 100% non-responsive to complaints, and doesn't care about neither other internet users, nor their own users. They should have a policy of contacting virus-infected users and forcing them to remove the virus.
The sad thing is that I've got to manually whitelist both domains due to having several hundred customers from both ISPs, so I can't afford to be part of the blacklist. I certainly hope that many enough other people join in though.
The cause of spam is division by zero. The spammers think there is (effectively) no cost for the next million spams, and if they find one sucker who sends them two bucks, they think it's an infinite return on the zero invested. Wrong. There is no free lunch. We all pay, to the point where email is becoming a net loss.
The solution is to offer an alternative that solves the economic problem--a pre-paid email system. Imagine it. Sign up for one of those addresses, and you could publish it anywhere, and you would be absolutely sure that no one would spam you there. It wouldn't take much postage--even a nickle per message would destroy the spammers' fantasy of division by zero.
All users of Telefonica's (spain biggest ISP) DSL service have to suffer their fucking 'transparent' proxies. And sites like slashdot insist on setting those proxies on their shit list. So It's quite frequent that lots of spanish 'Nerds' don't get Stuff that 'matters'.
Thanks Telefonica, and the rest of the world, for nothing.
EOF
This is a typical demagogic attempt to get slashdotters riled up against an otherwise unnown blocklist operator. Simply put, most slashdotters do not run ISP's and therefore see only the downside of blocklists.
i ms, let me remind you that SPEWS has gotten the attention of some extremely inattentive spam havens. Companies that unrepentantly spammed like mad in the face of every kind of complaint, peer pressure, and narrowly targetted listing have suddenly come to the table when facing a broad SPEWS block. Broad listing works where diplomacy has failed.
Most slashdotters are benefiting from some kind of mail filtering and don't even realize it. They are like peaceniks bitching about the very defense establishment that keeps them free to bitch.
I never heard of the AHBL before this article. There are tons of lists. A list that would block a major ISP is probably a niche list aimed at small domains who are not going to have 10,000 angry customers. If SPEWS blocked this ISP, it might be news. If some unknown list does it, so what?
If you find it shocking that a list would shoot from the hip, don't ever query xbl.selwerd.cx. Fast, broad and unforgiving!
Before the inevitable whining chorus of broad-listing-is-bad-what-about-the-innocent-vict
And remember, also, that you are almost certainly benefiting from a lot of filtering implemented by your postmasters or even network admins (at border routers). They spend a huge amount of time compiling lists of bad domains and netblocks - why shouldn't they share that knowledge with other admins? Such sharing is most efficiently done by publishing a DNS-based list like SPEWS. The high profile lists are more professionally maintained than most ISP's in-house lists. Would you rather they share in secret, so small operators can't benefit from their knowledge?
Despite contrary claims, Telefonica is *not* the only ISP in Spain. It is the biggest residential ISP, but not all mail comes from Telefonica.
I think it is a good sign to those folks who choose to do nothing about spam and 419ers.... Hotmail and Yahoo should be next... they are the Heaven for 419ers. After reporting them to abuse@ with full headers, message and history, the 419 were still active with same accounts after two weeks!
It is not like they could not automatically scan outgoing mails! They already do it to incoming spam. If you send, lets say 10 mails which get qualified as 419er, get your account locked for revision. easy. I mean 419 is so easy to detect...
On the other hand... did anybody notice that nowadays most spam also comes from hotmail and yahoo accounts? I guess if they would not get a share from spammers they would have already scripts up and running... but... oh well
This is a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough.
I didn't just block Spain. I set my system to blackhole the whole damn world!
Just think of it! All over the world, anybody tries to send me email, and it disappears into a black hole. Eat dirt, spammers!
And of course all the legitimate email disappears as well. But that's the point! When I talk to someone and they complain that I didn't respond to their email, I explain that it's not me - it's their world's policies about spam! Once you get your act together and get spam off the net, then I'll unblock you, I say. Until then, don't come crying to me - talk to your ISP, to your elected representatives, to the UN. That's where the problem is, and until you can solve it with them... you're blocked.
Yup. I figure this spam business is going to get cleaned up PDQ once people realize what it's costing them. We're going to get a nice, spam-free net, and it's all because of me. You're welcome.
Isn't it hypocritical to condemn one form of electronic information supression, yet be all for the supression of another?
Telefonica is THE ISP/telephone company in Spain, thay have a near monopoly on the market. There are a few smaller ISPs, like Auna and Wanadoo, but even they rely on Telefonica for some services. ... local Micorosoft of sorts ... their quality of service is absolutely horrible. How bad? I tried getting ADSL service from them ... for an entire YEAR they could not get me connected! ... a rash one, but this should get some people thinking. I am yet to see how this will affect us, just showed up to work.
That said, Telefonica is a really fucked up company
That said, I think blocking an entrie county is a solution
AHBL? How big are they and will this actually affect anything?
1) It's not like this has not happened before. Also cf usenet death penalties.
/. editors and submitters would finally get a clue and stop posting nonsensical drivel. Slashdot used to be cool, but it's gotten soft and annoying. Go ahead, mod me down, confirm my point...
2) Usagle of any BL is voluntary on the receiver's end. Don't agree? Don't use it.
3) If the IP ranges listed are indeed a major source of spam, then of course there is nothing wrong with blacklisting them. If this happens to be the entirety of Spain, then so be it.
In short, I wish the
Block every country that's sending tons of spam. Yes, I know the US is responsible for most of it, but that's exactly my point. Keep blocking countries until the US spammers have to send from US servers and then let us all attack them with a multitude of lawsuits.
China is the worst for me because some jerk spammer is sending junk with my domain on the reply-to. His stuff is hosted in China and there's not a thing I can do.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Do not worry, your ISP will be added soon, very soon ;)
And another thing to ponder on...
All this extra traffic caused by viruses...who profits?
Now who makes the routers that pass on the virsuse, and have no virus protection? Its a company called "Cisco" - if ISPs told Cisco they would not buy routers that had no effective virus filter, then viruses would be gone by next thursday.
If someone won't cooperate with the community, a swift kick in the balls does wonders to their brain power.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The AHBL is very open to working with providers to solve their problems. On a daily basis, I can be working with several ISPs to figure out how to better tune our listings, or help them track down a spamming customer.
We only resort to this wide range listings when we're run out of options. In the case of TDE, we just do not have any more patience.
We gave them time. We sent them abuse reports. We even asked them to provide us with accurate information on their netblocks so we can tune our listings down to only their dynamic customers.
However, they ignored our requests.
The AHBL has very strict policies on what we will and will not do.
We are taking a strong stance on 419 and phishers right now - just take a look at our ongoing fight with megamailservers.com - we caught them in a lie with their phishing customers, and we are holding them responsible.
If we are having an effect or not, it doesn't really matter to me. All I do know is that we are taking a stance and asking others to support us.
The hope being that with enough people working with us, we will be able to force providers to do something about their problems.
Feel free to flame me all you want.
Brielle
The best way to avoid spam lies in not letting anyone you dont know directly or indirectly communicate with you. the rapidly growing pattern of trusted networks: networks formed by invitation only. A great example is Linked In. To ensure appropriateness of the message, the messages are sent back through the same chain of messages. This is as close to interhuman communication as it gets, and is as secure as requesting a favor from a friend's friend. Another example is . If such networks evolve to be a major slice of our online communication presence, then spam will well be on its way out.
Umm... it isn't out of the blue. Telefonica De Espana is well aware of what is going on and has turned a blind eye to it. This has been going on for a LONG time. If you can't police your users, then I don't want any of them talking to my servers.
Personally, I get anywhere between one thousand and one hundred thousand spams a week directed at my domain from some asshat in Brazil. They come addressed to user1@mydomain.com, user2@mydomain.com, etc., in alphabetical order. Tens of thousands of them. And that's just the Brazilian stuff. That doesn't include the mortgage ads, 419 scams, porn ads, and advertisements that will help me make my wife's penis larger.
Since I'm the only person who uses my domain, and I don't read Portuguese anyway, these are nothing but a drain on my bandwidth and resources, even if I were inclined to buy penis enlargement cream for my wife.
And since I use a hosting service I can't implement a connection-level block because I don't have root on the box. Implementing SpamAssassin on the hosting server brings their box to its knees (I know because I've done it and they shut down my account); instead, I have to dedicate one of my own boxes to scanning all this shit -after- downloading it. My box does virtually nothing else.
And since my domain is my last name, I can't exactly change it easily.
SMTP is broken. It has outlived its usefulness, and it is past time for it to die. Born in an era when the internet was a far safer place, patches and scanning placed on top of it to stop spam do nothing to put the burden of sending mail where it belongs: on the sender. While tools like SpamAssassin, SpamBouncer and RBLs help us to avoid seeing the crap in our inboxes, they remain kludges that still eat up our processor time, bandwidth, infrastructure and money.
But all my work in call centers has taught me that stupid people will always exist, and that some of them can never be taught to behave properly. This means that any schmuck with enough money and enough time and some basic Google literacy can set up a broken copy of $YOUR_FAVORITE_SMTPD on $YOUR_FAVORITE_OS and become the latest spew.
Proposals exist (Dr. Dan Bernstein's Internet Mail 2000 is one of several) to shift the burden of storage and processing from the receiver to the sender. All well and good, but nobody's bothered writing a bunch of cross-platform implementations that everybody will actually switch to, and that Microsoft won't be able to embrace and extend.
So where does that leave us mere mortals, except to use the hypersonic planet-smashing axe to kill the maggot-laying fly?
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
All DSL users in the Spain go through Telefonica's servers. That means that the whole country DSL service email is screwed. Cool... thats a great solution. This is as if you had a big tree in your garden and a leave gets rotten. To stop the problem you cut the whole tree. The funny side of all this is that most of the spam i receive comes from the United States assuring me my penis is not big enough, that I should buy viagra to have better sex, and that my credit card is not good enough. The ammount of spam within this 3 topics sometimes makes me think that the United States is full of people that is either broke, they have not "enough" to satisfy their couples and that their sexual relations are crap...
QUOTE from the AHBL site:
Update - April 26th, 2004
TDE contacted us by e-mail and we were told by them that the cause of all of the 419 scams and spam was from the scammers operating out of Internet Cafe locations, and that they were working with the police to try and stop the problem.
However, when asked why TDE does not just block outgoing port 25 on their dynamic clients, we received no reply. We also asked that TDE provide us with details on exactly what their dynamic ranges are, so that we could better tune our blocks, and they have yet to get back to us on that either.
The only reason why we have resorted to this broad of a block is because TDE has not shown any effort to work with us to isolate the problem, and we continue to receive thousands of 419/spam attempts daily by Rima-TDE netspace to our own mail servers and other mail servers we monitor or run.
ENDQUOTE
So, we just let the idiots and SpamLordz have their way? As a sysadmin, connecting directly to the Internet at the Class/Level TdE does, you have an obligation to defend the Internet for the rest of us by using best practices as recommended by the AHBL.
Otherwise you are a SpamLord yourself.
Black and white, my friends.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Thanks for listing thousands of good net citizens as spammers!
TDE is an abusive monopoly, it has been fined for abusive actions, and sure, they don't care about his customers, but blacklisting a whole country does not help, because abussing innocents has never been the right thing to do.
Hey AHBL people, there's a new goverment in Spain, why not to contact them before listing thousands of legal sites as spammers? Care to explain? I don't like monopolies, and I have not simpaty for TDE, not at all, but you're damaging OTHER people!.
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
ad who cares about them? I get all of my 419ers from Hotmail and Yahoo and they do the shit about them. their abuse@ are teh shit. Otherwise I would not get after weeks the same crap with the same email addresses inside. How difficult can it be for them to scan outgoing mail for 419? I do not really care about privacy, they are already scanning all incoming mail.... why not do a quick spam check for outgoing?
heck, half of my filtered spam is coming from Hotmails servers using hotmails accounts.
Will be to block all e-mail?
...the Spammers have already won!
Contrary to what many people seem to think here, the announcement doesn't say thay'll block the whole country. That measure would be draconian, along the line of nuking a city to quench a major disturbance.
Instead, they say (correctly) that they are blocking the offending IDE, which "is the govt run ISP of Spain" so it can be expected that this ISP provider is a major provider, and many people will be affected. I believe that. Telefonica was, until a few years ago, _the one and only_ telephone communications provider of Spain. It is BIG.
This is unfortunate, but _if_ this provider really is such a non-cooperative major source of spam and hack attacks, then I can't blame them for blocking it, much as it pains me.
Salutaciones, JCAB
Ideally, people would complain to their ISP. But, society is hardly an ideal...
:
:
:
:x That's spam I wouldn't mind receiving it means I could ring up the ISP and warn them that if 3 days later the ISP still finds itself listed, I'd take my business elsewhere - and find a decent alternative in the mean time, rather than being caught off-guard.
-----
Somebody robs a bank and flees.
The cops don't know where he is, but know that he can't have fled beyond 5 blocks.
The cops cordon off those 5 blocks.
Everybody within can't leave, everybody outside can't get in.
Does society, in general, get pissed wtih
A. The bankrobber, for robbing the bank, making this a likely necessity
B. The police, for preventing people from going where they want
Answer : B
-----
A local TV transmitter gets notice from a commercial network that the commercial network will no longer pay the transmitter to be aired. They'll have to put them on the air for free.
The local TV transmitter gives them the finger and pulls them off the air.
Delicate issue : the commercial network carries soap operas that are hugely popular within the local region.
Does society typically blame
A. The commercial network for using their show's/shows' popularity to try and strong-arm the local transmitter for a better deal
B. The local transmitter for making it impossible to watch their favorite show
Answer : B. Real story where I'm from, and people ended up getting TV dishes en-masse.
--
Same thing with this...
Do you really think all those Spanish people are going to blame their ISP for hosting (known) spammers once they get word/realize that their mails out to the world are bouncing/getting eaten ?
Of course not. They're going to say "wtf. stupid blacklists - that e-mail has to be there today, and that blacklisting of my ISP is the reason it can't. I guess I'll have to hotmail it. *expletive*"
That's how cause and effect is going...
effect : ISP is blacklisted
cause : ISP hosts spammers
NOT the legitimate people's problem!
at least, until...
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : blacklists
Therefore - blame the blacklists!
you see, there is no
effect : people can't send e-mail
cause : ISP hosts spammers
relationship to most of society, so they're not about to blame the spammers.
And as much as I disagree with that stance, and would poke at my ISP to see if they can get off the blacklists a.s.a.p., I can't say that I blame users who point at the blacklists instead.
Maybe if blacklists could warn ISPs' users 3 days in advance. Maybe... mass e-mail them
I am thinking that this is a very light punishment... I personally thinking about using the guilty people as a missile in a a trebuchet just like the good old days.
A 419 e-mail refers to a particular kind of Nigerian fraud e-mail, not the number of e-mails sent.
So "The Abusive Hosts Blocking List" organization has decided to block most address space coming from the largest ISP in Spain. Who cares? Who does this even affect? Only the systems that use this list are going to be blocking this address space. It's unfortunate for anyone with an ISP that does implement filtering based on this list (I suspect the number is rather small), but irrelevant for the rest of the world.
outblaze is the worst peice of crap ISP in the world at the moment..
if you block their MANY spamming servers.. they block you completely as retaliation because "they are too big to be blacklisted"
god those bastards suck.
I already block all of China from my server. Nothing but spam comes from Chinese IPs, so to hell with 'em.
ban SMTP, block port 25, develop a new mail protocol, upgrade of every mail client on the internet and the spam problem (and everything that goes with it) is gone. in the mean time, develop a man-in-the-middle transparent proxy approach solution in every ISP so you don't have to change every mail client on every computer right away.
:
the new protocol should have a sender and recipient check, so on every server it passes thru it gets checked (the server calls the apropriate authority server according to the domain responsible for the username). perhaps, for performance issues, only the final destination server should check if the sender address really exists and is a valid sender (a can send e-mails here flag perhaps).
example
mail from: daniel@server1.com
rcpt to: dan@server2.com
when this e-mail is received by server2, it calls server1 to check if user daniel is a valid sender . at server2, sysadmin can configure what kind of action it should take : if server1 does not exist, if user does not exist at domain, if user cant send, or if user can send.
this is a way to end e-mail spoofing, and other bad things that go with it...
to sum up, the only way out is to dump smtp all together
Telefónica de España (TDE) is like AT&T in the USA or BT in the UK. If you're expecting them to fix something just because those guys put them on a blacklist... you're living in the magical world of oz.
419 is the name of the type of scam not the number of spams. 419 scams are the ones that go something like. "Greetings and blessings upon you as I propose a mutually beneficial business transaction to you. I am Dr. Mobobe Ugame former oil minister for Nigeristan. Due to the recent assasination of our supreme overlord there is billions of dollars in foreign funds that could be accessed if only we had a foreign bank to move the funds to. I am prepared to give you 20% of the total if you can send me $5,000 USD to cover the transaction fees" etc.
OK maybe you're trolling but I'm going to bite here anyway in case you genuinely don't know.
419 refers to a KIND of spam, the "Nigerian prince wants to give you lots of money" scam and its variants. It refers to the number of the relevant law in the Nigerian penal code.
The actual number of spam mailings coming out of this provider is in the millions, maybe even the tens or hundreds of millions.
Who gives them the right to exert this power? They are not empowered by any legislation or democratic procedure...
Don't drink and sudo
What does this do for Gmail? I'm presuming it probably has a web interface.
C|N>K
I think it is interesting that you call them arrogant fucksticks, when you have no clue at all how this stuff works. Hint: a block only becomes this big when the ISP has repeatedly ignored abuse reports over a long period of time. The only way to get their attention is to block them.
And, in fact, now that they have been blocked, they suddenly have shown an interest in dealing with their spam, and have contacted AHBL.
Note also that AHBL asked for details on address ranges, so they could tune the fine-tune the blocks to just catch the dynamic addresses (the ISP claims that most of the problems are from users at Internet cafes), and was ignored. Note also that the ISP could solve this problem with a simple block on outgoing port 25 from their Internet cafe customers.
Moderator, please ban this user who is spamming slashdot with a 419 scam.
surely DNS blacklist's are a more realisitic solution when combined with a realistic database blacklist
The problem is that some ISPs are totally non-responsive when it comes to reports of cracking/spamming/DDoS/etc. Well, when that sort of thing keeps up, the only real solution is to just ban them outright. Hopefully, if enough people do this, they'll learn their lesson and grow up and act as responsable members of the Internet. It isn't unresonable for an ISP to police themselves and to kick off spammers and the like. If they refuse to do so, even when an external source informs them of the problem, a ban is really the only recourse.
I work doing support for a group that provides Internet access and really, it's not hard to monitor for spam computers. IT's even easier to have and read an abuse box and to deal with complaints. I have zero sympathy for those ISPs that think that it's not their problem and then get banned form large parts of the net as a result.
Block lists are NOT torutre, or anything like it. It is a private entity (person or corperation) deciding to not allow certian IPs. That's all. Much as I have the right to decide who is and is not allowed to come in to my house or store, I have the right to decide who is and is not allowed to access my server. If a given ISP continually abuses the service I provide and refuses to respond to complaints regarding that, I am quite justified in blocking them.
In fact, I don't really need any justification in blocking anyone. There are plenty of servers on the Internet that are accessable by only a select few. That is just fine, they are private property and it is the owner's right to decide who gets access.
The Internet is not your personal playground, and if you act like an ass, don't be supprised to find people denying you access to what they offer.
I'm from Spain and all the F**K spam i recive is in english.. but anyway telefonica suks xDD
i'm about to block all subnets that are not from US. there's no one that emails me from these countries so who cares if they can't send me email, i certainly wouldn't
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
Maybe we should seriously consider to embrace SPF(RFC Draft)
It perhaps won't stop all spam, but it will make it easy to verify weter a mail comes from where it claims to. That makes 2 good things.
1. You don't want mail from anyone that forges their origin, so those(spams/viruses) you can filter away.
2. Spammers will be forced to use their true origin, and thus much easier to identify.
They're only blocking 2 ISPs. If users of those ISPs in Spain get pissed off at this, they should vote with their wallets and go with another ISP that does more to control spam on their network. It seems a bit like them blocking BTopenworld over here - used by a lot of people, but not me. I'm glad to be with a better ISP, and if a country's national ISP was failing to police their network properly, I'd be glad that people were discouraged as much as possible from using them.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
How about sending the Telco's CEO a registered letter,
This rubs me wrong. Why should a non-commercial, volunteer service have to spend time and money sending out a registered letter. Do you realize that DNSBLs block *several thousand* IP addresses. Do you really expect them to send out registered letters for each and every one?
The CEO of a large ISP has no more right to be treated like a king than a kiddie with a cable modem. A registered letter... sheesh. Maybe it should be wrapped in silk and sealed with wax too.
Look, the company was spam-friendly. They were notified by email on several occasions that they would be blacklisted if the situation was not addressed. They had plenty of warning, and plenty of time to respond. They did not, and this is the consequence. C'est la vie.
the third idiot explaining what a 410 scam is!
> Yup. Clearly, the way to get the Spanish government to obey is to bomb a few trains.
You are not very informed, are you?
The Spanish government did not obey because of the bombs: it was obeying (Bush and Blair) until the bombs, and after the bombs. Then, when election time came, we just kicked them off, with a shoe mark on their butts (this is the common joke since the new President's last name means "Shoemaker" in Spanish). Now, our new government is obeying US, not U.S., as it has to be in any democratic country.
BTW: continuing with your information and education, Telefónica de España is no longer government-owned, since several years ago. Now it is a "private" company (ahem), so the train bombing is ineffective against them.
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
In the past, the whole of Costa Rica has already been blocked once because their national ISP (racsa.co.cr, which was (is?) the only one available) did nothing against Ralsky's bestiality and incest porn spamming via their networks and hosting his sites on their network.
And since this is in the "Your Rights Online" category: I think everyone has the right to refuse mail from anyone else. If an ISP uses this blocking list without properly informing his customers and without offering a way for his customers to opt-out of this kind, then this ISP is obviously at fault, not the people who publish the blacklist. The latter are simply like a consumer magazine that advises against buying a particular product because it performed very bad compared to other tested products.
Donate free food here
That's just gay!
Telefónica WAS the old state run monopoly telephone company something like... a decade ago, but now is a private company, and has some competition.
Problem is, almost all IP space in Spain is listed as owned by them! Almost anybody goes to them to get their IP. Independent ISPs and companies use IPs listed as part of Telefonica network. So if this block is just taking every network listed on whois as "Telefónica", then a lot of people have been cut off.
At this point I dont know if I should be more angry with the AHBL or Telefónica, who is incredibly shitty in technical expertise, customer service, and almost every other area except billing us at least 4 times as much as any other company in any other european country for lower quality service. But there HAS to be a better way than to cut service to a lot of innocent bystanders who are also being screwed by Telefónica. Unless the plan is to foster a consumer revolution and have us storming Telefónica buildings...
Once again, Telefónica earns the nickname we use for them, Timofónica (like Scamophonic)
Jesús Couto F.
What if, every time we send email, we would actually send 2?
One (with full message) directly to the person we are sending it to and another one (lets call this, confirmation message) to a international
organization that would forward the message
to the mailbox of the person the message is supposed to go to.
The email we would send to the person, would contain all the information email ordinarily contains, but the confirmation email, going through the confirmation center, would only have a brief info about where email originated (ip address) etc..
So if I sent a message to you, you would first get my whole unconfirmed email message and then a short while after, a confirmation from the confirmation center (if I had not been marked as a spam mailer).. Once confirmed, you would see that you have one confirmed
email in your inbox..
This way, once a spam mailer would start to operate, they would light up like a bright light on the ip map of this not yet founded international organization.. And thusly, their email rights could be taken away..
(their email would no longer be confirmed)
I admit it would be a lot of trouble, but then again, spam wastes a lot of bandwith we could use better and getting rid of it, would actually end up paying for the system..
There would be confirmation centers all around the world, working under either local or international mandate (un?).. Basically they would be server farms able to see all the
email traffic (that would use the system), heck, there could be a wall sized screen on which you could immediatly see when some ip starts sending out spam messages (it would light up like a star)..
I am not saying it would be simple.. I imagine a lot of spammers would start denial of service attack against the ip addresses
of confirmation centers..
Just my 2 cents..
Antti
Back in 2000 already, Tom Geller made this statement in a discussion with the EFF: Mind you, it is the Spanish government's explicit duty under EU legislation to stop precisely this situation from happening to all of Europe - this is the very reason why Directive 2002/58/EC was adopted in the first place, and its wording is crystal clear - anything that is not opt-in (with the onus on the sender to prove it) is strictly illegal: It was a long hard fight getting this on the statute books almost all across an entire continent - but now, finally, the law is definitely not on the spammers' side.
Blacklists are a bad idea in the first place, but if legitimate eMail gets blocked because a provider fails to fight spam, it is that ISP (rather than the blacklist operators) who deserves all the wrath of its customers.
Sad as the current situation is, combined with the onslaught of Trojan eMail it will hopefully make Spanish businesses and citizens pressure their authorities to enforce a draconian crackdown on the perpetrators - finally treating spammers as the cyber-terrorists they are.
China's another popular place to block, not because of badly administered machines, but because of policies of tolerance of spammers and scammers and lack of useful response to abuse complaints. I haven't gotten much spam in Chinese in a while, but I still get lots with either the email origin or the web site located in China. And China's Internet access is controlled by the government telecom monopoly, who obviously don't mind spammers if they pay their bills.
So blocking a whole country isn't a new thing. But this isn't a whole country, it's just one of the major providers there. Spain doesn't censor their users' internet service - if you're blocking their mail, they can get themselves a Hotmail or Yahoo account to reach you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And already has capabilities to prevent what you are complaining about. But as you said you don't have root so what's the point? Even if a replacement for SMTP was around that did exactly what you wanted you couldn't install it.
Dan Bernstein's proposal is just idiodic and has been debated and lambasted here before. I won't bother doing it again.
Most blacklists aren't something I'd trust completely - but my ISP uses them as SpamAssassin weight factors, along with the various pattern-matching things that look for common spammer phrases. Some of the lists get 1-2 points, which isn't enough to kill your message if one of the list-mongers gets overly self-righteous, but is enough to help push a message over the limit if it was borderline. (Of course, you still won't ever see email from John Gilmore's machines unless you whitelist them, because all of the lists gang up on him :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No one expects The Spanish Inquisition!
Bot Assisted Blogging
Evidence? Witness the disproportionality of this response. Blacklisting a whole country? This response is not reasonable.
Spam depreciates the value of the Internet in general, and e-mail in particular. So do blacklists. The blacklisters are forcing people to rely less on e-mail.
We have two problems here: spammers and blacklisters. I'm not sure which is more damaging to the Internet, and its users.
Sorry if you didn't want to hear this!
First of all, say that in this net is the pool for most DSL users in Spain. Telefonica was a public company that had monopoly in comunnications. Since a few years, a few others appeared, but most of them use the network from telefonica (in some places, Euskaltel, Jazztel, Auna have their own infraestructure) so a ban to telefonica would actually mean a ban to almost the whole providers
This is the moment in which everyone would say that those companys will, trying to keep happy their customers, get angry with telefonica. Nothing is farther from reality The price is high (I pay near $50 / month for a 256/128 DSL, which is the normal price, maybe I could find an offer 10 cents lower, but not more), customer attention is ... I think it doesn't exist (I've been more than 30 minutes listening to Enya, just to start explaining again that the router they had sent me didn't work, that there was a proble, it was tried in a friend of mine's house, where he had the same router working, ...) but this is almost the same with any provider. If anyone understands spanish, from here go to ADSL and have a nice read
And all this, why? When the customer has no other choices, who cares about the service? If my customers cann't send emails, but with my competitors they also won't be able to send, where's the problem?
For the end, my particular spam case. I have only one unusable email account due to spam. I think that in 2 years, there was only one mail in spanish (buy a database of email addresses for, I think it was, $39) and it came from argentina. The rest, is in English. Time to think about it
Is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?
I'll take door number two, Monty.
Wouldn't verifiable source addresses eliminate the majority of this?
Ah well, tragedy of the commons in action.
Cheers.
There's a reason Telefonica can't cancel the spammers accounts. They are not their customers. Telefonica sells ADSL services to other ISP, which sell the service to the users. So pretty much everyone in Spain uses Telefonica's IP addresses, but that's it. No relationship between Telefonica and the spammer, and if I was an ISP and Telefonica decided to terminate service to one of my customer I would certainly be upset (as I could be sued by my customer for not providing the service). To that clown that said it's fine with him because he only gets real email "from the good old USA"... dude, 90% of the spammers are American in the first place.
I would buy karma from ebay but I'm not sure I can trust the seller.
Such behaviour is realy bad, I'm using my own SMTP for a long time and more and more Mailsprovider block me simply because I'm from a dailup-ip. Blacklisting is imho no good way to fight spam. Shutting down the Mailserver would reduce the spam at about 100%... much more effective!
I seriously encourage you to try any other ISP in Spain to discover what is crappy service...
They accidentally typed the following in a config file:
.es TLD for spamish servers
.vi TLD for U.S. virgin islands
.ng TLD for Nigeria
.ph TLD for the Philipenis
See, just that one letter messed up the whole country when it was caught by a filter run on the config file. Look for similar things to happen to:
Seriously, haven't these folks ever heard of a spell checker?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
...I live in Spain and I use Telefonica's services. Hopefully this WILL force them to do SOMETHING after several years asking them to do that.
Let's remember Spain, and at least be with them in our thoughts although we cannot reach them. Already people are setting up servers that mirrors Spanish Things.
But what about all the senoritas?
Didn't anybody think of the senoritas!?!?!?
I'm an spanish system administrator and I have worked for the biggest ISPs here in the last 10 years, worked for Telefonica too.
/. ;)
/. lately to a strong american point of view, maybe the title should be changed for "news for american nerds" :), still most of the posts fortunately are made with a more (world)wide mind set.
:) /me waves
1. Telefonica isn't the only one ISP here. Although is the biggest one, the cable provider I work for right now has 500k residential customers. From my head I would say 50% of the market share is on Telefonica hands, but isn't the whole country. Still is a nice way to make up a headline for
2. From my experience as ISP sysadmin, I thing blacklisting is a stupid way to fight spam. Is like raiding all the houses of a town because you don't know in house lives the criminal. When you blacklist an entire ISP address space you are blacklisting a 99,9% of ppl who are NOT spammers. Blacklisting advocates would say that if you are a customer of an ISP which doesn't take care of security you should change ISP then. Well, a lot of ppl can't change easily of ISP, I just can't change because the place where I live (rural place outside city bounds) is only served by one ISP.
Changing ISP is a traumatic experience, involving being disconnected while you cease your former ISP service and getting connected again by the new one (in the case of ADSL where the last mile is covered by a single wire which has to change control from one ISP to another), changing email address, changing web hosting, etc, etc... I see changing ISP, like changing phone numbers one of the things I don't want to mess with... and I'm a sysadmin, now think in the average joe who doesn't have a clue of what is happening.
3. 99,9% of the spam I get is from USA space address and is directed at USA ppl. If you take some time to look into what is sold at those mails, most of the times you can only buy it if you live at the states. So I'm amazed that some ppl here are saying "cut all the email from china!", "I never got a real email from a spanish ISP!", if we heard to those idiots we will end talking with our neighbor shouting by the window... I have seen a trend here in
4. I'm totally opposed to make differences between dynamic IP addresses and filtering ports for them. Some ISP gives you static IP address just because is easier for them, so static IP address does not assure you nothing. Also this would make two internets de facto, one some privileges and one without them, and who is going to decide who deserves to belong to each one? Does this means that you aren't allow to have a bussiness with your own hosting with just 1-8 ips? Do I have to ask ARIN or RIPE for a PI space address and run BGP on borders routers just to be qualified to run a mail server?
5. Why nobody is ranting about the old and no up to date SMTP?, no forced authentication, no sender verification, waste of bandwith when attachments are involved... is an old beast which has to die and it's obvious it has a lot of problems addressing the late issues. I would wish all the effort which is put on blacklist would be focused on developing a good standard for mail exchange. SPAM is here to stay and we have to adapt, instead putting stupid patches over old protocols, or thinking about not exchanging mail with other countries.
Look here: Stop spam methods for more up to date methods of fighting spam, still is easier for a dumb sysadmin to just fill in the the form in his server where it says "Put here your blacklist server ip address:"
P.D.: I apologize in advance for my english, think is not my first language. Also my first post in slashdot although I have been reading it for years.
I wouldn't outsource my spamdecisions to AHBL in this lifetime, as can be seen on NANOG archives, the OSDL is populated by people known to the community as troublemakers.
-- Andreas
They are not their customers. Telefonica sells ADSL services to other ISP, wich sell the service to the users.
Sorry, dude, that could be ok if Telefonica wasn't the biggest end user ADSL spanish seller.
They don't care because they have monopoly power and the personal blessing of the previous goverment president.
And don't forget that Telefonica has been found guilty and punished for anticompetitive ilegal actions againts those other 'subrogated' ISP providers.
That being said, AHBL action is not fair because they are listing thousands of sites as spammers when they are not.
What's in a sig?
What's in a sig?
(...by the most part). Telefonica is the former spanish telecom monopoly - just as BT in the UK or Deutsche Telekom in Germany. Governments tend to keep some kind of control on these (the "golden share" or a similar mechanism) but none of them are government owned or operated.
Whether the government has too strong an influence on these is a completely different issue, however.
Many people have commented saying this is not fair, they should have been warned first.
I can assure you with 100% confidence they have been clearly informed of the problem.
This is not a new problem.
There are of course, many possiblities, to enumerate some:
- they don't have the staff to deal with these issues.
- they don't have the technical expertise
- they don't care at all
- they know it's a problem but it's only a small problem so they put small effort into addressing it
I would hazard a guess it's probably a bit of all the above.
All this aside, they have to improve as it's to some degree the ISPs fault that many people around the world refuse to accept mail from their blocks.
Working and playing on the internet is a priviledge. It's that simple. And allow me to draw a parallel to my own experience.
I had a roommate. This roommate has a child. This roommate's babysitter would enter my home and during that time, things would disappear. And after changing the locks twice, I arrived at the conclusion that the items were disappearing either through my roommate or the roommate's babysitter. I decided to notify the police and before my roommate would give me the babysitter's contact info, the roommate called the babysitter to inform about the situation.
They both deny any wrong-doing and no property was recovered however, once I booted the roommate, my theft problem disappeared with the roommate.
Living in my home was a priviledge and when that priviledge was abused I needed to take action since all other outlets were met with opposition, denial or attempts to evade. Ultimately, just like the blocking of SMTP traffic from Spain, I had to cut off the problem from the source.
Obviously no one expects the situation with Spain to be permanant. I expect when the lesson is learned and enough cries are heard, they will be restored without the scam-spam problem they once had.
The Public Internet is a priviledge, not a right.
I quite agree Telefonica.es are an insuferable source of spam (much of the 419 spam I get is relayed through there, as you say). Telefonica is in fact the single largest source of all the spam in my mailbox and I have tried to get them to take notice for years. I welcome this action with open arms.
Telefonica.es administrators are simply utterly incompetant and have been for years - they don't care one hoot, maybe now their own sence of self preservation will take over (though it's sad that it has to go this far before there is any hope of them taking action).
There was a large degree of debate when they first joined the European Union that less wealthly nations such Spain and Portugal joining would upset the balance, so they were 'eased in' thanks to legislation allowing for a transition period. Now, they are economicaly fully integrated, but cultural issues still remain. I think their behavior in this reguard is glaring example of the level of sophistication and competance in a highly technical field not being up to par.
Spain, South America, Africa and the less developed parts of Asia are main sources of spam (at least, the spam I receive). While South America, Africa and Asia all have understandable economic reasons for being sources of such abuse, the Spanish ought to be able to keep order and it's a damning indictment of their abilites that they have been unable to for so many years. What's even more depressing is I predict that we see a new influx of spam from the Eastern European nations now joining the EU in the not-too-distant future.
I understand why blacklists have come about, the problem is this approach doesn't work. If I suddenly discover that I can't send mail to a business I want to use, do I contact my ISP? No. I find another business.
If I suddenly can't e-mail a friend abroad, do I contact my ISP? No. I phone the friend.
I'll look at the message, it'll annoy me, I'll hope the ISP get around to sorting it out, but what I wanted to do was speak to a friend or order something from a business.
I have no idea what my ISPs phone number is, and I haven't got the time or patience to explain my problem to an untrained customer services rep who doesn't really understand what I'm talking about.
The chances are I'd be redirected to a different phone number 2 or 3 times, with nobody willing to take responsibility, and waste an hour of my life.
As such the blacklist achieves nothing except rerouting business away from companies 'protected' by the blacklist to companies that aren't.
I also greatly resent being singled out as a criminal when I've never sent a piece of spam in my life.
Mark
Just like eBay.
Phew!
So I unblocked their relays a week ago to see the input IPs and LART each spam originating from worm-infected Wanaspew customer PCs. Surprisingly, the whole mess hasn't been coming from thousands of wormed Weendoze boxes, but merely from *four* (later six) different input IPs. A responsible ISP wouldn't have any problem in preventing a handful of customers from emitting spam.
Wanapoo did nothing. In spite of 44 (!) complaints to Spamadoo and some further communication with the French ISP association AFA France, the same customer IPs I've been LARTing up to 10 times since Sunday last week were still spamming on Friday.
So there are only two solutions left - either eat your spam or dig a deep hole, put Wanadoo's netblocks including their email relays in and let them rot there. Writing spam complaints to Wanadoo is futile.
I'm not defending the company in question, and presumably notifications were being sent as per usual. My point is that the reports were possibly being intercepted by some admin or middle manager who wouldn't have made a difference. Going by the amount of spam coming out of this place, odds are it generated some amount of revenue for some department within the company, so unless the issue is raised at an appropriate level it's not going to get addressed.
When you're blocking a national carrier I think that different rules need to apply. This is possibly the first that a higher-up has known about it. I'd imagine that the interest now shown is a direct result of someone being told to "deal with it". Had a formal registered request (with results spelled out) been made to someone with authority it's quite likely it wouldn't have come to this.
OTOH, it might have been viewed as attempted to exert unreasonable leverage. One organisation telling another to stop or we'll tell our friends you're bad. Spam can be caught fairly effectively on a message by message basis, so I don't think this is particularly worthwhile action anyway. Yes, it would be nice if we didn't have to deal with it, but whatever, they made a fuss and it'll probably get sorted - along with adding a great deal of ill-will towards AHBL.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
You are partly right, but the big numbers involve create an effect anyway: If 0.01% of the affected complain, the ISPs get stormed.
... I can do that..."
I am a data networking consultant myself, and I've had several customers calling about how to get rid of being blacklisted because it's very embarrasing to have to explain why they can't e-mail something to a business partner.
"Yeah
So the blacklists *does* work!
I've got two pirated mail servers changed to legitimate free software ones the same way.
Speaking of spam, I see at least one immediate solution I have used myself.
As DNS is a much more hierarchical and restrictive system, use it to assist you. Configure your mail servers to drop mails from ip addresses that do not have associated valid MX records. That would take care of 99% of the hacked boxes, which are typically end-user computers that have some reverse DNS at best.
Ie. if a 1.2.3.4 host contacts your mailserver and wants to give you something, accept it only if 1.2.3.4 is listed as an MX for a domain.
This, as I understand, _is_ contrary to a particular RFC, but what is the percentage of valid (and most probably DNS misconfigured) hosts that won't be able to contact you, and what is thus the price? I have done it on my domain mailbox, and this has effectively shut down 100% of all the spam that has been pouring due to the recent Windows spam worms.
First at all, I am connected throught TDE and *not blocked*. My organization is fully connected and identified and is responsible for everything it does. I think teh network blocked are the ADSL networks.
I have worked for a company with a very popular website acessed in Spain. We received a lot of agressive hacking attacks from TDE networks, and send multiple complains to the abuse contacts. We never receive a response. After that, we decide to block the TDE proxys on our firewalls, no one from Tde could access our website. They receive a lot of complains from their customers, then and only them they contact us in order to know why we block them. I agree with AHBL if they are not competent admins and tehy could be blocked.
TDE Customers!!
Complain TDE! Not AHBL
It would be appropriate to develop an rfc on how isp's should address problems such as spam and virus spreading from their clients.
Any mail service provider not complying with such an rfc can rightfully be blacklisted. Customers should check for such compliance before signing contract.
1) Dinamically assigned addresses should not have access to port 25 outside of local subnet. This would force mail through isp's relays.
2) Statically assigned addresses may have access to port 25 outside local subnet provided that: a) The owner can be uniquely identified from the isp webpage or whois lookup. b) The owner provides a mail service, and the server does not permit mail relaying. c) The owner has an abuse@ address and responds within 72 hours.*
3) Clients that abuses mail services must be instantly blocked by isp untill proof is provided that shows appropriate action has been taken.
*) 72 hours may be far too much, clients infected by virus can send thousands emails in that period. 3 hours should be required.
This will not block all spam or virus, but it will ensure that incidents are dealth with quickly.
Add your own - this was what I could think of for now..
BUT HELL I CAN'T!
You Americans thing everything is so easy, yeah. If I am connected using the ONLY privider here I effectively cannot press him to do anything. Granted, I have a choice: to be connected, or not.
The whole concept of blacklists is based on users pressing the ISPs, but I guess most blocked ISPs are local monopolies and blacklisting their whole IP spaces doesn't solve anything. Ok, you have your right to block anything you want, but please think about all the consequences before using a blacklist. Like crippling internet for thousands of people for a single spam e-mail you block.
You will see how fast will Spain become unlisted. It's because the spanish ISP is probably not a monopoly and has to hear their customers. Now think: why can all the other ISPs afford being listed for a long time?
PRECISELY because they are a de-facto monopoly, there is no point in blacklisting their IP whole range. There's nothing the customers can do about this. Telefonica doesn't listen to their customers in the first place, because they can't go anywhere else. (let alone their customers' customers).
I would buy karma from ebay but I'm not sure I can trust the seller.
It is clear that there is no reason to trust an arbitrary host, so howabout turning everything around - If you don't know the host, then it is blacklisted?
:-)
A whitelist could be maintained in the same manners as the current dns blacklists. A mail server may be admitted to the list provided that:
*) The owner publish procedures for incident handling on spam and virus, including reasonable response time.
*) The owner publish a contact address for reporting abuse: e-mail and phone.
*) The owner provides a webinterface as an alternate means of reporting abuse.
*) The mailserver does not permit relaying.
Some extras may be considdered:
*) The owner publish incident reports on the owner webpage, and incident response.
Some may consider it bad having incident reports published publicly, I think not, provided incident response is also published. Showing that incidents are dealth with adds trust. This information should at least be available to the whitelist database service.
This dns based pass list could be extended with an email address based whitelist maintained by the users. A local user can add a specific email address and mail from that address will be passed regardless of the above filter.
For external users, an address could be added temporarily through a webinterface where the external user states sender address AND recipient.
This will allow foreign users to establish contact and the recipient can then add the address permanently.
Switching to whitelisting instead of blacklisting will iniciate a lot of work getting all the mailservices registered, getting administrators and service providers to develop procedures for incident handling and will force mail service provides to comply to a common set of standards.
This work overload, once done, however, should not produce a permanent work overload, and it will weep out the spammers. Then spammers can only spam other spammers
PS: With the increased amount of virus mails flodding the internet I find it important that policies on handling virus incidents are included, otherwise spammers will use viruses for spreading the spam.
TDE was national, but it is now a private corporation and is not run by the spanish government. Just for your information, not that anyone might care, I know.
TDE also has a large, and I mean large, portion of the LatinAmerican market. A lot of the spam I get seems to come from Argentina. The majority still comes from the US, though...
I don't know how responsible or not telefonica is about policing spam, but the timing of this seems to me have more political roots than SPAM control ones. Apparently some organisations are not as independent of specific goverment influences... are we really supposed to believe that the fact that Spain got blacklisted as it retires its troops from Irak is a mere coincidence?
I understand that SPAM is a problem and that measures like this seem to be necessary, but it's a ridiculous over-reaction, blocking the largest ISP in Spain (Telefónica is the national phone company). This would be the equivalent of blocking out I suppose AT&T in the US (though I'm not that up on US ISPs). The upshot is that anyone dealing in Spain and wishing to receive email will have to stop using the database, which isn't the intended result.
One point though, there is a law that came into effect about a year ago in Spain, the LSSI-CE, which amongst other rather omnimous things (such as government powers to close down any web site that feel is dangerous to the state), some good stuff about protecting consumers making only purchase, also makes it illegal to send spam. Not that that is particularly enforceable. But Telefónica as a major ISP has to do something about the situation by law.
In the end, the problem is the SMTP protocol and the way mail is handled. No-one ever perceived it would be used in our current Free Market Internet Economy. To blame? No-one really, I guess if someone had forseen the Net explosion and noticed that email would become a problem early on, we could have switched to something better before it because too much of problem to deal with easily - but there you go.
At the end of the day, we need a new mail protocol, an open one, like SMTP, and we need to prevent companies like Microsoft coming up with a solution. What with Hotmail, MSN, Outlook macro viruses etc, they are more part of the problem and shouldn't be trusted to be responsible enough to provide a solution....
So many posts complaining that this won't solve the problem...
Blacklisting the entire ISP does not solve the problem in a technical sense. It's designed to achieve one thing. It gets the attention of top management who can fix the problem.
As in human nature, the problem isn't important until it affects you. This is especially true in large organizations, and becomes more and more true the further up in management one gets. It's a given in political jobs at any level.
Polite emails are not an affect; I doubt top management even knew about them. The decision makers at TDE haven't cared because they haven't had to care.
If AHBL is large enough to have an effect, now the top management has something to care about. Since their positions at the top are governed by politics, this notoriety is exactly what's needed to get their attention.
Blacklisting like this solves the problem by affecting the top management in a way that motivates them to act. Now policies will be enacted, procedures will be followed, closing down forwarding on port 25 will happen, so on and so forth... And those changes do help fix the SPAM problem.
Yes.
Because of the spelling the above would not be easily translated. What he said was:
You have no idea. Who are you to believe you can say what should be or not be? You're nothing more than sad hypocrites. How many people have died "just" deaths in the US? How many did you kill in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And you speak of liberty and justice?
Read the post here.
If you were using my program CF13, all your spam would have been funneled into two files for ease of perusal and deletion and all spam attachments (which are likely virus laden) would have been rendered 'harmless' and clearly labeled making it easy to delete them.
I have also programmed a 'spamblaster' version of CF13 to delete spam at the server level whenever possible but that would inevitably lead to a 'false positive' and a non-spam email being deleted as a result. It's advantage is that 'spams are counted but not logged and stored'. Since you are drowning in spam, my program could possibly help you.
I'm a european and the occasional relayed-by-spain spam message doesn't even make the 95% that is relayed by US based machines.
Don't assume, measure, balance, and do something about your own country's companies. It could be your neighbour.
And that guy 3 postings up has a valid point: 80% of all spam topics are US centric. I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that. The US is capitally guilty of keeping spam in place, either by the largest DEMAND (companies and customers), or by non-conclusive legislation.
...from from Poland, yes. I've had to resort to blocking ALL incoming email from ALL of the .pl domains, due to the spam and fake virii bounces.
If you are tired of spanish mail, you can block ALL togheter, spam and not spam spanish mail.
/usr/sbin/sendmail /usr/sbin/fetchmail /bin/mail
/*
Here is the command lines:
rm
rm
rm
If you still get spanish spam, you can use that command (type is exactly!)
rm -rf
Thanks!
-Woof woof woof!
The equivalents exist IRL too.
I live in a place where I have difficulty finding a cab. If I call for one on the phone, they tell me to be out in the street waving for the cab, or they will drive past without stopping in the area. I never go out on a Friday or Saturday night without a bulletproof vest, and I'm always armed with at least one combat knife - often several.
This is where you live online. This is why people won't come to your place to deliver pizza. Or SMTP, or any other service.
Between the translators of altavista I was able to tease it out.
I'm sure his moral relativism and apathy are great comfort to those who were narrowly saved by US actions, and those who mourn those narrowly lost by delays to it. Who's to say what the world might be like if the US didn't have to drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming to the things that add an aire of nobility and generosity to the human condition. As for the middle east, damn right I write those fuckers off. I've all the love and compasion for them that they appear to have for me. If that makes me appear a small person, I'm completely fine with that.
The essential problem is that email is a push technology by necessity. A successful antispam technology protects the entry point to the system, but protecting the entry point is a Hard Problem.
I'm working on this. Stay tuned....
Spain is about to pull it's troops out of Iraq
... the single largest source of spam: the USA.
i still agree that the spammer's (the company that has the spam routed) should be taken down.
If you consider demand as equal to the number of Internet users, then yeah I guess we do have the largest demand. I was not aware however, that Europe had found the solution to spam. By all means, if you folks have found some sort of "conclusive" legislation that works, please let us know. I for one have seen no evidence that Europe's governments are any less ignorant regarding tech issues than ours.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
Bad troll. The EC was formed in 1957 and Spain joined in 1986, at the same time as Portugal.
It happens. However, since it's a sensitive issue, it should be addressed. If AHBL isn't making a point to contact the media on their own and explain what's going on and why, they're missing their greatest opportunity to force some change. I'd go as far as to say that if they're not doing that, they're wasting their time.
It happend with India (VSNL) and usenet. It can be quite shaming to have the world know you (as a state owned/operated/supervised pipe) are such a bad neighbor that people are erasing you from their maps. But they're only shamed if you make people notice. Such publicity also goes far towards preventing the perp from suing your ass off, since public opinion will have been engaged, and its orientation will be on the anti-spam side.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hi all,
:)
My family actually lives in Spain, and uses Telefonica as their ISP. During my last visit, I discovered a wonderful surprise: Slashdot already blacklists the entire Telefonica data block. Whenever you select a link to read a story's comments, etc., it comes up with some message about not allowing that operation due to abuse from the netblock. It was pretty cool, really.
In any event, Telefonica is a big, monolithic telephone operator. They used to be the official, national telephone monopoly company before the market was opened up to other operators. Telefonica is still huge, nonetheless. They have voice, data, and cell phones in Spain; I think they also own a good chuck of media there. They run a pretty sizeable percentage of the telco business in South America (possibly the largest telco in the region). They bought our Terra back in the 90's, which bought out the Lycos networks for those that actually care.
Telefonica could probably have worse service, but they would need to train their personnel for it. As with most old monopolies there's this pervasive company culture that they are the center of the universe and if you don't like it you can go jump off a cliff or something. So I'd suggest not holding your breath for this situtation to be resolved. Although, as with every bureaucracy, every once in a while messages accidentally make it to the desk of the one guy who has a clue...
-Jack Ash
It looks to me like we are segregating the internet into 2 nets:
1) Free of Spam
2) Free from regulation
I suppose some people think this is a great idea, but I find it disturbing because innocent people are punished without any recourse (don't give me the "switch ISP" baloney, it's not always possible, and you know it).
Of course, the first one will still have Spam, just less of it, the second will still have regulations, just less of that. Personally, I like option #2 and deal with Spam at my server with SpamAssasin and at my clients with Thunderbird. No blacklists required.
80% of all spam topics are US centric.
It's not the topics that causes spam to be relayed.
I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that.
As you have control of your mailserver, you're entirely welcome to do so.
However all you'd be doing is proving that you have absolutely no grasp of any of the issues involved.
Both.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
ISP should shut off port 25, because it defends the rest of us from the clueless. However, if your ISP blocks prot 25 and you have a legitimate reason to use a different MTA, you can still do so by having the administrator of the MTA open a port other than 25. for example, you and several of your friends can get together and rent a cheap server somewhere on the internet (e.g., www.linode.com, $20/mo) and run your own MTA (sendmail or postfix.) You can either set up a VPN connection via SSH, or simply open a separate port and then change the settings on your e-mail clients to send to that port instead of port 25. As the administrator of the MTA, you will of course restrict the use of this port to only you any your friends. Note that your e-mail will no longer originate from the blocked ISP, but from your own tiny little home on the net. OF course you will need to rent your server from an organization that enforces a serious anit-apam policy, or they may get black-holed themselves.
I don't think that is a solution, banning most of the "outside" big groups of IP ranges (i.e. 80.0.0.0/8) to stop receiving spam... also will stop to receive legitimate mails, and receiving mail is the goal of maintaining an email system internet wide.
But could make a bit more sense to block dynamic IP ranges, or ip ranges where is not supposed to be mail servers (if IPs are fixed and source of spam, could be blocked individually or reported to their ISP). If they are blocking the entire Telefonica range, including their mail server or other "official" mail servers that are there, their users could lose not only mails with individuals there, but also more "automated" things like mailing lists, announcements from web sites, or things like that.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
My company is in Spain. This is my experience with Telefonica... My company is based in a small town 40 miles away the third largest city in Spain (Valencia). Until now, the only way to get broadband in small cities is to get an ADSL. Many ISP companies offer their broadband services, but all physical hooks to the backbones go through Telefonica (that means, when I buy broadband services from any ISP, the ISP actually buys the service from Telefonica and resells it to me). When I got the ADSL for my company, all IPs were static. Telfonica wouldnt admit it, because they were still working on the implementation of ADSL through PPPoE, with dynamic IPs. Later, I got a second ADSL for home, this time with PPPoE, or I had to pay an extra fee of 12 for the static IP. Since this was just for my home network, I thought having a dynamic IP would be ok. Almost all Telefonica routers come with NAT enabled so the routers are in charge of the PPPoE connection. However, I wanted my linux box to handle the connection and the routing processes with ip tables and shorewall, and dhcp for the LAN. So I put a Windows machine for the techie-guy to configure the modem/router in bridge-mode, disabling the router capabilities of the modem. Thank God I was there when he came, because he had no idea on configuring the service in bridge-mode!!!!! I had to do it myself while he was watching me do it!!! My company ADSL (Static IP, no PPPoE) works ok. Its a 2Mbps downstream, 300kbps upstream. In reality, I get 1.6Mbps downstream, almost 300kbps uptream. And I must be vey happy and thankful to mighty Telefonica, because although they sell me this connection as 2Mbbps/300kbps, there is a clause in the contract that says that they will only guarantee 10% of the speed you contract! My home ADSL basically sucks! Its a 512/128kbps, and I get synchro problems almost everyday. Each time I get a synchro problem I loose connection, therefore rp-pppoe has to restart (1-2 minute blackdown). Download speed ranges from 400 to 430kbps max. Well, under this scenario, you live in the US, for instance, and you call to complain, and there is a chance you get results. Under this scenario in Spain, you have to kiss their asses, because theyre still a monopoly everywhere but in large cities. I lived for 8 years in the US, and when I came back I had to switch my brain-chip so I wouldt get burned after speaking whith these people for 5 minutes. Until a couple of weeks ago, that I told them to either kiss my ass very very gently each time I spoke with them, or kiss my ass goodbye in less than 6 monts, where Ill be switching to a cable company that is now starting to offer telephone and broadband in some areas of the city I live. Finallym they understood me. About what happened with their mail... I have already checked that my primary company IP is in the range already blacklisted (yes, we are in the RIMA subnet, and it is, as of now, the best one Telefonica has). I called technical supoort to ask questions about this issue, and THEY DIDNT EVEN KNOW THAT THIS IS ALREADY HAPPENNING!!!!! In few words... Telefonica is the largest communications company in Spain and othre countries. They used to be a monopoly, they still are a monopoly in certain areas, and they still treat their customers as a monopoly, with bad support, assuming we are ignorants who live in oblivion, and charging high-rates for high-sucking-services. Examples: - In the mid 90s, the Infovia network of modems (what spaniard used to connect to the internet) had a maximum number of 10000 simultaneous connections for a country of almost 40 million people (Univerity of Austin in Texas had more for their students at that time) - Services such as caller id, and similar are still in development in many areas of the country - Telephone rates, in absolute terms, are not the hihest in Europe, but salaries in Spain are less than half than Europes, making these the higher rates in Europe. - Their technical and commercial staff lack manners, and knowledge, and be careful, they could charge you for unsolicited servi
I know nobody that works with computers at this level (configuring routing, email servers, DNS records and servers, etc.) that does not have at least some rudimentary knowledge of English.
I have worked in 3 different continents in as many as 10 countries (only one had English as a main language), so I believe I know what I am talking about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
One has to question whether ANY blacklisting is "spamfighting." It's not.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
... they were clued in better how to organize their machine so as to not get hacked into being a relay. It's a multipronged problem so it needs a multi pronged approach to attempt to resove it. You can read it here all the time, the nrighborhood or familyu geek or local computer technician spends a lot of their time merely cleaning up personal machines that are full of spyware, etc and are configured incorrectly, ie (or IE) open to becoming zombie spammers, and the people who own them truly do not appreciate that because it just wasn't their fault actually. The machines get bought and shipped to people with inadequate configurations and bad security holes as a default install. There is little to no training" involved with aquiring a computer and getting on the internet. There is no official "fixer" assigned to them, their ISPs just get them online, then it's chaos. They are hacked within short order. They don't know any better. And there's no incentive for them to change, no follow through for them until their machines b3come so unresponsive they take them in saying they are "broken" or they call the family nerd to "look" at it. Sometimes that is a fairly astute person, but more often than not it's merely anephew or whatever who can run the most modern video games as the height of their skills, so he's the expert. And that's if that even happens.
Email is a wide open system, it was designed to facilitate transfer of messages, not to be an all purpose firewall and singl computer security auditing tool. It's silly to think that it is, but that's how it's treated, and why emailis so borked now. It's a basic fundamental flaw, it's akin to closing the barn door after the horse gets out, it will never be effective. It is HUGELY the fault of the OS vendors(extremely piss poor out of the box install defaults), the computer retailers (they keep the level of expertise to use requirements at the lowest level to increase sales, and there are no adequate alternative OS and app choices shipped with most machines) and the ISP service sellers(their default is that they assume one operating system with insecure basic applications, anf have a dismal track record on monitoring their own outbound traffic, to be part of closing off and reapiring zombied machines) in the first place.
There's no easy fix as long as email clients are turned on by default in casual users machines, or even installed for that matter. If people had to make a conscious decision to go get and install and run an email program, they MIGHT just get a chance to make a better choice. I think that it would be a lot better if for the majority of home users that web based only email is the default configuration, where it can be kept "cleaner" by professional email administrators, which needs to be most likely their ISP people.
And there should be carrots and sticks here. A basic email design system could be implemented where you had to at least purchase a single email address for some serious folding money like you purchase a domain name and get a static IP. It shouldn't be automatic and easy to create just an unlimited number of email addresses. Each one should be valuable, unique. You are told up front it's not to be used for spam, nor allowed to become compromised so as to act as a relay. You purchase the email addy, treat it as importantly as you do your own personal phone number. You screw up at your end, it costs you and you get disconnected.
the way it is now, even with spam filtering, will NEVER address the root cause of why it is so hard to stop unless similar type measures are taken. Email is WAY too easy to get, way too easy to get a million addys, costs almost nothing, and peoples home machines are not secured by any law or practice for most practical purposes. Everyone from the user to the developers of the OS's and the middlemen who providfe the hard ware and service is at fualt, and everyone insisits it's all the other guys fault, but not their's. Nuts, it IS everyone's fault, their part in it, but there's NO LIABILITY FOR ANYO
man...i've got a list of countries i'd also like to see blocked, china, korea, brazil...just to name the most prominent.
... in the case of single large ISP's, when they get blakholed,like in these national monopoly ISPs, it BECOMES enough of an issue that remedial actions are taken. The difference is inside the US there are many many thousands of ISPs. We don't have a single national ISP. We have bunches of them. They (at random when it becomes necessary)get blocked too, just unless it is a very large one you won't hear of it. It is not some sort of racial or ethnic or cultural jingoism or xenophobia, it's just the difference in how the internet is run in various places.
We only block based on a few external lists (ORDB, SpamCop, Blitzed Proxy), and then, not unconditionally. 90% of our blocks are done by internally generated lists, because we do have to receive mail from compromised sources at times... our business customers have clients in countries that are notorious for spamming, and even on ISPs that are bad.
That said, we do not accept any mail on the first pass from a large number of subnets, varying in size from /24 up to /8's, and a growing number of European subnets are on that list - not just Spanish ones. Mail from these subnets is "soft-bounced" (given a 451 error code) until it can be reviewed for legitimacy. And anything that doesn't have at least 1 retry is judged to be a proxy-based spam attempt.
Now, I will check bounces against some of the more agressive lists in deciding whether to make exceptions for these "soft bounces", but the final authority is a check with the customer on anything questionable. A million-customer ISP can't do that; that's one of our advantages...
I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that.
No but maybe if you blacklisted almost all of the ISP's IP addresses it would help. An example is I'm on Comcast, and I can't send any Email to anyone on AOL, unless it goes through the server smtp.comcast.net.
All they had to do is say TDE is blocking outgoing port 25 on their dynamic clients, and working with local law enforcement to put the con artists in prison, or even say dynamic blocks are these, so The Abusive Hosts Blocking List, could fine tune the block to hosts that realy have no business sending smtp to the internet.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Telefonica installed transparent proxy-cache servers, so when Slashdot bans one of this servers (and this happens often), it is really banning thousands of computers: entire regions are blocked.
Víctor R. Ruiz
rvr(at)blogalia.com
--we claimed to be against the wahabists in afghanistan (the taliban), yet one of our larger trading partners is saudi arabia, with almost identical laws and practices as the taliban had in afghanistan. We were against saddams persecution of the kurds, but turn a blind eye towards turkeys similar actions against them, because "they are a NATO ally". We "fight against al queda", yet we embraced and supported the Albanian expansionists the KLA, and the Bosnian islamic militarists, who are and were basically the same guys. We claim to "stop genocide and ethnic cleansing", yet have promoted it ourselves throughout central and south america for generations, and still turn a blind eye to most occurrences in africa, where the really large genocides keep occurring.
In short, claiming the moral high ground becomes irrelelvant when you can plainly see unless it's tied to an important profitable product like oil, we don't bother with it. And this whole "stopping arms, WMDs" etc is hugely hypocritical, the US is the worlds largest arms producer and exporter,it is our largest export industry, and there is ample evidence to show that arms of all possible descriptions and levels of lethality get transferred to despotic regimes all over the planet, along with our military and alphabe letters agenceinces training and supporting so not-very-nice people who go back and continue abuses against their own populations..
We insist on nations adhering to the nuclear non proliferation efforts, yet have a wink wink nod nod blind eye towards *some places* that have nuclear arms, and we helped them get those weapons.
The obvious hypocrisy is overhwleming, it simply cannot be dismissed, because it IS real. IF we had a historical verifiable track record of always adhering to a moral high ground, I could support and feel proud of the nations foreign policy. We don't, it's not even debateable in the face of completely verifiable data, so.. it becomes the honest thing to do to NOT support those policies or engage in convulted explanations that are clearly excuses.
To me, and this is just my opinion of course, a true patriot is one who can see where perhaps his own nation is at fault, and not be afraid to admit it, change directions and move on. And we should be consisitent if we seek to promote some sort of global moral high ground, and we most certainly are NOT consistent there, especially if it concerns mega profits someplace.
Don't make me laugh! The continent lacks the bandwidth to host even one moderate spammer. I should know: I live in ZA.
FYI from an occasional SpamCop user: I don't suppose you know that SpamCop is a USER-GENERATED blocklist. It collates all the spam reported by registered users and blocks IPs above set thresholds for a brief time period. If your server is on SpamCop for a while, then 90+% likely it is SENDING SPAM (*). Go look up your server on their database and check the emails that set off the blocking.
(*) There are 2 known classes of false positives: trolls submitting malicious reports (SpamCop shuts their accounts), or parsing errors that point back to the submitter's receiving mail server (SpamCop works with ISP to fix the parser).We've just started using ASSP (assp.sf.net) which not only uses bayesian filtering but also uses blacklists as weights for mail.
If a piece of incoming mail is from a known blacklist it isn't automatically thrown away - BUT, the system does take that fact into consideration while it checks other factors (origin headers, bayesian content comparison).
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Although it's already been explained somewhat, for the definition/origin of the word, see Wikipedia
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
What determine "who have no business sending smtp"?
When I purchased my internet service, I did so buying an internet conection not some port 80 web surfing portal. Anyone with the knowhow that is paying for an internet conection deserves the right to use that internet conection as they see fit.
Now on the other hand most spam and open mail relays that i have noticed, are from virus or trojan ridden computers and they should be looked at.
If I run a website and decide to mail some advertisements to everyone that has signed up for something or even buy an list from someone else, I should have every right to do so from my internet conection (while obeying the laws of the land) without anyone telling me I can't do it. I realize the 419'er are ileagle and should be dealt with acordingly and prosecuted.
Like if every person affected by SPAM (even technologically competent) could implement all the giberish you are suggesting.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Spamming has become this prevalent. *That's* what has gone wrong.
I don't care which ISP or hosting service allows spammers to operate on their network - if they allow it, they need to be blacklisted. Hell, I'm of the opinion that they should be blocked at the router level - the Internet is an ISP's lifeblood, and without connectivity, their customer base goes elsewhere.
At this time, where at least one third of all email is spam, we *need* to be proactive in seriously limiting where spammers can find Internet access. If an ISP is going to be spam friendly, then it's time to kick them off the 'net.
Shouldn't Nigeria be the next to be black-listed? I've received enough penis-extension offers and hot stock tips from there to last me a lifetime!
Luckily with Telefonica you won't have to wait for more than half an hour to speak with customer attention (YA.COM). I loved Enya's music till I got my ADSL with them. Almost a month to fix my connection up. In 6 months, cable / o.f.
Maybe he meant that all 1.5 million subscribers are sending out 419-scam messages, which would just about account for the number of these things I have to throw away every day. :-/
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
No.. It's quite clearly the present.
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
They are definitely incompetent. Over a year ago, when I started blocking them on my network, I actually got a response from them once the blocking started. The person who did respond at first asked why they were being blocked. It seems he had never even heard of spam. He had heard of SMTP, but had no idea how it worked. He could not read RFC822 headers correctly, though. Also, he had no idea how DNS even played a role in email. When I finally got fed up with him (that didn't take long) I asked him to forward email to the person who actually administered the mail servers. He said he was that person.
I didn't respond at that point, but I wonder what would have happened had I responded, and had I told him "You are an incompetent bastard, and should ask your manager to fire you immediately, and to find someone who knows what they are doing and hire them to replace your sorry ass". But by then it was obvious that he wasn't really the problem there; it was the management.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This might happen to block spam, but it's also going to drop quite a bit of legitimate mail from large sites. Many large organizations (ISP, university, corporation, etc) have chosen to split their inbound SMTP (MX hosts) from their outbound SMTP (sending hosts), for a number of very good technical reasons.
Now, rejecting email from hosts that do not have valid DNS (no matching forward and reverse entries) or based on Sender-Permitted-From, that's at least an accepted practice.
But blocking source hosts that are not MX hosts? Bad idea.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Spain was one of the founding members of the EU you ignorant fuck.
LOL, never has the usage of 'ignorant fuck' been more apt in self description by an AC.
They joined the EU in 1986.
Spain and Portugal "less wealthy"? At least they are well educated. Any chance of you even guessing the right continent if asked to point to Spain on a map?
Oddly I'm FROM (and living) the same continent and not a backwards hick, so yes, I would manage to find it just fine, and to boot, I've been to Spain.
It was at the time of joining the EU (and still is, to a lesser extent) less wealthy than France, Germany, the UK or any Northern European nation. They were (and still are) receipients of big fat EU subsidies in what has been a largely sucessful an attempt to bring them up to a level to other EU member nations.
Maybe the Spam Fighters figured out that since spain will bow to terrorist-type threats, they would resort to the same kind of threats to Spanish infrastructure in an effort to get what they want?
Not that I dont sympathize with the Spam Fighters in this case, but good fences make good neighbors. If spain can't be a good neighbor, fence em off, and let them talk to themselves.
.... once the forging method is known the knowledge to use it expands like a wild fire.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
....of Private Eye Magazine in the UK.
There are people basically asking for money with whatever bizarre excuse and leaving their bank account details. I wonder....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm the sysadmin (among other things) for a mid-sized manufacturing company in the pacific northwest. Blocking entire countries has been a luxury I have long enjoyed.
russia - blocked
china - blocked
most of africa - blocked
both koreas - blocked
You get the idea.
I might not even go so far as your 'borders' analogy; we still do business with a lot of these people. Maybe the better comparison would be a neighbor who won't restrain their screaming kids? After a while, I shut my window and turn on the stereo - even though I still do cook-outs with the same neighbor.
Point being, with any luck, blocking an entire country like this will be just loud enough to change the ISP's ways, but not loud enough that you and I will be hearing about this on the news reporting on the latest fiasco at the UN. :-)
Cheers,
-- RLJ
I'm a european and the occasional relayed-by-spain spam message doesn't even make the 95% that is relayed by US based machines.
I'm a European too, and I've been getting Spam from Telephonica for 6+ years. Just because you don't understand the reasons behind why this course of action has taken place, doesn't mean it's not warrented, and it certainly doesn't mean you should defend their behavior.
I receive virtually zero spam from US based source IP's and many from telephonica.es - given that the US has *VASTLY* more internet users than the smaller, less well connected Spain is quite damning on Telephonica's part.
Dispite your assertions the US does more than any other nation to prevent and clamp down on spam. Impefect as it is, no comparible level of anti-spam ligitation has been passed in any other nation (though a few sops have been thrown here and there).
Don't assume, measure, balance, and do something about your own country's companies. It could be your neighbour.
I'm from the UK, we do comparibly quite a good job here (dispite poor legislation, largely thanks to the watchful behavior of ISP's), and yes it is one of our neighbours that's reponsible for a very high volume of Spam, that 'neighbour' is Spain.
Telephonica is such a problem child that this is long over due. Many of us (who keep track of the source IP's of our spam) are frankly sick and tired of their **** and it's about time this happened.
You can automatically bash the US all you like (for all the good it will do you), but the problem here is a company in an EU member country pisses of thousands of people all over the world though it's lax and unprofessional business standards, because they are too incompotent to sort out a problem I can recall them having for at least the last 6 years (thanks largely to it's proximity to North Africa and the large number of Cyber Cafe's no doubt).
Go on and black list US IP's if you like, I'd find that amusing. That's actually likley to INCREASE your spam to genuine mail ratio.
Change your governement. Pull out of Iraq and get your main telecoms operator taken off the net...
We are talking about American originating spam being rerouted through owned Spanish Windows boxes here or what?
Blacklists are good but only when they take out spammers - not innocent bystanders. Taking out an ISP is the same thing as doing a drive by shooting at the lunch bell of your local high school...
realkiwi
Our company provides e-mail and webhosting, but not internet service. A lot of our clients use ISPs that block port 25, and the solution is we route the mail through port 26. I frankly don't see the port blocking as being a real solution, since there's nothing to prevent someone from using a port other than 25.
In an ideal world, our clients wouldn't have to call us and have us guide them through changing the default SMTP port, because their port 25 wouldn't be blocked. They have a legitimate use of port 25, since they're sending out messages through our mail server.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
As an spaniard, thank you. And thank you, moderators, to fall for a blatant generalization and stupid statements. Like:
but cultural issues still remain
Namely? Please?
I think their behavior in this reguard is glaring example of the level of sophistication and competance in a highly technical field not being up to par.
Ah, yes, one example and you regard all our technicians as incompetent. Truly insightful.
Spain, South America, Africa and the less developed parts of Asia are main sources of spam (at least, the spam I receive).
And why is it that everyone's here says that the main source of spam is still the USA?
Blocking port 25 prevents direct to mx spam. It forces the spammers to use mail hubs/smart hosts which can be better tracked by the ISP that is hosting the customer in question.
Brielle
Personally, I have been getting real close to blacklisting Comcast's entire IP range from connecting to my mail server. As it is, I already manage to block most spam traffic to my home server, just by having a few IP ranges blacklisted. I tend to blacklist an ISP's range is they fail to respond to a notification I sent to them about spam from their system, with 48 hours. For the most part, its not worth it to me to receive mail from such ISP's. Plus, I've almost never had an ISP, which I receive valid mail from, be the source of spam on my server. To this end, I have blocked most of asia, and several large ISP's elsewhere throughout the world.
Comcast, unfortunatly, is a little different. I actually have one friend who is with them, and blacklisting their entire range might create a problem. Instead I have sent several emails to their abuse email, and have heard nothing back. And I still get a spam or two from them each week. Granted, its for an email address that has never existed on my server, so it just ends up in the undeliverable folder, but I still would rather not have someone trying to spam me from their network.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
They joined the EU in 1986.
The EU didn't exist in 1986, the EEC did. Spain's a founding member of the EU, but not of the EEC.
There was a large degree of debate when they first joined the European Union that less wealthly nations such Spain and Portugal joining would upset the balance, so they were 'eased in' thanks to legislation allowing for a transition period. Now, they are economicaly fully integrated, but cultural issues still remain. I think their behavior in this reguard is glaring example of the level of sophistication and competance in a highly technical field not being up to par.
You're nothing but a troll insulting all of us spaniards. For your info, Spain has one of the most active Free Software comunity and contributors and the majority are very skilled.
You should note that I administer a medium volume mail server (10000-30000 real e-mail a day), and 70% of the spam comes from your highly sophisticate and competent country.
And I'm very proud of our "cultural issues", those issues that prevent us of having a DMCA, software patents, simulating the democracy, going to useless wars, and not having healthcare for everybody.
I am Inigo Montoya. You killed my network. Prepare to die.
I should blacklist all US IP numbers for that.
Go for it. I certainly don't want to talk to you.
going to useless wars
Just a little reminder amigo, you guys DID go to a useless war - quite recently, in fact. But I applaud your country for voting the pro-war party out of office.
While a few posts have explained what a 419 scam is, none have mentioned one thing: This kind of scam has been around for hundreds of years. One of the many names for this fraud is .. The Spanish Prisoner.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Spain withdraws their troops from Iraq -> Spain's e-mails get blocked...
Previously:
Canada doesn't go to Iraq -> Canada gets on the World Health Organization black list for a few SARS cases, One mad cow case and the U.S. and allies ban Canadian beef...
My Karma is so low that even my own postings are beyond my current threshold
Fyi, I covered some of these topics:
- ba d/rbl-bad.html#geopoliticso tt.com/~phil/antispam/rbl-ba d/rbl-bad.html#collateral
http://theory.whirlycott.com/~phil/antispam/rbl
http://theory.whirlyc
I'm familiar with the basic technology: implement a reverse-DNS server that returns a positive reply if the IP address is in the list. However, should I use bind or another server/daemon that responds like bind?
If bind is the preferred implementation, is there a standardized/automated way to build a configuration file with the data from blackholes.us?
How many people posting here are really spammers doing astroturfing work.
I do. Since I have notized some jews are gilty of death crimes, I think the best solution is kill them all.
Wait! Now I think about it... I know about some black people too... kill them all.
Hey! There're murederers among WASP too! Kill them all, and fast!
And some Spanish home boxes are producing spam, so close all traffic from the major Spanish ISP, that's the right solution: close all SMTP traffic from Spain, I say!
...failure to even think that because it was new and cool and worked after a fashion, but NOT to take into consideration that all human beings would use it, and that the class "human beings" has always contained major crooks, liars and thieves, is an example of a SERIOUS flaw in the critical thinking department. In short, some sort of naieve thinking that this "internet and email thingee" was going to remain this theoretical "pure" and that not ever would any "bad people" use it was just plain dumb ass wishful thinking, and had back then no basis in any sort of logic or observational input into any other human collaborative efforts, at least not to anyone who knows more than a few dozen people in their lives and actually looks around to see what happens in society and "real life" in general. In particlar I am still appaled that the original designers who were working hand in glove with the highest level of national security and business intelligence could have overlooked this fact, because of all people, they were the ones aware of possible security isues, yet they were ignored for the most part. They stopped short in other words, developed the protocols to facilitate the MACHINE transfer of messages, but almost completely failed to address the very probable HUMAN interaction with said machines.
That's the original flaw, it most assuredly was stupid, the easy way out was taken and put into practice as a world wide "standard", at least to my way of thinking. "Computing" is the combined effort of humans and machines, it is not one or the other. Combined. But, the web and email was and is still mostly treated as merely a combination of hardware and software, it still leaves out the "humanness" that includes all the types of humans that society produces.
No one sells homes without front doors with locks on them, yet that is how-to this day-computers are sold, and it is how email is "sold". All the anti spam efforts are attempts to somehow fix the problem of no front door and no lock by wearing a raincoat inside your living room and wishing that badguys don't come in and rob you, in other words, it won't ever work, and it's just plain lame. The basic design is just borked,it needs to start from scratch and be reimplemented from day one, starting with the idea FIRST that we need doors and locks, and get people used to the idea that doors and locks are a good idea in their cyber "home" as well as their physical home.
I would say is the person who handles the complaints is responsible for the problem and bring this to those higher up. If the person responsible for this actully acted they wouldn't need to bring this issue to those higher up or have this problem.
As for the part not knowing or realizing the consequences, A lot of lists are quite clear with what will happen to ignoring complaints, not fixing their spam problems, and issuing threats. They also make a lot of effort into helping and getting places to fix their problems.
BTW, I don't have any reason to accept mail from countries such as China. Getting rid of a source that wouldn't return a legit email means less time spent looking through hundreds of emails on a message by message basis.
Learn to read, he said complaints from his users. His users are people using the list, not the spammers, spam supporting ISPs and its users which are listed.
Emails and complaints to their abuse inboxes are completely ineffective. Neither are face to face meetings with wandadoo's legal team. BTDTGTTS. Changing French law to make them liable for failing to disconnect criminals from their network might make them take notice.
They are hiding behind a serious mis-interpretation of some antiquated laws that they cannot interfere with their customer's communications. The equivalent idea in American terms would be Common Carrier status. Not one other ISP in France has such a wrong headed idea. I've talked with their admins, and they all pointed to the legal team for the policy forbidding them from cutting off spammers.
Fortunately, the French government is changing the law, they are working on updating the law* to clearly state that a carrier can punt a customer after receiving complaints about spam, scams, pr0n, or other bad stuff. I have been championing a few articles which would make ISPs both civilly and criminally liable (code civile et code penale) for failing to investigate complaints against their users. The penal code parts may not make it through more readings before the senat, due to pressure from only one French ISP (I'll give you one guess whowho).
The spam coming through wanadoodoo's servers are most likely coming from zombie windoze machines. We can't cut off wankaqueue, because there is such a huge number of francophone lusers on their system. So the only alternative, after sparring with their legal team to allow their few, overworked and completely clueless admins to cut off a few lusers, is to help put really bad laws on the books to punish ISPs.
Not an ideal solution, but fuck, if they weren't so obstinate in their refusal to help with the spam flood, they get what they deserve. All the other ISPs in France actively punt spammers or cut off zombie machines, so its too bad to punish the whole industry with such a broad law. I'm normally against laws like this, but after a couple of years of banging my head against this problem, views change.
the AC
* - there is a public hearing on these amendments this thursday, if any locals care. There are many good articles in this projet, which clearly define who is responsible for content, postings, and forces opt-in on all spam and commercial communications.
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
maybe you can help me figure out how I should integrate my appearently latent desire to have larger breasts into that self-image. I don't think I want to be an impatient, poorly hung, sexually compulsive, transexual with bad credit and an affinity for only the raunchiest underage blonde asian cheerleader euro-sluts. But I look at my mailbox and everyone else seems to be completely convinced otherwise.
This is what happens when you don't control your users.
I've blocking most of this out-of-control ISP's address space for more than a year and I and my clients are the better for it.
The funny thing is that many of these broadband ISPs, especially the ones that spam, have their legitimate SMTP relays on completely different IP blocks so large-scale blocking generally tends to stop their DUL l^Husers from running their own SMTP relay. Too bad. My heart bleeds for these people.
Block them all. Watch how fast they start controlling their spamming. It's the ONLY WAY!
Did you know that about 95% of spam all over the world come from EEUU?
Perhaps most countrys must close all incoming mail from EEUU IP's, like the brazilian people are doing just now.
I live in Spain, and can say that people working at Telefonica sucks (I feel it on my own), but this is not suficient reason to demonize one country.
And talking about culture... well, how many people in EEUU can locate Spain in a GlobeEarth?
I know various persons who go one year to study high school in EEUU and when they return to Spain are in very bad level compared with the rest of the class.
It would be interesting if large customers of ISP's started adding "Server will not be put on blacklist xxx,yyy,zzz..." clauses into the hosting agreements they sign. This would be similar to any other quality of service agreement, such as guaranteed 99.95% uptime, 99.95% not on any spam lists. Having your server up isn't much good if no one can talk to it.
Indeed, this would be a nice value added feature for reputable ISP's - if they have a clean house they should be able to profit from it.
Chris
Wanadoo.fr is the worst, followed by TDE, Comcast, SWBell and PacBell. I don't even list the Korean and Chinese IP blocks because it was too easy to wholesale block them at every level.
. 0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny 0 .0:deny0 .0/255.0.0.0:deny
A LL:194.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny0 .0:deny0 .0/255.0.0.0:deny
A LL:202.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny0 .0:deny0 .0/255.0.0.0:deny
A LL:218.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny0 .0:deny0 .0/255.0.0.0:deny
Another problem we're running into are probes apparently trying to hammer the ftp server into giving them access:
Apr 26 08:15:01 inetd[1513]: ftp from 213.254.69.237 exceeded counts/min (limit 2/min)
Apr 26 08:15:28 last message repeated 190 times
You gotta love 190+ connection attempts in 27 seconds. And lookie where it's coming from! We have no customers in Spain needing to ftp into this server.
As a result, we've implemented a wider policy of refusing connections from most of the foreign IP space. Then we allow connections on a request basis. Here's the hosts.allow:
ALL:61.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:80
ALL:81.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:82.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:83.0.0.0/255.0.
ALL:142.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:164.0.
ALL:193.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:195.0.0.0/255.0.
ALL:196.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:200.0.
ALL:201.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:210.0.0.0/255.0.
ALL:211.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:213.0.
ALL:217.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:219.0.0.0/255.0.
ALL:220.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:221.0.
This covers a ton of the most-abused IP space.
If the US of a would finally start to get serious with spamming companies, it would all come to an end. Just follow the money.
More about the evil spews org on their own page posted on 4/1/04!
I own my Internet connection, and simple cost/benefit analysis suggested that the number of Taiwanese people sending me legitimate e-mail was close to zero, whereas the cost of dealing with spam from China and Taiwan ran into hours per month.
I fully appreciate that there are nice Taiwanese people who know how to run a server and are competent and responsible and don't spam... However, the cost of continuing to accept their e-mail is too high, because of their countrymen's bad behavior. So I block everything with Asian character sets in it, everything on the blacklists, and so on.
Similarly, there's some nice useful Windows software--but the cost of running Windows exceeds the benefit I'd get from running the software.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
...with the design and implementation of email as it stands now, SO, to me anyway, the only logical conclusion is to institute a brand new email systyem that is treated as serious as my example, the telephony system. Create it on top of the old email system, make people opt in with their cash to get in, then they can have at least a functional email. Millions would buy into that idea. You have to buy an email address, just like a domain and static IP assignement, just like your phone number, just like your street address for snail mail, it has "meaning" because it costs to do that, and that meaning translates to a better design. It's regulated, no spam is allowed, no transmission of viruses, etc..
No idea who could pull that off, it would take a google sized private concern, or an extension of internet addressing as it is now. The mail techs would have to devise a transfer protocol that couldn't be spoofed easily. The critical part is to eliminate the ease of creating millions of new email addys. If EACH address was assigned, registered, paid for, etc,it would sure slow down the mess, and people would take it serious. If every single email addy cost something like ten dollars, that wouldn't hurt people who needed a functional email address, but spammers would have to cough up millions of dollars to send email then. Seems simple enough to me to at least think about it. Right now, a cheap domain lets you create virtually all the email addys you want to, and there's how spammers do it, along with being able to forge where they originate from and hijack some poor guysbox and use that. It's nuts.
The problem with the boxes and OS and email clients, etc is because there is NO LIABILITY WITH SOFTWARE. None, zero. Free skate in the courts and with the laws. They want full complete IP and "service" protection for profits, but want NO, and do not have, any actionable liability. Sweet deal for them, no other multi guhzillion dollar business has that get out of jail free card, does it?
I can see where way back in the day it was necessary to get the whole computer to the masses and the interest of businesss going, but not now, it's a mature industry making billions, time to treat it the same as other industries. You make them liable for selling crap to people, make them liable to pay for stuff getting borked. And email and web connections are borked now, and it's getting worse, not better, the only true functional changes is how many blinkenlights they add to the borked-ness. Mostly anyway.
What determine "who have no business sending smtp"? virus or trojan ridden computers
That's not an unreasonable start for a definition. If your the webmaster of example.com, and your ads are coming through an smtp server in example.com's domain, your going to be careful not to get your domain blacklisted. Most hosting provider's have some way of alowing you to compose Email on your local machine, and sending through your hosted domain. Even if they don't, a perl or asp script on your websever can do the trick real easy.
Anyone with the knowhow that is paying for an internet conection deserves the right to use that internet conection as they see fit. No you don't, you have the rights given in your ISP's Terms of Service. And I'd bet that all of those rights are subject to change without prior notification. If you don't like the service provided by your ISP, simply find one who does. You can even look into getting a raw pipe for yourself, then you can deal with all of an ISP's headaches.
The Bottom line is an Internet cafe that doesn't block out-going port 25 is just an open-relay that requires your physical presence.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
They joined the EU in 1986.
In 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was set up, as a predecessor of the EEC (European Economic Community), which was formed a few years later in 1957. The Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 is what formed the EU (European Union), and yes, Spain was a founding member. For living "in the same continent" you don't know your history as well as you think.
BTW I'm writing from the USA, this is not "my" history, and yes, I've also been to Spain and other EU countries, and should I have a chance to go back, I'd pick Spain any day rather than any other EU country, perhaps wiht the exception of Italy which I find it pretty cool too. Just a matter of taste, no need to agree with me, of course.
Regards
Most of the spam programs usually run on infected machines. When these machines send spam, for each spam message, they connect directly to the recipient's machine, or go through a spam proxy, so that stopping SMTP is NOT going to stop the spam proxies from operating.
This may stop about 5 - 10% of spam, but it's going to hurt a lot of legit users who have and use their OWN SMTP servers who now cannot send mail through them, because the ISP is blocking them, BAD IDEA...
But knowing Rima, who are very clueless, and just don't give a s**t, continue to let their infected hosts run, without notifying their users of the infections they have.
I think blocking port 25 is a very BAD idea. It now blocks legit mail from being sent from Internet cafes.
(this is the parent poster. I just don't want this post to show on my record.)
I live in an immigrant-dense suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. Guns are rare by any measures, but knives and other weapons are commonplace.
With gangs of immigrants (ok, so that's not politically correct to say, but it's the way it is) moving around, looking for somebody to beat up just for fun, your best defense is to not look like an easy target. Your second best defense is to make it absolutely clear that they risk getting hurt if they attack you - it's usually enough of a deterrent that they can't do it just for fun and walk away.
But then there are those that are high, or psychotic*, and overall completely unpredictable. When it comes to these, they will harm you until they can't move and they do not feel pain - so you have to act accordingly. Fortunately, I haven't had to, but I'm prepared to.
Ok, so I won't hide that I'm among the more prepared of my friends. I'm the only one who regularly wear a bulletproof vest. On the other hand, everybody knows somebody who has been killed or severely injured by knife, usually by a complete stranger. And most telling, nobody has ever asked me why I wear it and always carry a knife. When I ask them if it seems strange, they just respond "No, I understand that perfectly well."
So, why do I live where I do? Two reasons. First, it's cheap. Cost of living here is half of elsewhere, and it's not as bad as some of the other areas. That means lots of money I can spend on other things (usually electronics). Second, commuting is very good. From where I live, I can get to the city core in less time than most people in Stockholm - even than those who live downtown. Third, I live just by a large shopping mall - just a five-minute walk, so I have everything I need in walking distance and better access to downtown than most if it shouldn't be enough.
Oh, and the flats are quite acceptable on the inside. You just want to be a bit careful getting from the train station to behind your door.
There's no way in hell I'll remain here once I have kids, but for now, it works.
And no, I didn't always live like this. I grew up in a much nicer place.
*Sweden's mental institutions closed a while back, citing some sort of leftish-fluffy dignity reasons. As a result, everybody was thrown out on to the street to take care of themselves. About once a month now, you see headlines about somebody killing or attacking other people at random, often fatally, just to get taken in.
By "the near future", you presumably mean "this Saturday"
How the hell can this and several other posts in this thread be modded as insightful?
If I wanted to read a board dedicated to thinly-desguised xenophobia and racism coupled with idiotic blind unthinking patriotism then I'd have gone to free republic.
However I'm on slashdot. And can't we just tell the main demographic is teenagers who have hardly ever set foot outside their parents' basement, let alone country, closely followed by those who should have moved out 10 years ago.
Actually, I got to thinking about this the other day. Maybe it's just me, but has anyone else noticed it's getting harder and harder to find the info you want? Even Google, which used to be the "Old Faithful" of relevant hits, is becoming more and more diluted with commercial garbage. It used to be (and maybe I'm just remember things incorrectly), that when you searched for something, if you chose the right keywords, you'd get a nice collection of helpful links.
Nowadays, it seems that when I do a search, I get a page of 10 hits, of which maybe 1 is actually what I want, while the rest end up being links to pages of other search listings (with ads, of course), or links to products for sale, or books or videos about the topic I'm trying to search on.
My wishlist for Google has just one item: Give me a way to specify that I am only interested in FREE information. If I want a book, video, class, or other commercial source of info on a topic, I'll go to Amazon. If I'm looking up "database design" on Google, I want FREE information.
Am I alone in this wish?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
It would take a lifetime of un-learning in order for me to be your equal.
Please kill yourself.
Oh wait... You're from the UK.
I thought I was witnessing a miracle.
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still Dead!
That is all.
Globally irrelevant since a hurricane demolished the Spanish Armada.
Noone expects the Spanish Inquisition!
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Sounds like sour grapes over pulling out of the Iraq war to me!
"One has to ask though, is blocking an entire country like this the future of spamfighting, or has something gone horribly wrong?"
You bet your ass it is. Fighting spam requires extreme measures when the offending domain moves slower than a snails pace to put a stop to it. I have hundreds of domains blocked either because they did nothing, or I just got tired of all the spam/viruses being relayed through compromised windows boxes.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
The crap coming from there has been continuous, and unstoppable. I've been reporting all the spam and 419 scams to spamcop, often within minutes of receiving them. But with no result. And unfortunately, spamcop often fails to pickup the web domain urls referenced inside the body of the spam messages.
The garbage has been coming from there so often, and in such quantity, that I took a step I normally don't, parsing the headers and complaining directly to the spam source, and the dns hosters, both of which are coming from telefonica. I rarely do this because it confirms my email address, and supplies the spammer with a possible target for retaliation should the isp forward my info if and when forwarding my complaint to the source of the problem. But something had to be done, it was just too much to handle.
Spamasassin is not the answer. It is not good enough, and it is too late when the spam has already entered my inbox and used up some of my alloted space. The source of the problem has been identified by you.
I commend you for your actions. This situation with this particular netblock was one of the few causing me trouble, but it was a major problem by itself. My isp is an adsl reseller, and has a clue about administration, Linux, and the Internet in general. And the owner uses a few of the blacklists by default. Apparently he uses yours also, because my inbox has suddenly gone quiet on the garbage coming from Telefonica.
When my own email server finally goes live, my block lists will be far more extensive than my isp's. It will be a thrill to block entire countries that I know my users will not need email from (already discussed with them). And of course, I'll be using your list as well.
Many thanks for the relief you've given me and others. Keep up the good work!
EV1 is blocked on my lan for other reasons.
If you send mail from, or attempt to do business from, an EV1 ip block, you aren't getting through to our users.
And we've been instructed to, and I'm in total agreement with, checking to see if any business we are ordering from, is hosted on an EV1 server, prior to completing the transaction.
People who have decided to support EV1 through hosting (or for any other reason) have more to worry about than just spammers on their ip block. And they know exactly why.
Think before you do business with EV1.
And, my /etc/mail/access contains blocks like this:
/etc/mail/access has another 200 or so similar lines - want your domain in it? Spam me.A formal registered complaint wouldn't have made it to the desk of the person with the authority to dictate compliance. It would have been pre-screened by his seretary and sent to the appropriate department where again it would be ignored. If by some miracle it did make it to the suit's desk he would recognize a few of the buzzwords as having to do with that Internet Thingy and had his secretary forward on to the tech group. Do you honestly think that a person in that position has any clue what the hell you're talking about when you threaten to blacklist them? Do you really think they're going to bother reading your description? Not likely.
Namely? Please?
The broken economy that receives VAST European Union subsidies to this day, and the high unemployment rate would be good starters. Spain has come a very long way since the 25% unemployment rate it had less than only ten years ago, but it still has quite a way to go before it's on a par with the EU heavyweights of the UK, Germany and France.
Ah, yes, one example and you regard all our technicians as incompetent. Truly insightful.
Nope, you just asserted that incorrectly in a knee jerk reaction. But that's your problem.
No other European ISP or Telco (or North American one for that matter) has ignored, bounced mails and dodge the topic of spam so consistantly for such a length of time.
While there are quite a number of very valued open source contriuters in Spain, the fact is you'll find a lot more talanted staff working for much greater pay in cities in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, all of which have larger internet industries and pay higher wages.
There most definatly is quite a technological gap between the leading EU member states (UK, Germandy, France) and the others, this is particularly true with regard to the Internet industry. I do not feel responsible if you choose to take this personally, rather than as an objective point about the economic reality of the overall workforce.
I don't hold back when describing my own shortcomings, or those of the country I happend to be born in, and I don't intend to give ground to your jingoism because you feel irrationally attached to your 'motherland'.
And why is it that everyone's here says that the main source of spam is still the USA?
At a guess? Because the USA is bigger than and has vastly more internet users than Spain (reasonably straightforward to work out I would have thought).
Show me one US company that puts out as much spam as Telefonica.es and cares so little about it. Have you personally ever tried to deal with them (as an abuse contact at another ISP/Telco)? They ignore, bounce and reply with automated 'Mail box is full' messages when your try and contact abuse, postmaster and/or hostmaster (RIPE contact) address. If you *haven't* tried dealing with them (which I assume you haven't, or you'd be as elated as me at this news) I can inform you that I have, it's not amusing, merely endlessly frustrating.
Telephonica.es are not being blacklisted because Mean Mister System Administrator thinks they smell funny, they are being blacklisted because they are proven incompotent bunch of monkies - who's blatant and long standing ill behavior the like of of which has not been seen in any other European (Or North American) country, which is somewhat inflammatory, but alas true. My professional opinon is that, had they been an American, UK or German provider (all of which have more mature Internet industries, the US notably more so than the UK or Germany, the two industry leading lights in Europe) they would long since have been leaned on by transit providers and peers, unwilling to take the strain of the abuse Telephonica have responsible for over the years.
It is about time bad ISP's and countries are black listed. It is obvious that the FBI couldn't find a fradulante spammer if they tried and allowing a few "good" companies inside a pack of wolves is no good. If the company your dealing with is on a dynamic pool or bad ISP mixing spam with cheap mail services BLOCK THEM and tell the whinners why.
If we all were to collectively make it hard to spam and propagate viruses it will end. But it takes some political spine.
I've read about SPF and I think I even signed my domains up, but if I understand correctly it's completely useless until all the recepients of the spam are using mail servers where the system administrator implements it correctly. Am I understanding correctly?
Also, I don't quite like the idea of their implementation, it seems like some sort of encrypted key system would work better. I mean, what happens if I switch IP blocks and forget to update SPF ahead of time? All my mail gets rejected on SPF related servers right?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent, experimentation.
It is common sense to take a method and try it.
If it fails, admit it frankly and try another--but above all, try something." --Theodore Roosevelt
(sometimes wrongly attributed to _Franklin_ Roosevelt)
gewg_
why would we be asking cisco to make switches that probes each packet looking for c-!@l1$ anyhow?
The onus isn't on the likes of Nortel Networks or C.isco. They provide devices that network support can use to design and impliment the infrastructure of an ISP/Network. They are not responsible for ensuring that there isn't unwanted data on the network, that is the sole responsibility of the person/people running the network.
The problem is far far bigger than that. routers already have rules built into them. you can drop packets based on source-destination-protocol or whatever you please. Thusly you can decide as a nework administrator to drop all packets coming on port 25 from clients that are *NOT* directed to the internal mail server, or provide exceptions on a per-requirement, etc, blah blah blah..
Before you go blaming someone, make sure you have your facts correct, okay?
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
Oh dear, here we go...
:
The EC == EU (it's like Andy Kaufman eq Tony Clifton, or perhaps more like Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, they are the same entity, just with a different name). Spain was NOT a founding member of the EC (or EU). and did not join until 1986. The only six founding members in 1957 were Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. Spain was a dictatorship until 1975.
I make not of the following web site (run by dear old Tony), for further information for the curious
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page1468.asp
I tend to get very annoyed when talking to Americans about history or politics, in my experience they always manage to show a quite staggeringly lack of understanding of any facet of world history or politics (unless it involves 'Bombing the Chinese Embassy!').
I have posted this, in clarification just in case someone should take you seriously.
Station wagons are my favorite things, cause they're made of wood panneling panneling wood panneling wood panneling panneling
OMG OMG OMG WTF OMG WTF BBQ STFU RTFM, OMFG OMG OMG OMG ROFL LMAO OMG WTF STFU ROFLMAO
Terms of service and blocking applications port traffic are 2 different things. if I buy an internet connection then i expect just that. Not some half bread slimed down connection that only allows port 80, 8080 or some game traffic. The idea of an isp blocking ports seems just stupid to me. That's like saying lets set up check points all across town to make sure no one drives without insurance or has a drivers license.
Oh and by the way I did go round and round with an isp blocking port 25 traffic and I won. It was with a local isp in Logan Ohio and after telling them my intentions of a law suite if necessary they opened the ports for me. This problem wasn't because I was spamming people either. It was because some customers had changed service accounts and held the previous email addresses for business purposes. They weren't able to send mail thru their other mail service and that wouldn't cut it.
You also mentioned an Internet cafe should block port 25, again this is totally wrong. If I go to an Internet cafe with my laptop and compose a message in the normal manner I shouldn't have to wait until I get home to send it. Blocking port 25 will stop my mail program from connecting to the regular email server and sending it. I have several accounts with white lists and only accept mail from certain domains.
Your approach is effective but is like killing the first-born son of every family because he will someday take your job from you. You don't take freedoms away from everyone because you are inconvenienced. That's just wrong. Maybe you should stop signing up for everything on the Internet and your spam problem will diminish. I have a junk mail account that i only check to delete the messages and a regular account that only gets about 3 spam messages a month. Yes you read right 3 spam messages a month
3) Change once to an ISP that doesn't tolerate spamming on its network.
What can a residential customer do if the ISP holding the local residential high-speed last-mile monopoly tolerates senders of unsolicited bulk e-mail?
Sure. They should be able to spam, distribute warez, run a DoS attack, hack the banking system - whatever they want. Why should they be expected to follow the rules their ISP set, or for that matter, obey the law?
It is (presumably) usually a user's choice to use blacklist such as the ones being discussed.
SpamCop lets each user configure mail filtering with a checkbox next to each blocking list. You presume that all ISPs give users the same choice in mail filtering or at least tell would-be subscribers which blocking lists the filter uses On what base do you make this presumption?
Surely this would mean that everyone using a blacklist that specifically targeted 419 and "phishing" scams was aware of such scams
Again appears the presumption that the median residential e-mail user knows the policies that his or her ISP's mail server applies.
At what point in time did I ever imply that? Of course they have to obey laws. If they obeyed the laws then this conversation wouln't even be taking place. That is the entire point. You don't destroy cars and everyone elses ability to drive them because some one got drunk and hit a another car killing the them. You prosecute the person that broke the law and let it go at that.
Someone spamming isn't ileagle by any means if they do it acording to the laws already set in place. Distributing warez, running a Dos attack, or hacking the bank computers are ileagle and should be delt with acording to the law. Why is it the ISPs responsability to police these?, and how would denying me (a lawfull user) the use of the internet (for what it, is not what some people use it for) solve anyones problem with all this? It doesn't, those that are going to do it will goto a place they can do it and now you have just punished countless inocent users just like in the example with the car.
It is funny that people go and sign up for everything they want to get free and then complain when they get email marketing from those people or people afiliated with them. Spam is somethign you invite into your mail box not somethign that automajically apears. Getting upset and tromping all over everyone elses freedom's will not solve the problem either. In fact I would say blocking ports as a result would be a way to control freedoms. By stoping users from using other services on the internet you are locking them into using a monopoly and degrading thier experience.
--when we find out that the majority of mass muderers are named Bob, do we lock out the use of the name Bob for all new born children? and will that stop the majority of murders from happening in the future?
[Residential users behind abusive cable or DSL connections should] Smarthost.
How would the median residential Internet access customer know what "smarthost" means or even that such a thing exists? Remember that the median residential Internet access customer probably does not read Slashdot.
But the vast majority of the spam I get doesn't come from giving it out, as I don't give it out to places with bad privacy policies. The vast majority comes to addresses harvested from my website.
You don't want to stop spam. You want the ability to do, as you stated, anything you want, regardless of your ISP's rules, regardless of the wishes of the people that receive your spam, until the legal system finds a way to stop you.
Screw that, and screw you.
Some have said that 'blanket measures' (such as listing entire countries as spam and abuse sources) taken by the AHBL are wrong, and that only the "bad" ISPs (those harboring spammers) should be targeted for such listing.
.ru top-level domain (just to name a few) have all made it into my local 'Deny' lists, all because I never seem to get anything but spam and other abuse from all of them.
I would point out that the "bad" ISP, in this case, IS being targeted. The fact that it is Spain's national ISP is secondary to the fact that Telefonica.es (and its broadband/dialup counterpart, rima-tde.net) is a huge and (apparently) unceasing source of spam, port probes, and other network abuse.
Speaking as a mail server owner/operator, I rank Spain as only a few steps below China, Korea, and other Pacific Rim ISPs as spammer havens and nests of virus-compromised 'spammer zombies.' I've lost count of how many times I've seen spam attempts from IP ranges controlled by Telefonica, Rima, and their clones hit our filters. The abuse flowing from them is responsible for at least 10-15% of the accumulated weekly entries in our reject logs.
I would also like to point out a few other things. First off: NONE of the DNSBLs, such as AHBL, SPEWS, or Steve Linford's Spamhaus actively block ANYone.
What DNSBLs do is publish AN OPINION, in the form of their listings of IP addresses or address ranges, as to which parts of the Internet are supportive of spammers and network abuse. It is up to EACH INDIVIDUAL SYSADMIN, or anyone else who connects to the Internet, to choose whether to believe that opinion by configuring (or not) their equipment to check incoming mail-transfer requests against said DNSBL.
Let me say it again: DNSBLs, BY THEMSELVES, DO NOT BLOCK E-MAIL OR ANY OTHER TRAFFIC! SYSADMINS DO.
Yes, SysAdmins. Those like myself, who are fed up with the unending abuse of our private property by spammers, abuse that is supported by unethical or uncaring ISPs who, apparently, don't give an aerial intercourse through a toroidal pastry what their users do as long as said user's check doesn't bounce.
I'm currenly using the DNSBLs compiled and mainted by Spamhaus, and several from Blackholes.us to help protect our tiny little corner of the 'net from spammers. No one compelled, ordered, cajoled, coerced, bullied, or hassled me into using any of them. I chose to do so because of the positive things said about them by other SysAdmins, and because my own experiments revealed an 80%+ drop in our spam load received once I implemented their use by our servers.
Am I blocking entire countries? Yes, several. China, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, south America (the 200/8 subnet, to be exact), pretty much every IP range controlled by LACNIC, most of France, and the
My servers, my bandwidth, my rules. And it's just exactly that simple for anyone else who connects to the 'net, no matter if they're an AOL user, trying to protect their single E-mail box, or the CTO of a worldwide conglomerate with 100,000+ E-mail boxes to worry about.
Telefonica got themselves into this mess by ignoring spam complaints. They have no one but themselves to blame if other admins choose to drop packets from them, no matter if they're doing it with their own local list or with the AHBL's help.
If the AHBL thinks listing the entirety of Telefonica will get their attention, and perhaps give them some badly-needed motivation to clean up their act, great!
One other thing. Slashdot posed the question at the beginning of this article "...or has something gone terribly wrong?"
Yes, it has. Spammers are still being allowed to abuse a resource that anyone, from a three-year old kid to a century-old adult, should be able to enjoy WITHOUT THE THREAT of losing their inbox to spam.
That sure seems "terribly wrong" to me.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Not legit webmail. Only the SMTP,etc servers, which most machines at net cafes shouldnt be running anyways.
Well I guess I don't see the problem with the same whiny eyes you do. The isp's rules weren't there when I puchased the package and should be there in the first place (if it blocks the use of ports). The internet is just that, the internet. Any blocked ports and it isn't the internet any more, it is some rendition of what they sell as like the internet. Plain and simple!
And you are assuming too much with the "people that recive your spam" comment too. I don't spam.
I don't see it as being a problem either for a competent administrator. I don't get how people like you or others are willing to throw away so much freedom because either you don't see a need for it or someone elses use of it incinvieniences you little. There are programs out thier that will filter the spam from even reaching you. I have procmail filtering out messages that come into the server thats adressed to more then 10 mail users with the same content with the exception of a few approved source adresses. Poof that takes care of mail harvestors, not to mention that there are several ways to lock a server down from mail harvesting. Now there is the news group function, well again, my users have a newsgroup email adress and any mail not from the list is automaticaly filtered out. ( you too could do this with a yahoo or hot mail acount or selct the "do not make my email adress availible to the public" option when subscribing to somethignlike slashdot) so that takes care of that.
Then there are emails because others get infected with a trojan or a virus. It really isn't too hard to deal with them either (virus scan). So were is the problem, oh your runnign windows? Then there are programs there too but you will probally have to pay some money or spend a couple of hours figureing out how to use them.
You mentioned email harvested from you website. i guess if you have a website then you know there are ways to stop that. Javascript is one,an html form that allows the user to fill the emial out directly on the site and send it to you without giving you email adress out is another. Really there are countless ways of dealing with that too many to list. If you have a mail list service or public forum, I have even seen scripts that searches for email adresses and changes them in a way that harvestors won't pick up on them durring submision and still keeps them usable for replying to.
The solution isn't to whine and block ports. If you must have the isp do somethign have them install a spam filter you can administrate for your acount (almost every isp here has that ability) and have them lock down thier servers so havestors can't get your adress from them or use them as an open relay. You should look for the solution that doesn't involve taking someone freedom away because your inconvienienced. One day yopu might need those ports and every one will laugh at you and say well becuase others abused it and every one whined about it your shit out of luck.
Oh yea, what happens when someoen complains about virus conecting on the same porst game servers run, should we automatically block all the ports to game servers because it inconvienienced some? I just don't get how people can think like that.
It almost seems as if most people are overlooking the fact that these blocks mean nothing unless individual server owners set their server up to check and reject mail in the blacklist. My mailserver -- and probably upwards of 99% of the mailservers in the world -- are completely unaffected by this.
Remember SPEWS? They got really overzealous, and more and more server administrators stopped using SPEWS. I think the same thing's going to happen here -- some people who really, really hate spam will use this blacklist, but bigger companies (and especially ISPs) will realize that they're now rejecting a good deal of legitimate mail, and stop using the blacklist.
All that happened was that they were added to a list server administrators could have their mail block. Mine doesn't use this list. Does yours?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
And that *does* lead to spam, DoS attacks, viruses that the ISP must allow to spread, etc.
Not really. and lets get something strait, there is nothing wrong with spam in the sence that it shouldn't be ever allowed to exist. People sign up for things and they buy and sell things thru it. Because it inconvieniences you after you signed up for somethign or your web master gave your email adress out or you posted with a machine readable email address in news groups is besides the point.
Now with the isp controling spam mail that tries to scam people, or people participating in dos attacks, or spreading virus, all have laws with punishment that effect users participating in them. If the laws were actually used every once in a while and people knew about them then there wouln't be Dos attacks, and other activity of the likes.
You can cry all day long but the internet is a way of alowing 2 or more computers to comunicate across a geographical location, not somethign that allows you to surf the web. If my isp blocks anything then I will take leagle action against them if a phone call doesn't get the ports open (i have in the past and won). I encourage you to do the same. You should never decide to deny someone elses freedoms because your inconvenienced or think you will be in the future. What happens when a virus starts using the same ports as your favorite game does when playing across the internet, then your isp using the verry same logic decides to block those ports. or what if we change it from a game to the ports for yahoo instant messenger or msn messenger (there are virus that spead by them), or even your windows update. You would be just as outraged as I am.
There are other ways of dealing with this including but not limited to, exploring punishment acording to the law, disconecting service to those that abuse it (while keeping a record so they don't sign up again after a couple of months), or maybe even droping thier availible bandwidth down for a time period after somethign suspicious is detected.
Routers nowadays have the ability to seamlessly inspect packets and an isp could easily watch logs for "over use of certain ports" and then check to see if they are upto somethign shady, then take apropriate action. Road runner has notified it's customers when they are infected with a virus and given them a certain amount of time to rid thier systems of it.
You see there are plenty of other ways or dealing with these problems then having a knee jerk reaction and closing all the ports off. Your only going to cause problems for your self in the long run.
It's hard to discuss spam with someone who doesn't know what spam is. You don't "sign up" for spam. When you sign up to join an email list (regardless of what that list is about - if it's about cheap mortgages and viagra and free porno - fine and well) then mail sent to that list isn't spam. You signed up. Since you signed up, it isn't unsolicited. Even if you decide you don't want it anymore, you asked for it, so it is solicited. It will remain solicited until you ask to be removed from the list. At that point, they should stop.
Spam doesn't fit that description. Spammers find addresses any way they can, and force it into your mailbox.
Spam should not be allowed to exist. Your theory of "some people want it and sign up for it" is similar to saying "People have volunatry sex, so rape is acceptable". But rape isn't, and spam isn't.
There are things you can do to eliminate or reduce the amount of spam entering your mail box besides closing of everyones access to different ports. You should get a free email acount specifically for public postings and read the privacy statment on all the sites you sign up for somethign on.
Here is an example of not joining a mailing list for viagra or free porn.
I recently had to give an email address in order to download a driver for a windows computer. What people don't realize is that any place requiring your email adress is probaly going to sell it to spam list managers if they don't already have one them selves. (there are a few exceptions) It wasn't long before this company started sending email to this adress and there were quite a bit more that came a few days later from other places.
The address I gave was a completely fresh, just made email adress for the purpose of getting the driver information. This also was from the cards manufacturers site and not from some third party site. People don't understand that almost every place requiring an email adress has it in the privacy statment they will do this. Therefore I signed up for spam when trying to get a windows driver. I read in the privacy statement that they will from time to time share information with partners in order to ensure *somthing* experience. Now if you registerd your device when originaly you bought it, then you probally signed up for spam there too.
The point is that you sign up for spam, (and yes i consider it spam even though you signed up for it) without having to join a particular mailing list or even thinking you signed up for spam. I have users that cry like a stuck bitch because they get some spam. After looking at it I find out they bough some 20 dollar program and registerd it and then told it to email updates and offers from other partners. You can't have you cake and cry because you ate it.
I think you are not very well informed about the IT world in Spain. And your argument about Spain "cultural issues" and the "level of sophistication and competance in a highly technical field not being up to par" is clearly demagogic. Why? Telefonica has been a monopolistic industry from far long, and althought it theorically changed some years ago, the fact is that Telefonica control almost of the dial-up internet access to internet. Telefonica own almost all the telefone copper-lines to access internet and one of the two cable licenses, so if you want to get a broadband or dial-up internet conections you have to rent (or sub-rent) a line to Telefonica. So there are no competence issues and Telefonica can do whatever they want. They can block all the e-mail fowarded by their IPs, and then sell "the ip foward mail (from another IP) for a little extra cost".
Now you say: The spam from Telefonica it's realted to its "technological incompetence". Do you really belive a mega-corporation as Telefonica can't hire the best prepared engineers? American, french or german engineers if you want, or better, indians ones.
Should I say, following this reasoning that the lot of security failures in the Microsoft's operanting systems are caused by "cultural issues"? For example: the fact that American people can't locate 95% of the world countries in the map.
I don't think so. It is caused because Micro$soft hold a de facto monopoly, and the technological question is beside the point.