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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?"
... 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
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?
Then is it your fault or the blacklist's? If you hand your keys to a person you know is drunk, and they crash your car, is it your fault that your car it totalled or is it their's?
I say it's yours.
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.
"Blocking off an entire country" is meaningless in this context. You make it sound as if no one in Spain can send e-mail now; that's completely untrue. What has been blacklisted is e-mail originating from Spain's national ISP: that won't affect the Yahoo Mail, or hotmail, or GMail, or any other mail service accounts of people in Spain. Only the accounts provided by Telefonica De Espana, or companies that rely on them for hosting, will be blocked.
This is far less extreme than say, a spam filter that automatically flags email originating from hotmail and aol addresses as spam.
- Paypal is unusable;
- Many other online ordering service block my whole area;
- I have been unable to find a colo provider with php/mysql that will either accept my payment or allow FTP from SE Asia for their free account;
- Loxinfo (the largest ISP here, I believe) users cannot post to Slashdot stories.
Living in a country that is a home for spam relays, FTP assaults, whatever... makes life much more difficult online, though I do none of this.Put identity in the browser.
Personally, I've found that many blacklists are getting rather over-zealous lately. For example, one of my ISP's mail servers is on the SpamCop and Dynablock lists, causing pretty much everything I (and many hundreds of thousands of other people) send out to be classified as spam!
:-(
Fortunately, I can work around this by relaying mail through a non-blacklisted server, but most subscribers won't have the ability or access to do that. And if the ISP ever turns off port 25, I may have no choice but to relay through their servers
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...
You make it sound like no one ever uses their own corporate mail servers?
:-\
Not everyone uses yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc. A lot of local businesses will have localised mail servers, these people will now feel the crunch... I can imagine export type companies would really be wailing.
It's not like they all have time on their hands to start phoning up and complaning, let alone even KNOWING who to complain to (imagine if they're a few tiers down from the top ISP). How many of those business would know why their email all of a sudden wasn't being responded to.
Clients love getting email from joe@hotmail.com, very professional looking
While this may actually induce something to happen, I still feel the cost on the innocents is just too high.
PLD.
A list of EV1's IP blocks was available long before the whole SCO debacle. The reason being there was a time when it didn't appear EV1 (aka RackShack) didn't appear to be policing violaters of their AUP. Hence if you want to block EV1 you can add that particular blackhole. Of course it's something you have to add manually.
Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.
Those who blindly trust a blocklist will get burned eventually. Don't just trust some stranger you meet on the Internet to do your work for you... they will eventually screw up when you're not looking.
This article advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
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.
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?
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
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.
I agree all of this can seem damned ugly, but we really have no choice. If some people fly through the roof, let them. The alternative, a legislated and policed Internet, is not an alternative.
/. is powerful - and if it's legislated and policed, you can kiss most of that goodbye.
And they must succeed, for if they do not, the legal eagles will be here to clean up and then the world will have to go off searching for a new Internet.
The freedom of the Internet is, IMHO, the top priority here. It is the one thing we may never trivialise. We're a fifth column here. The net is powerful -
So let them let off steam. Let them blacklist all of Spain. After all, Spain should do something. Let Spain work it out. If it does work out, it's not only a victory for anti-spam forces like us, it's a victory for a free Internet.
Tada.
If the choice is this or nothing, I'll take nothing. Would you be happy with this if you lived in Spain?
Now if you want to do something constructive, switch to cryptographic tagged aliasing (basically, what Spam Gourmet does). It works, you're in control, and it doesn't break anything. My recent paper shows why this approach is much more suitable than white|black-listing.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
hrm.. nothing is definately not enough, they terminated no customers, sent no warnings, they demanded to see our previous complaints because they'd never recieved any complaints from ahbl.org. news flash we have quite a few domains, we're not going to complain from the blacklist. Frankly we shouldn't have to wave around a blacklist to get attention, and to get abusive customers removed. A customer who has abused is already abusive before the first complaint is sent. TERMINATE THEM THEN!
I see ChinaNet are on that list. Some !#@%er on ChinaNet is joe-jobbing our webmail system, we have virus and spam scanning but that takes up a lot of processing time, coupled with the vast barrage of bounces from the spammer its bringing our system to its knees.
Complaining to ChinaNet has made no difference, all we've had is an automated response that was in Chinese.
The sooner we just start blocking sources of spam wholesale the sooner we could see results I believe. I know it's a very extreme response, but if you look at the case where Blueyonder removed themselves from the Usenet system (before they were banned instead), it forced them to sort out their spamming problem. Since then they have been able to sort out the spammers and rejoin the rest of usenet.
When the rest of an ISPs customers cannot send or receive email the ISP will have to respond or face losing their customers.
here here...
Actually I work doing technical support hosting company, and we have occasional problems with new IP addresses we are given being pre-blacklisted for us. Now, I am all for control of spam but the current mentality in the blacklist world works out to be guilty until you prove innocent. Consider this analogy with blacklists:
The house across the street from your parent/inlaws/someone-that-you-want-to-live-by gets raided due to a high number of people coming and going all hours of the night. The police declair it a crack house, and sieze the property. You find out about it, and see the house will be auctioned. You attend the auction, but the house, renovate it and make it look very nice. You live a quite life, never have police come over, no complaints ever. Eventually you die/move/etc and new owners move in and they too are the best possible owners, and as time passes the house sells yet one more time and still no disturbances. According the the blacklist mentality, when did the house stop being a crack house? Never. Could be 100 years later and the house is still a crack house until the current owner proves otherwise.
Now, you tell me where there is freedom on the web with that mentality?
Yes spam is bad, but blacklists can be much worse since most consumers of the internet don't understand what that filter can prevent them from doing.
Imagine placing an order with a store online, typing in the right email address and the wrong phone number. If that site is blacklisted, then there is no way contact you to let you know that the item is backordered and ask if you want to cancel the order or wait for it to come in.
As for the solution that I think would work is to simply add certificates to all the email servers, and as email passes on each hop it gets an encoded time stamped copy of that certificate which also has a encoded name of the last hop. This would allow you to know the source of the email and if you match that with an MX record for the from domain then you know it was an approved server, so that means that that person ment to spam or has an open relay. Either way, not resolved in x amount of time and the cert if revoked; and any email from a non-cert server just gets dropped as people wish.
Thats my 2 cents...
Great !!
Perhaps it would also filter out all of the crap about offers for cheap mortgages, cheap medications etc. etc. that are off no interest to me MAINLY BECAUSE I LIVE IN THE U.K.!
This does work. It worked with Telstra.
Your concept of the money flow with spamers is wrong. Spamers get paid by compaines that think they will sell something to the end users. The result is most of the people who paid the spamers never make any sales at all.
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
They will when the alternatives are 1) having to change one's e-mail address every week because your ISP just got on SPEWS blacklist and 2) drown in spam.
3) Change once to an ISP that doesn't tolerate spamming on its network. They DO exist.
Have worms on your Windows box: your ID is revoked.
Which means a huge subset of users would lose the ability to send mail anyway. Same supposed problem with blacklists, except in your solution, they lose it completely.
x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
No-one has even tried because the ideas got shot down by professional hand-wringers
It has been tried, repeatedly. It has failed, just as repeatedly. This idea of yours is not new, not practicle, and all but unimplimentable.
(x) Sending email should be free
I disagree. E-mail "stamps" would be a good idea.
Email stamps would be a very BAD idea. Spammers already steal accounts, bandwidth, server space... what makes you think they wouldn't steal "stamps?"
All in all, a very naive suggestion.
"People willing to trade someone elses freedom for a temporary lack of spam deserve a damn good kicking" - as Ben Franklin may wished to have said on reading this.
Are you sure that we should break that tenet of law that the UK and US hold very dear - "That we shall not send against the innocent in cause of the guilty" ie we don't punish the innocent just because the guilty are harder to catch.
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'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.
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.
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.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
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?
[Are you sure that we should break that tenet of law that the UK and US hold very dear - "That we shall not send against the innocent in cause of the guilty" ie we don't punish the innocent just because the guilty are harder to catch.]
If only this were true. What we do is pass new laws that make it easier to catch the criminals as they break the new laws (not the old ones) but that also make criminals out of the otherwise innocent. (And sometimes - "but we won't use them against the innocent. Wink. Wink.")
Because of new money laundering type laws here, my bank wanted me to provide them a written reason as to why I wanted to move a decent sum of money from my savings account to my chequeing account - IN THE SAME BRANCH!
We will certainly restrict the rights of the innocent to go after the guilty.
I agree we should not, and we need to stop, but we do it now.
drew
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.
Fuck you talking about AC???
/. seem to think it means.
:-)
The freedoms you speak of are the freedom of speech. No one is taking away any freedom of speech -- what they are taking away is the freedom to come into my home and say anything they want.
This has never been a freedom in any western cultured nation.
As such, if I allow all my friends to come in and say what they want, but I don't want some dirty Italian to come in and start talking smack, I should have a right to do so. And it would keep about half my f'n family out in the process.
The freedom to speak has never meant the freedom to be heard.
If this were something that was blocking trafic from legitimate gov't service -- that would be curtailing your 'freedoms'. If the RNC decided they were going to block any service to their public offices from any of the numerous ghettos they never seem to know are there anyways, that would be censorship.
Too many f'n idiots scream freedom when its that very freedom that allows us to do this. Freedom does not mean anarchy. Unfortunately, thats what 99% of the folks on
Then again it isn't quite as curtailed as some elected officials seem to think it is either
I agree - some black hole lists are getting over-zealous. My ISP's SMTP server was recently listed by dnsbl.sorbs.net. Check out their removal policy:
"Third and finally, if you are really not a spammer, or you are truly reformed, de-listing is relatively easy. You pay US$50 to a charity or trust approved by, and not connected with, SORBS for each spam received relating to the listing (This is known and refered to as the SORBS 'fine')."
(http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/SpamDBFAQ.html)
Who the hell do they think they are, demanding payment of a "fine" to remove your server from their block list? It's extortion. It's just like the protection rackets the mafia used to do: "You've got a nice store here...it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it...we can protect you, guarantee nothing happens to your store for $500 a week..."
For this reason, and many others, I strongly disagree with black hole lists. They think they can change the world by saying "Hey, I'm important, and I'm blocking you! You better shape up, or else!" I understand their cause, their desire to stop spam, but they are just going about it the wrong way.
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
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.
Have you considered a radical solution to your problem - moving, for instance?
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.
(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.
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
I wish my provider was half so responsible. If their filter flags something as spam, it's dropped on the floor. I've missed legitimate e-mail because of it - some from Yahoo Groups, indeed, and also mail that I tried to send to myself to have a copy when I did a reformat. Gone. Who knows what else I've missed that I didn't have any way of knowing about.
When I was in my latter years at university, they had the decency to flag messages as spam and send them anyway. Then a tech-savvy user could incorporate that in his/her own filtering rules. Good thing, because even with the little traffic I had on that address, I had enough false positives to notice.
The best part? Cogeco doesn't have ANYTHING in place whereby I can complain, or become exempt from the filter, or anything like that. Tech "support" just tells me to talk to the sender and get them to change things.
Yeah, right.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.