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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?"
A few other countries that can use this are found here.
Dude, where's my packet?
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
Bad luck to those ligitimate ISP's out there that get brought down by a few big National ISP's.
Blanket measures like this are wrong. Target the individual ISP's that are known bad.
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.
not so much a bandaid as a trust metric. It's the equivalent of saying "I am incapable of doing this research, however I will trust persons x y and z to do it, until I say otherwise, I still retain control of my server because I can revoke that trust at any time". However your comment is quite valid, some of them are "self appointed dimwits"
Sounds like the post-9/11 mentality. You know, that "I don't care what you have to do, do SOMETHING!" mentality.
Look where that got us, eh?
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
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?
e-mail will be blocked by their blacklisting service
Nope, only *you* can block email to *your* server.
Nonsense, the government has no say in what policies a private Spanish company implements.
This is seen as a technical issue for the company to resolve.
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
Telefonica is the biggest ISP in Spain. There are others, but Telefonica's servers route a huge portion of Spain's emails, so this is significant.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
The United States produces more spam than any other country.
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.
I believe Poor Richard's Almanac (written by Benjamin Franklin) which went something like this:
When solving a problem it is common to take a method and try it. When it fails, try another. But above all, do something."
It might operate reliably for a while, then start to get compromize itself slowly...
Much like the U.S. government.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
That is the point of Blacklists - you should be complaining to your ISP that they are blacklisted. If they are blacklisted, it means they are hosting spammers and this (customers like you putting pressure on them) is the only way to get them to clean up their act.
TDE is blacklisted.
They are as government independent as the BBC or DeutscheTelekom or the BundesPoste. If they were independent and a commercial enterprise, perhaps they would take the actions of those trying to preserve the Internet for the rest of us from the spammers, script-kiddiez and terrorists as seriously as they should.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Yeah, that happens pretty regularly where I work, too. We provide inbound and outbound mail service for corporate clients, but do not allow spamming. Nevertheless, it seems like all it takes is one dimbulb somewhere to decide (usually erroneously) that something is spam, and one of our hosts will wind up on the spamcop list. They've really gone around the bend.
There is one blacklist I trust day in and day out, though: ORDB. That's because ORDB will only list confirmed open relays. This is a conservative approach but it means that if a host is listed, there is no question of whether or not it belongs there. Also, there is an automated retest-and-removal system. I can't use ones like SPEWS because even though I mostly sympathize (although I think they are *way* too quick on the trigger), in my business that would block far too much legit mail and we just can't do that.
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.
This is a silly argument. Criminals will forge i.d.'s regardless of the law *because - duh! - they're criminals. It's what they do*.
And if you think it's difficult to forge a driver's license or a passport, from *any* country, you've been swallowing too much government bullshit. For $500-$1000 you can get a completely new, legal identity that'll check out if the government investigates it, because it was purchased directly from the folks who control the system that issues i.d.'s in the first place. I could, in 48 hours, get a perfectly valid (and new) SSN, drivers license, and birth record entry which will hold up under government scrutiny *because the folks who control the system will sell them to me, and they aren't forged*. I can get decent forgeries for just a few hundred bucks, if I don't need to pass a serious security check.
Internet i.d.'s will be no different, and no harder to forge. Or to buy, from the right people.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
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.
Telefonica.es is the ISP, as RIMA-TDE (another hat it wears) it has been responsible for the continuing incredible 419 spams out of Spain, though they're a BIG ISP, and they are, this does not excuse them from policing their network and ensuring that such things are kept to a minimum, and terminations occur when appropriate. The issue here was they refused to identify corrective actions, refused to terminate abusive customers, and refused to return contact after they initiated contact.
At least the system would government controlled and thus a lesser evil than the tyranny of vigilante groups like SPEWS.
Boy you are a True Believer(tm) aren't you!?!
Name one thing the Government (any government) does well?
As For SPEWS and others, their actions are based on actual monitored events (spam) and not the whim of some dictator or someone doing a favor for a bribe.
Further, the use of these BlackLists is TOTALLY voluntary. You don't have to use them. Run your own MTA.
But let the government get ahold of this and no one will speak out of turn.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The AHBL is the redesign of the older blackholes.2mbit.com DNSbl from years ago. We've just changed its main focus on abuse in general - which includes e-mail, DoS attacks, etc.
We are apparently in wide enough use that we deal with TDE customers on a daily basis that are complaining that they are blocked.
Its not our primary focus to be the biggest.
Our primary focus is to protect our systems, and the systems we manage, from spam and abuse. We make our data available to anyone and everyone, because we know that our data will improve on the feedback of our users.
So far, we have had zero complaints from our users as to our blocking methods, even if they are extreme at times.
Brielle
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
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.
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!
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...
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: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
A 419 e-mail refers to a particular kind of Nigerian fraud e-mail, not the number of e-mails sent.
Gandi.net just happens to be a cheap registrar. I bought a domain there, and their service is perfect AND cheap. Now your idea is just as plain stupid as blacklisting an entire country.
Note also that with a few simple scripts blocking by registrar should be fairly easy.
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.
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.
your paper also doesn't really provide any emphasis or responsibility on ISP's to police their traffic, therefore it's more or less functionally useless at stopping spam. The best way to stop spam is to deny access to our mail servers from ISP's harboring spammers.
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
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.
Funny, that reminds me of how rich people talk about poor people --- too bad for them, they shouldn't "associate" those people or live in those spammy countries, surely people in Brazil have the power to force their ISP to stop spammers the same way people in the US were able to force Comcast to tell them exactly what the monthly bandwidth caps are. Oh, well, let them eat cake, change ISPs, complain to your ISP, its not SPEWS, they just create a list and then they wash their hands of it.
Elitist fuck, many people have as much power to switch ISPs as you do to make SBC stop using PPPoE. If you were in a situation where you were fucked as collateral damage by SPEWS or the war on drugs or the war for big oil or the war against terrorist hackers, then you wouldn't be so flip.
Regular people don't have power - ISPs, spammers and SPEWS (in these types of situations) have the power and regular people are just fucked as usual.
SPEWS - "We try to pressure ISPs into stopping spammers by drawing innocent parties into the line of fire and having them howl like tortured cats. We call it 'Coercive Recruitment' but we feel good about recruiting them because our cause is just" and as we know from history, when people are recruited against their will to fight for a cause they are always the better for it...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bad troll. The EC was formed in 1957 and Spain joined in 1986, at the same time as Portugal.
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
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'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.
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