Spamhaus Opening New Branch in China

Eggplant62 writes "ChinaTechNews.com is reporting that Steve Linford's Spamhaus.org will open operations with the help of Chinese government officials and ISP's in order to remove spammers operating servers on China's portion of the Internet. For years, China's unwitting ignorance of the spam issues they have with the rest of the world has been a major stumbling block in the fight to control spammers who operate from the netblocks of foreign nations. Seeing China take steps to help the world curb the scourge of junk email has me cheering all the way. Go Steve!"

Comments

Awsome

[Tokerat]

I'm glad China realized just how much money they're going to save their economy which they have been viciously trying to kickstart lately.

Go China!

Remove country code blocks?

[Spruce Moose]

Maybe now people can start removing country code blocks. It's kind of sad having to block off countries due to spam and it would be nice to be able to turn this off.

Eh?

[gordgekko]

For years, China's unwitting ignorance of the spam issues they have with the rest of the world has been a major stumbling block in the fight to control spammers who operate from the netblocks of foreign nations.

Unwitting...ha ha...good one. Nothing happens in China, especially in the high tech sector, without the government knowing about it.

Re:"the scourge of junk email"

[SharpFang]

Ever got an SMS to your phone from the restricted "emergency" account and been fumbling for 2 hours to find an internet cafe in a strange city to troubleshoot the unknown problem while it just appeared that the spammer launched a "dictionary attack" against your server? Sometimes it's "mark, delete" and 500 spams gone in matter of 10 seconds. Sometimes it's 2 hours of stress, fear, wasting a lot of money and nerves because of one spam.

Thanks to lovely spammers I can't leave my box for a month unattended. With 5 emails my mailbox would fill in half a year. With 100 spams daily this drops to weeks.

Do the math

[BattyMan]

The guy who got sentenced to jail today for spamming had sent something like 800 million pieces of spam. If we figure that each of those took someone one second to delete, then he's effectively _stolen_ those 800 million seconds from those "recipients".

This amounts to:

8e8 / 86,400 seconds/day = 9259.25 days.

9259.25 days / 365.25 days/year = 25.35 Years

OK so maybe a minor spammer's life isn't _completely_ forfeit. The last time I did this (with numbers from another spammer) it worked out to 112 years.

_How_ much spam was Richter responsible for, again?

Not unless it is reduced by a fator of 1000

[batray]

I block all mail from CN, HK. & KR becasue I get nothing but SPAM from them. I do mail for about 40 users and I block more than 5000 spam messages from CN each day. Until that number drops by at least a factor of 1000 I will leave my country block for CN online. Trojan proxies and CN now are my number 1 & 2 sources of spam.

Re:Nice to see they have their priorities in order

[Nestafo]

But hey, United States got the biggest attention in Amnesty International Report 2004, and US produces more than half of the world's spam. You are correct, people seem to focus on irrelevant things. But compared to US, China is not the biggest to blame after all.

Re:Not unless it is reduced by a fator of 1000

[1u3hr]

I block all mail from CN, HK. & KR becasue I get nothing but SPAM from them.

I live in Hong Kong. For every legitimate email I get from the US I get hundreds of spams. All in English, selling drugs, mortgages, software, porn, cable decoders etc. The US creates the spam, and routes it through whatever servers it can find. And you know who thw spammers are (ROKSO) and do nothing to even slow them down. But you block my emails becuae I live in the same country as the server the American spammers are using.

Re:Why not?

[eric76]

I really don't understand this murderous hatred of spammers. What they do is incredibly annoying and costs businesses a lot of money, but have they ever killed anyone?

Rarely, but yes.

One of the sometime purposes of 419 spam is to lure you into Nigeria or some other country where you may be kidnapped and held for ransom. There has been instances of people being murdered.

You have some screwed up priorities!

[fmaxwell]

I would hate to have on my conscience that some guy with a family to feed is sitting in jail just for spamming because I cooperated with his government in prosecuting him.

Your argument is wrong on so many counts, so I'll just pick on a few of them here.

1. Company X makes widgets.
   
2. Company X gets a lot of spam.
   
3. Company X's employees and IT staff spend a lot of time dealing with the spam.
   
4. Company X has to hire additional IT staff to combat the spam software.
   
5. Company X is forced to raise the price on widgets to pay for the man-hours and additional staff that deals with spam.
   
6. Sales of Company X's widgets decline due to the higher prices.
   
7. Company X goes into the red, losing money.
   
8. Company X lays off workers.
   
9. Those workers, who, unlike the spammer, did nothing wrong, have families to feed, too.

Consumers are paying more for most consumer goods (especially Internet access) because almost all companies are dealing with spam problems. That means lower sales of luxury items, layoffs at stores, etc. Republicans are quick to claim that taxes drive down consumer and business spending, but what do they think that the "spam tax" is doing to the economy?

Would you hesitate to turn a mugger in to the police because his family might go hungry? Would you not turn in some guy who robbed a liquor store because he is doing it to feed his family? Just because the U.S. government won't jail spammers doesn't mean that the spammers should not go to jail. If China jails them, then I will applaud China.