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

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.

Whack-a-mole

[Hungry Admin]

welcome to level 50 of whack-a-mole!

Spamhaus Opening New Branch in China

[Richard_L_James]

Great title.... makes Spamhaus sound like a fast food chain !

Re:Awesome

[Spyffe]

I must say, though, that if I were a member of an organization that informs law enforcement, I would be hesitant to work with the government on the mainland.

Spamhaus.org in the US can assume that spammers will be assessed for fines; the punishments may be more serious in China, whose legal system is much less transparent than that of the United States (although the US is working on theirs).

I would be very careful to point spammers out to law enforcement; 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.

Re:Why is this a Chinese issue

[blowdart]

A lot of the spamvertised web sites (including Richter's) are hosted on Chinese ISPs (71% according to a survey from Commtouch. (The same survey shows that 60.5% of spam is sent from US addresses)

The ISPs are unresponsive to emails, some don't have abuse@ addresses and of course there's the language barrier. So, hopefully, a spamhaus setup in China will get the chinese ISPs to remove the spamvertised sites quickly.

The effectiveness of this idea, of course, remains to be seen. I can see the temptation of taking hard currency when you're happily ignoring complaints about the "Make big penis" web sites hosted in your IP space.

Now if only Russia would do something about the paypal, ebay and bank phishing spammers they host, then I might consider lifting some country blocks.

China trying to cool economy

[baomike]

Actualy china has been trying to slow economic expansion. The current rate is believed to be unsustainable. It has been leading to "excesses".
There is official worry that the bubble may burst,
therefore they are attempting a "soft landing".

Re:"the scourge of junk email"

[GrpA]

If that's all there was to it, there would be no problem. Unfortunately, when you miss a critical e-mail because you accidently delete it, or it gets deleted as a false positive, then you start to realise the real cost of spam to the recipient typically costs them more than virus and worm damage combined.

Then consider that if you have children, Pornographics spammers expose them to the worst of hardcore porn with utter comtempt for their safety and wellbeing.

Finally, remember that Spammers are *all* Sociopaths, protected for the first time by the size of the community, allowing them to abuse anyone without any fear of retribution.

For what it's worth, I personally see spammers as a bigger and more present problem than hackers ever were.

GrpA

It's 2004 People

[wan-fu]

Hello? Reality to the readers of Slashdot. Every time China is mentioned in any /. article, China's human rights issues are immediately pushed to the forefront. I have serious beef with that in the form of two main issues:
1. The "get priorities straight" or "let's see China get some basic human rights" posts are more cliche and more often seen than hot grits and Natalie Portman (then again, I read at +1).

2. It's 2004 people, China is no longer the China of ten, even five years ago. China is one of the most rapidly developing nations and with each major technological push in the country, the people receive even more degrees of freedom. When I was in China just two years ago, I could talk to just about anyone about how they felt about the government. No discomfort, no "oh crap, is he secret police?" (I am Chinese, US Citizen, with Beijing Mandarin accent so it's hard to tell that I'm not from there)

Though Internet access is "spotty," e.g. no access to Google cache, etc. They have the Internet and most of it at that. Sure, things operate differently there and it's easier to find yourself in a jail cell. But there is no longer the mentality of "he critized the government, flog him."

Now, in the more interior/central parts of China, changes are slower than on the coast because of the slower pace of technological change there. But I can't emphasize this enough: China has made some serious progress from ten and even five years ago. Every year, China makes big strides. People have more freedom in their speech, press, and some places even have elections.

Also, since it's obvious that most people here aren't that knowledgeable about China (nor am I, but at least I know enough that it's not how everyone is describing it), another important thing to note is the changing of leadership. The old guard is slowly receding with China's new president (though obviously Jiang is still a big figure lurking in the shadows) and fresh blood in the Congress. New ideas and new leadership will only make the country better

Lastly, though we always hear about human rights violations every year, I feel (and this is just my opinion, no real facts here) that a lot of it is blown out of proportion. Not to say that it's okay, but that perhaps people should try to be less biased about it. I think that because people hear about these incidents in China, they automatically think, "Damn, that China, they'll never fix their human rights problems. They are always beating people and torturing them, etc." But now, put that in perspective of what happens in many other developed countries (US, Britain, etc.) Many people are unlawfully detained, or excessive force is used upon them, or they are mistakenly incarcerated. I think that if you took all the news stories about those types of events happening in the US, and said it happened in China, people would go nuts calling out for China to give their citizens "basic human rights."

Re:"the scourge of junk email"

[Richard_L_James]

Like most things there is a balance in terms of how advertising is carried out. Proper commericial email advertising is definately here to stay. The problem is there are many so called "email advertisers" out to make a quick buck by any means possible.

In my book there is a huge difference between putting a advertising flyer through someones letter box vs attaching a flyer to a rock and smashing it through a Window. A proper advertising company will use the letter box. IMHO people like Steve Linford help ensure a balance.

when someone DDoS's me I just laugh at them for thinking im hurt by not being able to use the internet for a couple of hours and walk away from my computer

Your lucky to be able to do that. However many people rely on an Internet connection for business. For them walking away means no money is being generated and important customer customer communications are not being received. Like you most if not all of these decent people wish they could just walk away like you can but they are unable to do so.

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?

On Human Rights.

[Nailer]

I live in Australia. We're apparently a US ally (more like a lackey), but even the most conservative (therefore pro-US) newspapers here reported the Iraqi torture as just that. The Australian, the nationwise conservative newspapaer in a country of 18 million that's one of your biggest allies, used the word torture to describe naked prisoners being badly beaten or having chemical light fluid poured through their anuses.

Which is why I find it amusing that on Nightly Business Report (a US financial news and current program that's on just before our own news) you're using the words 'suspected mistreatment' to describe something that's documented and not denied by anyone (the only issue seems to be whether the Geneva convention was officially supposed to be ignored).

So yeah, look in your own backyard before judging China. Since Sep 11, you're like a wounded pitbull attacking everything and anyone without thought. What on Earth does Iraq have to do with terrorism anyway?

(And yes, Australia has a pretty poor HR record in a lot of ways too - but I'm not denying that)...