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Endangered Countries On The Internet
Vande writes "Balkanalysis.com has an article about Macedonia being driven towards internet extinction as a result of some blacklists, which also include Bulgaria and Romania. Namely, this poorly written quote from the 'export bureau' (non-gov org) states the reason for being blacklisted: 'Pay close attention to shipping or contact addresses located in countries with a high reported incidence of online fraud and many e-commerce web sites have found a high incidents of on-line fraud as well, such as Africa, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia, etc..' They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble. Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users. And I thought all this time I was surfing the 'World Wide' Web :/"
use a proxy located somewhere else
Residents of those contries have the option of using foreign ISPs, or even anonymous proxies, to bypass the blacklists.
neworder.box.sk has some links to good anonymous proxies.
Clearly, it should be called "Fraudster"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Easter Europe has fallen victim to e-commerce site bias. Many electronic file transfer agencies assume just to steer clear of E. Europe rather than dealing with fruad. This brings up the obvious question of better varification. Just think how much more these sites could make in commison if they invested a little in verification.
I mean, I'd support the forcible removal of nations that cause trouble for the rest of us. That's the reason we went into Iraq. Prevent problems for the rest of the world.
Has anyone here spoken to anyone from Macedonia? Ever?
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
i thought it was a continent
Is this a real article or a bad joke?
what are Israel's fraud stats?
That said, I'd be unlikely to ship products to, say, Nigeria for obvious reasons. The web is a bit of a mess as far as security is concerned. And part of the issue is that countries don't enforce their own laws very stringently (e.g. sect 409 of the nigerian criminal code).
The Cheese Stands Alone.
How much? Negative how much you mean. They have their own country. Buy from shops there. What? No shops? I wonder why.
was, after all, designed based on the idea that all people are good. when a few people turn up bad apples, people want to punish them. usually this ends up with innocent people getting hit with the punishment, and the bad apples usually can find a work around for pennies.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
maybe we do it because it's free at least for us, when we can put it on your credit cards :)
Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users.
That's not true. Cutting off entire countries is never done to hurt legitimate users, it is done to protect legitimate users. The legitimate users just don't happen to be in the countries that are cut off.
When 100% of the traffic received from a large netblock is undesirable for a long enough period of time, any reasonable person will eventually add firewall rules or blocklist entries to solve the problem.
Perhaps if the governments of and companies within the countries that tend to generate or relay far more illegitimate traffic had any interest in protecting their ability to communicate digitally with the rest of the world, they would do something about it. As things stand with certain massive netblocks that have sent me nothing but spam, viruses, phishing attempts, and 419 scams for several years, I am willing to risk losing one or two legitimate contacts in favor of eliminating thousands upon thousands of undesirable contacts.
For these who cant RTFA: Of course, not only "Wild East" countries like Russia and Israel exceed little Macedonia in terms of online criminal output. It would be utter hypocrisy to ignore the vast internet fraud industry in the United States itself.
In conclusion, if you must blacklist a country, you should start for these 3.
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Listen while I tell you a story. Jed, new on the internet, has a web store. He was barely getting by when out of the blue he got dozens of orders, then hundreds, from Bulgaria. Jed, being new, didn't think twice. Credit cards are wonderful, and their numbers and expire dates even more convenient. Fortunately, before he sent even one product to Bulgaria !! he posted in a local board about all these sales and for us to admire his prowess. When we told him what's going on, he got out of the internet sales business and went back to his kiosks in the malls. Blacklists are there for a reason.
"They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble." The author completely misses the point of why blacklisting is done. The ratio of fraudulent to legitimate purchases in Macedonia is a lot higher than it is in the US, and as the author himself notes, Macedonia's internet population is negligible anyways, so it's not like you're losing that many sales by blacklisting the country. Thus blacklisting Macedonia is a much more efficient solution than, for example, investing in verification measures as one previous poster has suggested (not to mention that verification measures still probably won't deter criminals anyways - just like you can work around a blacklist using an anonymous proxy, there's bound to be new, inexpensive ways to work around any low-cost verification system. And the system would have to be very low-cost indeed if you expect the increased profits from Macedonia's "negligible" internet userbase to justify the expense).
Seeing as every spam artiste has relayed through them, it appears your standing in the WTO has more to do with your access than any other criteria.
Maybe it's time for an update? -
WWWW - Western World Wide Web
We could descriminate even further and make that:
WWWWW - White Western World Wide Web
Just this morning we cancelled 4 orders by the same person from Nigeria. UK billing address, Gambian delivery address, Nigeria IP address.
We lose more money to the US than Nigeria, but then the honest orders more than outweigh those. I can't recall a single order from Nigeria/Romania where the credit card was 100% clean.
If these countries want to get a positive reputation then they should place more real orders so that the clean orders outweight the fraudulent ones.
Another thing that is noticable, Indians in the UK have a very high level of fraud, whereas Indians, in India have a very low level of fraud.
I reckon its because they are displaced from their home country and don't feel any need to be honest.
Here are some nation-by-nation fraud statistics, generated by ClearCommerce and mirrored on a county law enforcement website. I can't vouch for their methodology, but it seems to back up the perception that the article's author is complaining about (and is a little easier on the US than the article chooses to be - score a point against reflexive America bashing). http://www.ocalasmostwanted.com/online_fraud_stats .htm
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
The problem isn't so much that there is a lot of fraud coming from these countries, but that the governments there do nothing to stop it. Rewarding a nation and a people who don't even have the wherewithal to police themselves is not the way to solve the problem. You solve the problem by making this lack of responsibility painful for them. If someone is being a screw up, you get behind them and kick them in the ass until they get their shit together. Refusing to do that because you're afraid someone might think you are being unfair doesn't do anyone any good.
Whether it be a nigerian 419 scam, or a scam escrow service, these kinds of operations exist because law enforcement in these places is on the take. It isn't just the scammers that are screwing you, its the police as well because they're getting a cut of the loot.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
How is this any different than reality?
The Internet is designed for enabling communication - it's not designed to ensure that everybody *WANTS* that communication!
If an area is unpoliced, crime rates will rise. People who wish to conduct legitimate business will leave those unpoliced areas.
Just because it's "the IntarWEB" doesn't mean the above rule changes any. If Macedonia/Mongolia/Outer Slobovia wants to be dealt with "fairly", they should police their own areas so that crime stops paying, like the other, more trusted areas.
Would it be any different with any other communications medium than the Internet?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sure, the USA might account for a lot of fraud because of the sheer Internet population here, but at least criminals here have at least some fear of getting prosecuted and thrown in jail. If a country doesn't enforce the law (or there isn't one there to enforce), then the entire country might as well be waging war on my servers.
There is a much easier work around:
...
-> Get a workable leagal system and enforce laws
Works for:
UK
Canada
France
Australia
New Zealand
USA
hmmm...lots of former British colonies there...
Africa is not a country. It is a continent.
such as Africa, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia, etc..
When the good folks start putting the pressure on the bad apples to C&D, then everybody benefits. Bad apples go elsewhere or do something else, and the good people get peace of mind.
I'm sorry for those that are caught in the Class A and B blocks of scammer/spammers. Your best bet is to appeal to the powers that be to get some IP space in the US that you can use for SMTP.
It's best for us to wholesale blacklist IP space to shut down the Korean, Chinese and Russian scumbags. Sorry, but it has to be done. It's easier for you to negotiate separate IP space for SMTP servers, so don't whine about being blacklisted... it's an easily solveable problem.
Russian Americans and Jewish Americans are the top 2 nations represented in the dominant influences on the United States if you take "influence" to mean the variance that can be explained in other demographic variables by one demographic variable.
The interesting thing from the fraud standpoint is that the top demographic influence is HIV positive tests per capita.
Seastead this.
Both the article and the writeup wonder how "tiny macedonia" could be a big enough problem to blacklist. Surely Russia and Israel have more scams?
What they're missing is that it's probably the ratio of fraudulent order volume to total order volume. It seems that the blacklisters are accusing Macedonia of too high a ratio of fraud.
These complainers are failing to see the merchant's viewpoint. Fraud can really bite into profits. If I were starting an e-commerce business, I wouldn't ship to any questionable countries. Sorry to hurt anyone's feelings, but it doesn't make business sense.
Sound like Macedonia needs to start catching and prosecuting the fraudsters, then publicize this fact to the e-commerce merchants.
If those countries knew how to use their internet properly -- secure their smtp/web/proxy servers, there wouldn't be a damn problem. They caused their own fall if you want my opinion, on to something else.
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
Been there, done that. There are only so many anonymous proxy services out there, and it's easy enough to block those IPs too. And then there's a few strategies we employ for unknown IPs...
Please do not spread misinformation!
These Eastern European countries are considered developed countries:
http://encyclozine.com/Developed_nation
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
US Embasy Brief for Travelers To whit: Macedonia has a cash-based economy. The local currency is the denar. Few establishments accept dollars, credit cards or travelers' checks. Travelers are advised to avoid using credit cards due to numerous instances of credit card fraud.
I realize the State Department may be parroting back the same biases as banks and such.
A quick search for "+macedonia +fraud +crime" and "+macedonia +online +fraud" has it listed on almost every bank, shipping, and e-commerce site as a country to suspect. On most of the lists, it's third after Nigeria and Columbia.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The definition of 'world wide' varies depending on whether you're from the USA or someplace else. Who was it, the Monty Python folks perhaps?, who remarked that the key difference between the US and England is that when England hosts an international sporting event, they invite other countries. Could the same be said for the "world" wide web? :-)
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Should an artificial state has its own internet identifier (for example .fyrom) in the first place?
First of all, what you call "Macedonia" has a formal name which is Former Yugoslavic Republic of Macedonia. IMO "Macedonia" is the direct result of the breakup of Yugoslavia. For many decades after WW2 the communist regime of Yugoslavia used the term "Macedonia" to define the southern part of Yugoslavia.
Now according to macedonia.org ""Macedonians" make up 66% of "Macedonia's" population of 2 million, Albanians 23%, and Turks, Vlach, and Serbs, the rest (1994 census)"
In the past 50 years communism was the ideology that hold together the people of Yugoslavia and its constituents republics like "Macedonia".
After the breakup of Yugoslavia their politicians "sold" this story of "Macedonia" to the Albanians, Turks, Vlachs and Serbs i.e. that they are true descendants of Macedonians.
Please...
The true Macedonians were, are and will be Greeks residents of northern Greece. Aristotle the philosopher was Greek and lived in Macedonia, Greece. Philip the father of Alexander the Great was Greek and was king of Macedonia, Greece. Alexander was king of Macedonia, Greece and he became emperor of the area from Asia Minor up to the borders of present day India. (BTW he is the only conqueror still remembered by the population of Middle East as a liberator and just sovereign)
As for the internet access of the Former Yugoslavic (communist) Republic of Macedonia... Well their government should start by diminishing internet fraud and curbing the illegal activities in general in their state.
I don't see why it's Slashdot's job to be free advertising for this guy's personal opinion
Whilst written from a personal perspective, the article raises valid issues. Some anti-spam RBLs just blacklist entire countries like Korea and China. See this here for more about that.
The difference is now it isn't just affecting email, but other parts of the web as well. It doesn't make living in one of these countries any easier, does it. If this article is to be believed, it seems that many admins have been quick to blacklist eg. macedonia perhaps because they are small and "not worth the risk" rather than actually being a source of trouble.
So, we're now excluding minorities on the so-called World-Wide-Web. Sure, it's an opiniated observation, but an observation that I'm glad to have encountered. I'm glad this article ran, I got something out of it. I'm sorry you didn't. At any rate, this article is a hell of a lot more "insightful" than the Linux Users Are Spoiled drivel I had to endure recently.
I don't think I've noticed any of this blocking described in the article during my everyday surfing, and I do surf the web a lot. Can't say this really worries me.
While I do agree that blocking ANY country (including the mentioned Russia, Israel, etc.) based on actions of a few individuals is utterly wrong, I think the article is a bit too alarmist and paranoid, especially the bit about this being the result of some kind of political conspiracy.
So a few sites blocked Macedonian IPs, big deal. Various IP blocks get blocked all the time for various (sometimes wrong) reasons, and things usually work out when enough legitimate users complain. A tempest in a teapot...
"was, after all, designed based on the idea that all people are good."
Ummm...no. It was based on the idea that a small group was basically good. The inventers didn't know it would grow to these proportions, and even back then any fool could see that the premise that everyone's good is false.
There is no such country named as Macedonia, probably the author meant to write F.Y.R.O.M.
There is a reason why Macedonia or Yugoslavia isn't on that list of developed countries.
From the CIA World Factbook:
At independence in September 1991, Macedonia was the least developed of the Yugoslav republics, producing a mere 5% of the total federal output of goods and services. The collapse of Yugoslavia ended transfer payments from the center and eliminated advantages from inclusion in a de facto free trade area. An absence of infrastructure, UN sanctions on Yugoslavia, one of its largest markets, and a Greek economic embargo over a dispute about the country's constitutional name and flag hindered economic growth until 1996. GDP subsequently rose each year through 2000. However, the leadership's commitment to economic reform, free trade, and regional integration was undermined by the ethnic Albanian insurgency of 2001. The economy shrank 4.5% because of decreased trade, intermittent border closures, increased deficit spending on security needs, and investor uncertainty. Growth barely recovered in 2002 to 0.9%, then rose to 2.8% in 2003. Unemployment at one-third of the workforce remains the most critical economic problem. The gray economy is estimated at around 40% of GDP. Politically, the country is more stable than in 2002.
The point of the article was that minorities on the World-Wide-Web are being unfairly excluded with no recourse whilst larger entities like Russia/U.S.A. remain off the blacklists despite being much bigger sources of fraud.
Now if only I could think of something nasty to say about Macedonia.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
If ISPs in large contries refuse to play nice, they can face this. I have seen this with Wanadoo, a large French ISP. They just don't respond to abuse complaints, even if you get someone who speaks French to send them. They seem to have this "not our problem" attitude, leading to lots of abuse. Ok, well, if you aren't going to deal with it, the only solution may be to block them. Just how it goes.
UU.net went through this. They faced a Usenet Death Penalty (the inability for their entire network to use newsgroups) stemming from a refusal to deal with abuse.
Basically, ISPs need to take some responsibility for their users. Doesn't mean they need Orwellian monitoring, but if someone sends an abuse complaint, they need to look and see if it looks legit and, if so, ban the abuser. Otherwise they DO risk blacklists, regardless of nationaltiy.
If a certian netblock repeatedly tries to hack my systems, and the company/person in charge will not respond what can I do? I'm not going to sit and allow it, so my only option is a ban on the firewall.
We've even done this internal to the university. When Phatbot came out it spread pretty bad since so many people had shitty passwords. We had about 5 infections, all in research labs that wouldn't let us manage their systems (huge supprise). When it happened, we shut the lab's network connection off and wouldn't turn it back on until we had found the system and made them promise to keep it off the net until it was fixed. However some departments lack a good network staff, and let systems just get infected. Those that were non-responsive were just banned until we got confirmation they had cleaned their crap up.
Life in an unregulated world. Since there is no central body that controls who can and can't play, no net police to track down the bacd guys, if you misbehave, those you go after may just ban you and be done with it.
I feel I should point out that blacklisting an entire country is probably not as good an idea as it sounds, as it may just inadvertently set a dangerous precedent.
Before starting my current job, I did some systems admiistration work for small ISPs here in South Africa. At one point last year, after long deliberations and searching for any other solutions we could find, we finally decided to blacklist seven U.S. ISPs, because of the never ending tidal wave of spam and worm attacks that originated from these. It worked.
Following from this, I have often wondered about the possible effect of completely disconnecting the United States from the rest of the internet.
Just think for a moment my fellow non-Americans, no more "legal" spam, no more pop-up adds that come from nowhere, because a hapless user clicked "Yes" somewhere, no more propaganda web sites telling us how wonderful they are and how bad we are, no more "you will use DRM because our laws say so, even though they are not your laws" attitude, no more open source projects being distributed with half the functionality removed, because it might infringe on some insignificant U.S. software patent, and someone from the States might download it, putting the author in violation of the patent, no more Carnivore servers reading every word I type as I compose this post, because I just might be saying something that could "endanger the interests or national security of the United States", ah, bliss...
Since the introduction of the CAN-SPAM Act, spam, even non-compliant spam, has been increasing. American businesses seem to interpret the Act as a free license to spam everyone with impunity. Oh sure, the very large spammers eventually get shut down by multi-million dollar law suits filed under the Act by the very large American ISPs, but that really doesn't help the rest of the world, does it?
We've all read the statistics about how China is such a large source of spam, but what the statistics fail to tell you is that this spam originates from Chinese companies, being payed by American spammers to do their dirty work. If spam from China could not reach the United States, because the United States isn't there in internet terms, there would be no point for the spammers to continue hiring the Chinese to do this for them, and spam from China would probably decline.
I'm sorry if this hurts the feelings of all the American readers, but I feel I must point out that the rest of the Western world is getting very tired of your incessant moaning and paranoia.
Inter-without-America-Net anyone? If they can justify doing this, so can we. ISPs of the world, blacklist with impunity!
I realise that this post will probably get me flamed or even moderated into oblivion, but I think it does serve to illustrate an important point, of which even the United States should take heed.
If the U.S. can justify blacklisting an entire country because of a minute security threat, do we, the rest of the world, not have more than sufficient justification to blacklist the entire United States?
This is a dangerous door for the U.S. to open, and it swings both ways. Yes, blacklisting the entire U.S. does seem to be impractical, as we would probably loose most of the internet, but to be brutally honest, the only American web site I would miss is Slashdot.
This is why black holing ip ranges is fucking lame. Legitimate traffic gets lost in the process. We all know Spam is a problem, but black holing large ranges only hurts people.
We can be a little smarter then this, in this day and age.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Where else would you find quality trolls like this one, dumbass?
.to site is in a blacklisted country?
cutiemegs5690z (4:31:02 AM): hello stud! I am a 20 year old college student from Florida. Some and the girls and i decided to have a little fun, go here and tell us what you think: megscam.explode.to
p.s. does anybody know if that
A friend of mine (Actually the guy that runs sinfulshirts.com) refuses to sell to Russia just because it's not on a list of countries that another T-shirt site will sell to. No more reason then that and "Well, they must have a reason.".
It bugged me, because another friend of mine was saying that Russians didn't wear t-shirts with funny sayings, and if he got an order from Russia, I would have irrefutable proof she was wrong!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Internet still runs on protocols designed 20-30 years ago that rested on the assumption that everyone using the network could be trusted. As long as we stick with that assumption, we're going to have blacklists, spoofing, what-have-you. The trick is to not rely on the Internet for anything important.
uh, shouldn't that be 403?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The poster is rather plainly a Macedonian who is annoyed at having trouble with web sites. . .
.it's the USA's fault, Israel's fault, Russia's fault. . .
.
.especially given the limited news value of a pure opinion post.
Plainly. Any number of Slashdot stories have been based on similar complaints. Do they only count if it's an American doing the bitching?
. .
He said nothing of the kind. He pointed out a certain hypocrisy in the blacklisting.
I don't see why it's Slashdot's job to be free advertising for this guy's personal opinion. .
I rather thought that was one of its overt functions where the opinion might be relevant to the tech/computer/internet world.
. .
I disagree that it is pure opinion or of limited news value, but then I don't take a purely "western" point of view either.
C'mon, really, slashdot is a news site, not "opinionated rant of the week", for that I read the comments, not the articles.
And now you have mine.
KFG
How long have you been reading slashdot? 3 days?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
macedonia.org?? You don't have to be an Olsen twin to know a country that uses .org instead of a country code is lame. PS please post pics of Mary Kate using The Cheat. preferably both naked and petrified.
The 1st world is the west, the 2nd the (former) communist bloc (of which Macedonia was part of when it was part of Yugoslavia) and the 3rd, the poor countries of the world.
I don't know enough about Macedonia to know whether there is a lot of fraud coming from there, however, I have very little faith in these commercial rating agencies. There is little incentive for them to do much research - it is much easier to just lump a small country on the list than to lower their profits by spending time and resources. From the posts I've seen here - few of their Western clients are going to question it, especially since very little business is lost. The only people that could be hurt are the ones in Macedonia that have little influence and noone is going to listen to...
Sort of like those loser credit bureaus that insist on using social security numbers as keys because it is easy and the banks don't care and it is hard for individuals to sue them. A frustrating situation indeed...
Intelligent people should be able to understand the difference between a nation or a group of people, and an individual. For some reason, idiots such as yourself are unable to grasp this simple fact. An individual internet user can't really do much, especially if the country is corrupt. And they certainly can't stop hackers from the outside world breaking into servers in that country.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
try Israel
Okay. Your post made no sense whatsoever. I'm assuming that the page you linked to is the output of some kind of clustering algorithm. But yeah. It wouldn't have made any sense at all if I'd hadn't taken graduate level CS classes.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The issue came to the public attention about 6-7 years ago (I think), when a bunch of teenagers "discovered" IRC CC trading channels, and got a hold of some stolen credit cards (and once you have a few, you can trade them with people on those channels to get more). They immediately shared them with their friends and started ordering all kinds of stuff online like CDs, watches, perfumes, eyeglasses, and what not, for them, their girlfriends, relatives, etc.
:)
:)
Well, the customs officials noticed the unusual surge in that kind of merchandise coming from a small number of big online retailers, and stemmed the flow immediately.
They would just keep the stuff at customs terminals, and notify the recipients that they should come pick it up. When a kid showed up, they simply asked for proof of order, and if it was ordered via credit card, they asked to see the actual credit card.
If they failed to produce it, the police was notified (the idiots were ordering stuff to their home addresses), and some of the bigger offenders were brought in for interrogation etc. Nobody really got anything more than a slap on the wrist, as most of them were just kids, but it sure ended the massive ordering.
I even remember even a few scary looking guys in suits with laptops at the university where I was studying then, they were going over the computer terminals and servers to extract logs of suspicious activity as some of the orders were coming from there. I later found out they were from the illegal trade department, which means somebody in the police took this very seriously.
In any case, I was surprised at how quickly this was stopped and the responsible people identified, I didn't think the customs and police had any kind of tech savy people among them.
On a related note, at about the same time software piracy was thriving in Macedonia, you could get a truck load of latest expensive software for a couple of dollars per CD.
It was really bad, I even distinctly remember I was playing the final retail version of Quake 2 almost a whole WEEK before it was scheduled to appear in US stores
Anyway, after some more incidents and complaints by foreign companies, the government really cracked down on this kind of thing a few years ago, and the legislation was slowly brought up to speed to include laws for online commerce, credit card fraud, etc.
Things are very much under control now, but hey, bad reputation (admittedly well deserved) tends to follow you for a long time...
Let me say on the out-set: I am not impressed. Since when has Africa been a country? This is what I find wrong in the "Western" Press. When ever something about a country in Africa is being discussed, The word "Africa" is used instead of the country. Africa is a continent with more than 50 countries, each with different peoples. I will give an example of Uganda which with is 24 million people, has more than 40 tribes. Each of these tribes is different in itself. I sympathize with those that fall into the topic's fraud.
As an African living in Canada, I hear Africa being lumped as a single entity when referring to a country in this vast place! Africa is unique in that it has climates ranging from temperate to tropical to semi-arid. Back to the point: I agree that this piece has been very very poorly written! But it's worth the read.
... to make them to get off their lazy asses and start cleaning up their networks.
if you get spam from them, it's your problem, and they have zero incentive to do anything about it.
however, if their customers are suddenly unable to reach you, then it becomes their problem and voila, suddenly they have a reason to finally dump their abusive customers and clean up their networks.
blacklists are used because they work, and because they are the only things that do work. if network opterators werent so fucking lazy, there would be no need for blacklists.
Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users.
So Verizon can block port 25 to stop the spam and it's OK, but it's NOT OK to blacklist a country with less than 1000 internet users due to millions of dollars in fraud?
Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users in that country. Cutting them off helps all of the legitimate users everywhere else.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, right Mr Spock?
Who cares if this is the case. Personally, it makes no difference to me where information comes from... just that it comes.
If this knocks out a country, city, or group of Trekkies, it makes no difference to me - all sources are the same on here. If theyre getting affected because theyre inconveniencing people, let them legislate then to fix it.
When I continued to press my throbbing meatstick into them, however, they admitted that they were following the recommendations of a commercially compiled blacklist.
Troll
-uso.
People are free to have their opinions -- noone argues against that. Slashdot editors are free to include whatever stories they please -- just as well as include the same story twice, thrice, or any other number of times. We are then free to discuss and express our POVs on any of the above.
.99 cents (even EURO-cents!) -- can you just bloody let me doo that without filtering my billing address only because it is not in US/UK/FR/DE?!
TFA is an obvious rant. While it does raise good points, like 'Is it really world-wide, this Web?' Yet at the same time it makes a few poor arguments.
I've also been bitten by short-sightedness of many Western (especially US) websites. Hell, ITMS would be the first one on the list of my gripes: I am more than willing to pay
True, billing address blocks are different from IP blacklisting -- the latter won't allow me access ITMS even if I had a valid US card with a proper billing address somewhere in the middle of MO, MN or MT.
Yet whining about "unfairness" of what is done and appealing to the "public", instead of trying to see whether some home cleaning could not be done first -- that does seem like a lame way about it, don't you think?
--AP
As many a FOSS geek has argued, information wants to be free. The Internet is perhaps both the cause and effect of this little maxim. As has been noted elsewhere in the discussion, the protocols that make the Net are not particularly good at things like verification, authenticity, trust, etc. You know, all the things that are necessary in a cutthroat capitalist world...
:(
So if we take this anarchy as something of a fait accompli, then where we go from here kind of depends on where you stand on the issue of, well, free.
I'm no anarchist, but country blacklisting seems a little over the top, a tad heavy-handed, if you will. Granted, these countries might produce more than a small amount of slurry, but that is the inherent problem with freedom - you might not like what comes out. It's like the people who get scared about Freenet and the idea that child porn might travel over their wires. This might be a little of an extreme example but the point is the same.
Not a few people have lamented that the problem with the Internet is it allows every man his voice - ugh, it sounds awful, doesn't it!? So democratic.
I'm not pro-spam. Depending on my mood, I can ache for the pre-commercial glory days of the Internet. But this is what it is now - pig shit that we have to roll around in. I just don't think that anyone has the right to silence someone else's voice because of the actions of a third party.
It's also interesting to note what a peculiar façade the Manufacturers Exporters Directory Global Worldwide Association, or whatever, is. Any site that uses Babelfish to offer translation is, in my book, seriously lacking in credibility. It is rather evocative of those irritating placeholder sites you sometimes get to when you type a URL slightly wrong. Furthermore, calling itself a bureau and using the eagle in its logo it downright misleading.
I don't know where the Slashdot crowd stands on free speech, but the crock of shit we are discussing at the moment is not in a small part America-made. It's the World Wide Web, people. Don't forget that.
iqu
Yet at the same time it makes a few poor arguments. . . -- that does seem like a lame way about it, don't you think?
Yes, I do agree that it was a poorly written article.
KFG
I live in Romania and I am well aware of the aspects of fraud and all, but that is NOT the main business on the net here; we also are trying to develop the infrastructure in order to provide the necessary cultural links between the individuals and the rest of the world. We fight our way through with the old rugged "securitate"(read gestapo) service in order to provide some privacy for the user.
You have no idea how difficult is to persuade a hacker to stop; in some cases we had to meet him in person and kick his ass.
And now this. There are some reasons why the fraud is taking place through and in Romania; one is the goverment because they don't have the necessary expertise to deal with the issue; second is the general state of poverty (generated by the corrupt goverment as well).
Of course you might say, it's your govt, deal with it, in the mean while you are blacklisted; but think about it: the net is the only viable way we can use to keep the people informed, to communicate to each other and all; and cutting us off will NOT lead to a fix, but to an even darker period for the people(read lemmings)
We thought that the WWW did something good here : it helped people learn about freedom and decent living; and now, what's gonna happend? China style WWW? It tastes bad already;
Back to 1947?
We're now arriving at a point where virus-infected users are booted off networks and told to clean their shit up, it's a logical extension that countries which can't police themselves suffer the same fate.
Like the virused home-user PC, its a matter of local responsibility, having better safeguards means the Web community won't ever need to act against you. I hope Macedonia actually takes action to regain the trust of the world rather than just looking for ways to get around the blacklists and relays through foreign proxies.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Just a note to whoever modded my parent post "flamebait", while you're perfectly entitled to do so, this post was my genuine opinion and not just a troll. I found the article to be lacking in content and overflowing with inadequately justified claims, simple as that.
Anyway it is so expensive to get something shiped to any of those countries.
I would not think to buy anything under 1000$ otherwise the shipping cost would exceed a resonable percent from the total price.
I personally do not think that your post should have been moderated flamebait because I don't believe that you were deliberately trying to attract flames. However, that said, it's hard not to read your post as suggesting that the opinion of someone who is plainly an annoyed Macedonian is worth less than that of someone who is plainly an annoyed America. Given that that's the case you can hardly be surprised if people find that implication grossly offensive.
Maybe you just meant to say that Slashdot shouldn't post opinion pieces because you are not interested in hearing how others are affected, but that's not what you said.
I live in Romania and i've been happily buying books from the US with a Mastercard for 5 years. Neither Amazon nor smaller specialized online bookstores seem to mind that I'm in Romania.
I'm not interested in anything else since I'm not about to pay for international shipping for something i can buy from here anyway. Not to mention that having the warranty across an ocean is rather inconvenient.
One decent measure of anti fraud protection i've met is stores refusing to ship anywhere except the card holder's address. Isn't that easily verifiable from inside a merchant account? Isn't that enough, instead of blocking?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I think .to would sell domains to anybody...
And if you mean where it's hosted, it's hosted in the US, at something called emerytech.com.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
The problem with ITMS, and some other vendors, is regional distribution agreements. I may have a web store that sells widgets, but the manufacturer of the widgets may only allow me to sell widgets to customers in my country or region. The manufacturer may have exclusive distribution agreements with companies in other parts of the world.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Pretty much everything you say about this story could also be applied to the anti-outsourcing rants. Poor arguments? Check. Whining about unfairness? Check. Better addressed by some home cleaning (in both cases making the writer responsible for fixing an entire country, but equally valid or invalid either way)? Check.
But you want to try dismissing one of the outsourcing articles as the whining of an American and see what happens to you? I may well get modded into oblivion for being honest about it even here even in this context, post it out of this context and you won't stand a chance.
The "collateral damage" of black lists is far worse than positive effect it ever has, I have recently come to the conclusion that black listing is in general worse than spam itself! Blacklisting single hosts for open relay is fine, actually I support and use host only black lists. But in my opinion these kinds of blanket black lists are dispicable!
Just a quick look at the kind of things that are black listed should make anyone cringe, I'm not talking about the topic at hand, heck small countries have no hope of surviving if big counrties like Australia, or the UK have significant portions of their Internet blatently blacklisted!
For example, their respective largest ISP's Telstra and BT are both blacklisted! apparently they are "only" dynamic ip black lists, of course what many "intelligent" people in charge of these black lists dont realise is that these ISP's allocate their STATIC IP's DYNAMICALLY. So who cares? Well 45% (figure made up based on Telstra's market capitalisation) of Australian small businesses or some equally significant number of Brittish small companies have endless problems that they cannot afford to deal with!
It is a daily issue for myself as an engineer for a large outsourcer in London, I used to be able to say email is a reliable system, your message is generally either delivered or you get a NDR. Today you just dont know..
You might want to learn a bit more about the US system, specifically regarding the Internet. Right now, despite what some of our leaders would like, the government does not run or control the Internet in this country. The Internet is run by a bunch of private corperations, public instutions, and so on. At the top level are big communications companies like AT&T. They sell bandwidth to smaller companies and so on until it reaches the consumer. The government actually buys connections from these providers. They do run their own networks, but for internal communication. When they want on the Internet, they get on it just like private ciizens.
So, any and all blacklisting is done by companies and private citizens. If I run a mail server and determine that X netblock, which might be a whole country, is an endless source of problems, I ban it. The government does not tell me to do this or not to do this, that's not up to them. Same with an ISP. They may decide to ban netblocks/countries. Of course they do this at the risk of pissing off their subscribers. If they ban something they want to get to, that'll create backlash. They way the benefits against the risks.
So please, don't get on the nationalist, anti-US kick. The US, as a nation, has NOTHING to do with this. It is companies and individuals excerising their rights in a free society. I have a right to choose who may and may not access my servers. For some servers, any may do so, for others, none but me.
If you, as a South African ISP, want to blacklist the entire US, that is your right (I understand that you are supposed to be a free country as well). However I won't confuse that with the policy of the Sount African government. Also, don't be supprised if your subscribers leave since, at this point, a majority of the Internet still resided in the US (though that continues to change).
I do get really tired of people from other countries blaming any view or action taken by a US citizen on the United States as a whole. Just because a minority in the KKK declares people of African descent to be inferior does NOT mean that is the official position of the US. It means that we have a right to free speech here, even if that speech is racist, stupid, and wrong.
When the US government mandidates bans on other countries, then you come talk to me about US policy. When it's private individuals, blame them, not the US at large.
Than you must support the freedom to blacklist. Remember we are NOT talking about the government doing it, that is different. We are talking about corperations, private bussinesses, and individuals doing it. If I am truly free I must be free to decide who I wish to associate with. Much as I am allowed to keeep people out of my house, or kick them out of my store, I must be allowed to block them from my server.
People doing something is very different from a government doing something. If the government stops something form being published, that is censorship. However if I stop something from going on my website, that is free speech. It would be against that ideal to force me to publish something on my site.
There are also objective realities to be considered when running a bussiness. If a given country has a very high occurance of fraud, which costs you money, you don't have much choice other than to not deal with them. Fraud is a fact of life, but in most countires the occurance is low because the authorities prosecute it. In countires that ignore it, it's very problematic. If it is to the point that the amount of money you make from legit sales is less than what you loose to fraud, you cannot justify doing bussiness.
This is, for example, why so very many places will not do COD. COD these days isn't cash on delievery but check on delivery. So someone buys something, you send it to them, and when they recieve it, you get a personal check. Well if that bounces, you are screwed. Fraudsters know this, and exploit this. Hence, COD is a blacklisted method of purchase for most merchants, eBay sellers, etc. The additonal money you make from legit COD sales is less than what you loose from fradulant ones.
The Internet is still, at this point, a real anarchy in that anyone can join and there is no overall authority. That means that people can, and will, make their own rules. That is real freedom. It is NOT freedom to tell people "YOu will not ban any IP address/range, regardless of what it does." That is being authoritarian, just as much as mandidating a ban would be.
You would emigrate over Internet connectivity?
this is slashdot, most here would answer yes.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I think I'll add a Macedonia block to my site. I already block email from a number of countries, why not web access as well?At least some of them are spamming/phsing me by crawling my web site.
Until/unless these cesspools of fraud are taken care of, I will never interact with anyone in these countries.
It's my server, just like it's my email Inbox.
Play nice or I'll kick you out of it.
It's just the same old dumbass story of US protectionism screwing everyone and helping no one.
Dubya just wants to cut out certain other countries so that the scammers based in the states can have all the benefits.
Just like those sons of bitches are doing right now in Canada's north, in the Beaufort Sea, trying to pretend they have jurisdiction over Canadian waters, only in that case the assholes are getting US Oil exploration companies to do the dirty work of exerting sovereignty, instead of going about it in any legal manner.
One day, the US will fall, and the world will be so much better a place to live.
I, too, am getting very tired of the spanked spammers, customers of spam-supportiing ISPs, governments that refuse to do anything about fraud, and just general black hats of all kinds getting whiles published on Slashdot. I wish there was a filter to turn these stories off. I wish even more that Slashdot wouldn't give them what they want most of all -- attention and a positive spin.
They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself Why is Israel mentioned here at all? What are the fraud stats from Israel?
So block it out. What the heck do I care about news or opinions from Africa or China or Macedonia? They can call me on the phone if they need me -and if they have my cell phone number.
Vote Quimby!
Your post seems to be in no way connected to the one it was replying to, neither agreeing nor disagreeing nor adding to it. Maybe a mistake?
A prime example of why you received, and deserved the 9/11 attacks.
because of your pure blatant dumbass ignorance, and how you show no respect for the rest of the world.
When a governments turns a blind eye to massive online credit card fraud, blacklisting is the best answer. Rather than bitching to the people who use blacklists, those affected should complain to their governments about the lax law enforcement that caused the situation. Merchants need to be able to complain to the Macedonian authorities about credit card fraud and have reasonable expectations that investigations and legal action will take place. Until/unless that happens, don't expect merchants to ship their goods off when collecting payment is a crap-shoot.
If your neighborhood is filled with thugs, muggers, murderers, and thieves, don't whine to Dominoes when they won't deliver a pizza there. Clean up the neighborhood and then you can have your pizza.
Non Sequitur. What you talk about has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I am talking about bans on IP ranges, commerece by private entities. You then throw out four terms with no context that in no way relate to what I am talking about.
Let's please stop with the logical falacies and short, meaningless responses. If you want to debate, debate. My argument was that the US government is not the one doing the banning, private entities are. If you have a counter argument, let's here it, not an irrelivant list of unrelated terms.
For those who are not familiar with these... they allow anybody in the world to pay anybody else in the world a certain amount of gold. The actual gold sits in a vault (or actually several vaults across several locations on earth) and basically what gets exchanged is the rights to a fraction of that gold held in trust.
There are several well established digital gold currencies now, with E-Gold being the oldest, running since 1996 I believe.
One of the important distinctions between using E-gold as a payment system, and (say) credit cards, is that there are no chargebacks. That means that when a merchant receives payment, he is SURE that he has received REAL VALUE and not something that can be revoked.
Because of this, digital gold has really been catching on for online commerce in a lot of locations worldwide where credit cards have not been traditionally used. Places such as India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa are prime markets for digital currency. And personally, I think that western nations will really benefit from the birth of digital gold currencies as well.
Lets face it: the whole western world banking system is terribly outdated, and as evidenced by the high incidence of online fraud, credit cards are not really a great solution for e-commerce.
(Heck, even the Mozilla Foundation accepts E-Gold donations!)
And I haven't even begun to mention the privacy benefits, and the fact that gold retains its value much better than government issued fiat currency. This page has a bunch of great links about the digital currency revolution...
A friend of mine from Romania needed some books, he tried to get them sent to another friend in Germany, but HIS credit card was not accepted, because it was a Romanian card.
:-(
He tried several different aproaches and nothing worked, to make the story short. Finally he contacted me, in the US. I paid for the books with my paypal, made the seller ship them to his home and he wired me the money.
A big pain in the butt, just for a couple of books if you ask me
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
I have to use a proxy to browse Slashdot from my home connection (and had to do the same from my office connection for a while).
For some reason, Slashdot has decided to ban whole ranges from the biggest providers in Spain.
Right now, more than half of the Spanish internet population is banned from Slashdot. This was virtually the whole Spain for some time.
I've written several emails to Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, only to receive a "hey, I'm sorry about that" and I still have to use a proxy.
You can read more about this here (Spanish)
One of the ranges cut off was Telefónica's Proxy-cache. This alone leaves out the majority of the Spanish internet population when it's incidentally turned on.
Isn't hurting innocent victims exactly what blacklists like SPEWS does purposely (collateral damage)?
This is modded is modded Interesting!? Who the fuck found him telling people to leave their country because HIS countrie's stores are screwing them over interesting? This problem is because of American stores. Yet people living in Bulgaria should the fix the problem. Riiiiiiiight. This will be modded a troll and considering the people who modded the parent I think I'm glad.
I'm perfectly willing to read pieces which contain opinions, if anything it's a good thing, but there's a difference between a news article which also gives an opinion, and articles like this which are little more than one person's rant. In other words, it's not the presence of an opinion that's the problem, it's the lack of content.
Since the internet population of these nations, are as you stated ... negligable, I doubt that they are hurt in any way.
The US is still the controlling factor of the Internet, and it's use. Israel and Russia are it's allies. It is also safe to say, that any misuse of power over the control over the Internet, will first and foremost fall on those who are at the helm, which is the US of A. The question is, weather there will be any long term consequences.
Take a peek at news.admin.net-abuse.email in usenet for a lucid defense of en masse blacklisting. For the lazy/news-client-less, it comes down to this: it works. When those responsible do not resond to abuse, they get cut off along with the rest of their (possibly innocent) customers/users. This gets attention, and attention begets action, which in turn engenders better behavior by the offender.
And after reading the article, I was left wondering why any US admin would care about this arrogant screed from a petty, anti-american jerk off in a Podunk, backwater, country like Macedonia. If we don't want your packets, then who are you to tell us we should accept them? Change your behavior first, then we might notice and remove you. And that attitude of yours... yeah that'll get results. I just added
God bless and happy birthday America.
Lets face it. Every country has their fair share of fraudsters and miscellanious criminals. If the richer countries can't stamp out online fraud then how can anyone expect economically smaller countries to have much of a chance?
I don't think blacklisting countries from the web is a good solution. Blacklisting countries from buying off the websites is a better, although still not reasonable, solution.
I know fraud hurts the bottom line for many companies but discrimination hurts the end users to.
Silly rabbit
we cannot have scams and fraud from third world countries clog up the Internet. If a certain percentage of their population is causing the scams and frauds, then by all means blacklist them. After all, if they are not able to Police themselves and put the fraudsters in jail, then something has to be done to stop them.
If they don't like it, they can form their own Internet, or move to a country that does not suffer from such fraud and scams. We are not in the Global Welfare business of supporting poor nations that have to rely on scams and fraud to earn an income.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
people should be able to do what they want with their private property.
Is it truly legal to not allow black people in stores in America? Hey, the store is their private property. Same rules apply.
I live in one of those countries that has been a long time favorite on all kinds of blacklists . Whell , to be onest , at first these was justified . I mean , about 6-8 years ago everybody new someone who was in the internet ordering business :) , and I don't think any bank was issueing international credit cards then . That was arround the time when cc generators actually worked .
But now things changed quite a bit . First there's the minor issue of the local FBI bureu . Cc's are not that easy to obtain know , script kiddies are ceritainly out of the business . And if you're that good , you're probably haveing a well paid job admining something , or getting your visa . Script kiddies are now conning people on ebay , but if you think somebody on the other side of the planet is getting a good deal from you with shipping by AmericanExpress , taxes and all ... you pay for your naivity
OTOH , this blacklist thing is not bothereing me much . I have my own card , nobody refused it by now (google , hosting companies , domain registars etc.) but i'm not buying anything that needs shipping . Godaddy.com blocked all of it's customers from here (without anounceing them first at least) , but i've asked my registar and they said they will do no such thing (keeping my fingers crossed) .
The only thing that's really annoing is that paypal is not sending money over here , and WesternUnion's charges are huge , so working on rentacoder.com and such is not really a good deal .
I didn't in any way imply that you are a "plainly annoyed American" and since you have not (that I am aware) submitted any articles it would not be relevant to my post whether you were or weren't.
There are plenty of articles written and submitted by Americans annoyed about all manner of things. Your objection to this one seemed to revolve around the fact that in this case the annoyed party is a Macedonian. If not then why did you mention it?
It would be nice to hear a bit earlier than the order system saying "Oh, you want it shipped *there*? Sorry, we don't do that." - this is a common problem with US online shops that don't mention that they don't ship outside North America until you try to enter your shipping address and find that the Country drop-down box only gives you options for the US and Canada.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
pity for you when your job goes to India (or Romania for that matter :) ) , and you start whining on /.
Basically the selection of demographic variables here is not at random -- there are more demographic variables for those dimensions of society that are seen as phenomena that are manifestly important to explain.
For instance, it may be that an optimal coordinate system for these data would include all incarceration rate statistics in the same principle component, which would wash out the concern over incarceration rates vs other "random" variables (that's a pun for statistics nerds) that are involved in other principle components, such as median age, Norwegian Americans as a percent of whites, etc.
Another principle component that has "too many correlations" is income levels, which has percapita variables for each, of many, income groups.
Again, if we're really concerned about something we tend to scrutinize it more and have more measurements of its various manifestations. That's why averaging the coefficients of determination works in the laboratory of the States measurement of dominant United States Influences.
Some sort of ANOVA, with a "cost" weight assigned to each variable, would be ideal here but such weightings would have to be quite subjective anyway and are probably best estimated by the meta statistics of the statistics gathering process itself, which has to do with how concerned people are with various measures. That is accomplished by the employed method of averaging squared correlation coefficients (coefficients of determination) between all measured variables.
Seastead this.
Anti-outsourcing articles *are* whinings of Americans (US, rather -- there are two whole continenets out there called 'Americas'). Just the same like cries about a (potential? happening?) brain-drain from US back to EU or Asia.
--AP
...high incidents of on-line fraud as well, such as Africa, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia, etc.
/.!
Africa and Nigeria mentioned separately? Didn't know Africa is a country. You always learn something new at
It started as a slightly different post, but by the time I was done it wasn't really connected except (in a small manner) to the last paragraph. :)
Tell your politicians that they're losing international revenue because their ISPs and phone companies are too stupid, corrupt, or otherwise unwilling or unable to deal with spammers.
I have seveal countries blocked at the SMTP level not because I want to, but because I can't afford the excess bandwidth charges I get from trying to accept and spamfilter mail from them on a case-by-case basis.
I can't block the US, but I've been able to keep US-originated spam down to a nightmare cacophany rather than an expensive nightmare cacophany by blocking dialup, cable, and DSL.
It sucks, but it's what I have to do. I simply can't afford to accept this traffic.
They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble.
:/"
Why, Macedonian criminals aren't up to snuff with their Russian counterparts? We are talking about FRAUD, not legitimate purchases, so what makes you think the population significantly limits the scale?
Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users. And I thought all this time I was surfing the 'World Wide' Web
Really? It sure seems to me that cutting off an entire country where an enormous percentage of the transactions are fraudulent helps most of us, by keeping prices low.
Or do you think I should be forced to pay more because some guy in a country that isn't willing to enforce the law has a "right" (sic) to buy online?
If Macedonians don't like it, they need to change their government and crack down on fraud. Pretty simple stuff.
Mail is a different story. Using a different account is straightforward. I don't know anyone who uses telefonica for mail, but you basically have no option for broadband (it's only telefónica and resellers).
Yeah.. so?
Not every country works just like the USA. In many countries money talks, that's all. Internet in many places is prohibitively expensive in the first place as far as the local average population is concerned, and may even require bribes to obtain (becuase it's only available for certain reasons, like school, etc, so you have to convince some official that your business is "education" related, etc.)
In these countries, those running the service, which may even be a government monopoly, don't give a crap what goes on with it so long as the money comes in. They answer to nobody, except perhaps a government that equally doesn't give a crap, they have more important things to do.
If the WORLD blacklists them, then they will listen.
Blacklists are not a long term solution.. they do hurt the innocent... but how do you get through to the ISP who doesn't care, and a government who doesn't care or is unable to police things?
Last time our Slavic knyaz nailed his shield to the gates of your capital (Constantinopole) as a sign of you having to pay tribute to him, you didn't quite like it. But you payed. Now it's a bit too late to complain, eh?
If people from Macedonia can't place credit card transactions, they'll want to know why. When they find out their country has such a poor reputation among vendors, they'll pass laws and regulations and fix the problem.
I'm tired of hearing people call other people 'helpless' because they live in a poor country. They are far from helpless.
People are people. Enough said.
As a reader, I find this one tiny inconsequential alteration is not only NO BIG DEAL but also just plain funny.
Get a sense of humor.
If your friends' countrymen are giving his country a bad name on the internet, the gov't should do something about it. You can't blame other entities for not wanting to do business with a locality when a large percentage of it's produce is fraud.
Blar.
I live in the US and have a good credit card and do online shopping, but with a twist. I don't use my credit card online much, only to a couple sites I have been doing business with for a long time. The rest I get a snail mail address from them for whatever thing I want to buy and send a personal check or a US postal money order. Takes a few days longer to get my stuff, but I don't care, it is more secure all around for both parties to do it that way. It is slightly more hassle, but much more secure. Nothing is perfect, but you can eliminate a lot of the imperfections by not using the more imperfect method of online shopping. Filling in a form with CC info or paypal info at a "secure" shopping site is marginally easier, but it is not more secure than the old fashioned way of doing remote business called "mail order". That's why there are all these problems you see. There are still scams that can happen both ways with snail mail, but all in all it's an older and better established way to do that sort of remote buying and selling. It's also cheaper for the vendor, so it can be cheaper for the customer, with a tradeoff of a just a tiny little more work at both ends, and you as a vendor don't have to eat the processing fees from paypal or the credit card companies, just work with your own personal bank. I'm not sure how it works in other nations, but in the US there isn't any fee for depositing checks, just writing them, and even there a lot of banks here now will pay interest to you on a checking account with a reasonable minimum balance, so it's the exact opposite of a credit card or paypal account, the processor (your bank) pays YOU instead of the other way around (CC company and paypal).
In other words, why should you or your customer work to make visa, mastercard and paypal rich, when there is no absolute outright need?
If the country of Elbonia has 100 IP addresses, and 90 of them have been linked back to committing fraud and therefore blacklisted, then effecitvely their country has been knocked off the net.
If Russia has 1 million IP addresses, and 9,000 or even 90,000 have been traced back to fraud and therefore blacklisted - the majority of the country is still able to access the internet even though the rates of fraud exceed Elbonia's by 100x to 1000x...
This rate is irrellevant as the country of Elbonia needs to look at fraud as a percentage of users in their country, then introduce efforts to reduce that percentage. This effect of whining because your country is being kicked off the net is pointless.
Macedonia, Ghana, Nigeria, et al: Clean your house, pass some laws, and we'll let you participate in the world economy again. Its as simple as that.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
e-comerce sites traditionally ban our IPs, because of the profit/fraud ratio from the people here. The general web, on the other hand, used to browse/search/mail/chat/etc not explicitly related to money is not restricted anyhow (at least I didn't noticed)
Mail is not an issue. Web is an issue, because proxies will add you inacceptable lags (besides, they get banned rather often and you have to reconfigure it, which is a PITA).
The issue here is what means are acceptable to stop attacks, tighter security measures for everyone or banning countries en-masse, leaving a bitter heap of collateral damage behind. I'm certainly pissed at slashdot. I've considered becoming a pay member in the past, but I won't ever give a cent to whoever applied those policies.
I also browse the site a lot less, since the experience with the added lag is much worse. I'm positive the same happens to a lot of users in my situation, let alone those who aren't knowledgeable enough to bypass this moronic "security" measure by using a proxy (hint: not the ones attacking the site with scripts).
'Pay close attention to shipping or contact addresses located in countries with a high reported incidence of online fraud and many e-commerce web sites have found a high incidents of on-line fraud as well, such as Africa...'
News to me. I always thought of Africa as more a continent with a rich and diverse assortment of tapestries of culture. With great cultural variances within groups of cultures and subgroups within those groups and so on...
This is pretty much the same for all indigenous peoples from all continents across the globe. The only reason we can think of the United States as having a sort of unified culture is because at critical junctures of forming our own identity as a people we had devised means of communication and transportation This is the reason that whether you go to Ann Arbor Michigan, Toms River NJ, Seattle, Southern California, Denver, (you name it) a suburb is a suburb is a suburb. All this had been done after we had already colonized this continent, which until then previously had previously as diverse a population of greatly differing cultures as any indigenous area of the globe.
I remember going to Lollapolooza (lots o' poor losers) back in 93. Someone had a table setup with a sign above it reading "African Food"....'Hmm..wonder what that tastes like'. So, I wander over there and ask her what kind of 'African' food they meant. It was loud so she kind of shouted back at me...'IT'S...AFRICAN...FOOOD!'...(as if I couldn't read the big bold letters above her). 'Ah! I see! What KIND of African?'...'Nigerian'...'What kind of Nigerian? Yoruba or Ibo?' Which I later found out is more popularly known as Igbo. But you could have properly referred to the plate in front of me as either.
This question really kind of floored her. And it shouldn't have. It really kind of annoys me when greatly divergent groups of people get lumped together like that. Just as it pisses me the fuck off when people speak of all Native Americans as if they were just "Indians" (as if there were quite literally no difference between a Lakota, a Navajo, a Lenape, a Choctaw, Oglala, Onendaga and and what have you)...it really pisses me off when people start speaking of Africa as if it were a "country". It's NOT!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Dear fellow Slashdotters,
Please be informed that there is no Macedonia country. There is not a Macedonia nation, a Macedonian language or Macedonian race.
The country that you refer to as Macedonia is actually named FYROM.
Macedonia is the name of the region that the Great Alexander was born at.
The Macedonians was a Greek race.
The name 'Alexander' is Greek (Alexandros).
The ancient Macedonians spoke Greek.
Macedonia is a region of Greece.
Excuse me for protesting here on Slashdot, but it is a good chance to know that the former Yugoslavians and Albanians have ACTUALLY STOLLEN the historic identity of Macedonia.
Before you say 'politically correctness', try to understand how painful it is to stole one's identity. It is the same as me coming to your neighbourhood, stealing your name (first and last) and claiming to be the sole descentant of your family tree.
Before you say that every person or group of persons can identify themselves as they like, think that one's freedom ends where another one's freedom begins. Everyone has the right to identify themselves as they like, but they can't just go around and steal other people's identity!
Imagine if I was rich enough to buy a huge farm near the American border, claim that my farm constitutes a country, write my own constitution, establish my own government and call it AMERICA! Not only you will be outraged, but in no time your army would take it over...
The only reason these former Yugoslavians call themselves 'Macedonians' is that they want to justify their existence as a separate country. Before Tito, no one called them like that, not even themselves. Tito, as a devious communist leader that he was, named the South of Yugoslavia as part of ancient Macedonia, in order to create trouble in the neighbourhood and obtain access to the Mediterranean sea!
I will not put any links that back up my claims, because the internet is full of such material. Just go to Google and enter the relevant terms (Macedonia, Greece, Alexander etc) and you will see for yourself.
Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users.
Many countries still don't think hacking is a crime. Many law enforcers consider online fraud is not part of their juridiction. As a result, computer crimes become a regular part of the internet in this countries. So, you can't really blame people for not wanting to do business with people from those regions. If you get robbed 9 times out of 10 when you go to a town to sell your products, you'll learn to avoid that town after several incidents. Until the town passes laws and enforces them, salespeople will avoid it like a plague.
It shouldn't be much different here. The countries need laws to deal with computer crimes and enforce them. It is in their interests to do so. Computer crimes may be a start of a longer string of much more serious crimes. They may give them a bad name in the business world and prevent people from investing. They also prevent them from using the good things of the net.
You are right. Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users, but it is not the fault of the e-commerce companies. Do you seriously think that cutting off the entire population good for profit unless there is a good reason to do so? Blame the governments of those countries for failing to protect them after all these years. A decade should be enough to make laws, no?
The 90% of telefonica's customers who are legitimate are the ones who end up paying the tab -- but they're also the ones who haven't the slightest idea why they cant get to many sites.
Once they know that the problem is that their ISP is more interested in getting money from fraud artists than giving the rest of their customers open access to the net, then they'll place pressure on the owners to clean up their act. (( either that, or they'll just lynch them and hope the new owners don't want to be lynched too )).
Communication is always better than supression.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
No, the quote is not poorly written; it is your position that is poorly reasoned. To someone who's about to ship an article of merchandise and has to worry about whether or not they'll receive payment, what's relevant is the probability of fraud given whatever information they have about the order; in symbols, if we only take into account the country to which we are shipping, this is
The probability of a random fraudulent order coming from some country X --
-- is irrelevant, as it swaps what you know (country) with what you don't know (whether or not the order is fraudulent). Yes, P(Macedonia | fraud) is going to be low because of a small Internet population; nevertheless, P(fraud | Macedonia) can be relatively high if a relatively high PROPORTION of orders from Macedonia are fraudulent.
There is no such country called Macedonia. Their official name is Former Yugoslavic Republic Of Macedonia. These guys first have to find for their country a real name (and stop forging Greek names and history) and then do sth for the net chaos...
Online gambling provides a few examples.
Most of the UKian sportsbooks (though for tax reasons they run their 'net operations out of Gibraltar or Malta) like Ladbrokes and Will Hill don't take action from the US; I suspect it's because, should the US ever legalize sportsbetting, they want to be able to jump right in. Betfair is another example of this.
OTOH, many/most online casinos refuse to do business with Danes, thanks to a recent spate of bonus-whoring from that country after a few TV specials touted it as an easy way to make money.
This is business, my friend, not some socialist expirement.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Are you talking about a muslim ghetto in the UK? Because those muslims sure like to throw rocks at Israeli Jews and they sure like to stone to death people when enforcing sharia punishments.
All that a service provider on the other end of the net is going to see is that >>90% of the connections from Macedonia are fraud related. The small percentage of legitimate connection attempts just aren't worth the agrivation of allowing connections from that netblock.
Even though the US is the source of more fraud (in an absolute sense), there's a bigger baby in the bathwater. Although cutting off UUNET might stop more fraudlent connections than cutting off Bulgaria, it would also cause more complaints, so that's just not going to happen.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
... so work around those aspects of reality. Use that egold deal someone else mentioned in another part of this article thread. Really, I fully understand it would be a lot easier and less hassle if using online services was transparent and honest and effective. I have no easy answers to it. Perhaps, a group of honestvendors can get together in foreign nation x, and arrange so that they pool their transnational currencies they accumulate into one large sum per alternate currency, then conduct one transaction with the currency exchange service per short time period, then unpool the now exchanged local currency back to the individual vendors based on the accounting data that went into accumulating each pool per individualk vendor. Consumers in those nations there could do similar I guess, the concept (a variation of it) is called a "buying club" or a "co-op" here in the US. I have been in several, more or less they work pretty spiffy.
Anyway, as has been pointed out, it's the number of bad apples as a percentage of the population, that's something only the inviduals in these respective nations can do for themselves, until we have an international way of regulating e commerce that is effective. I have MANY times here on slashdot advocated that email addresses be much harder to get*, and that they be as unique as normal telphone numbers or street adresses, so that fraud and spam may be knocked down considerably. It is just too cheap and easy to get a fraudulent anonymous email address that will be used for hacking/crime/spam purposes. WAY too easy.
*you could still have the basic anarchy style email addresses we have now, as many as you want, no problems, just an additional one as an alternative you used for V.ery I.mportant E.mail, whether personal or business, etc. I would propose they be run similar to domain name registration now, and cost x amount of folding money per email address and had to be tied to an actual verifiable named human being with as much identification verification as possible to insure legitimacy.
Besides that, I don't know, there are tradeoffs around the world wherever you live. I live in the US, so this is the reality I live with, the good and the bad. There are certain aspects to living in various other nations that make them a better place than living inside the US, and there are some that make them worse. Just "is" is all. I freely admit to being fairly insular in my world views, but I stop short of jingoism or xenophia, but I will still call a spade a spade on any subject. I will praise or decry based on data, that's it, on any subject.. I don't necessarily hate or dislike any particular peoples or groups, but I believe in freedom of association as well, for all peoples, and that means that if group A decides to not do business with group B, well, that's just how it's going to be. I may not like this decision or that decision, but all in all because I can still roughly speaking make those sorts of decisions for myself, I think it's acceptable, so I must accept it for others as well. I know I work hard to try and make my nation better, with all it's faults, and I spend very little time on "entertainments", compared to most people, as my personal tradeoff and to fulfill a certain sense of civic duty, and it's all voluntary on my part. It's the best I can do. Other people around the world must do that themselves, take what steps are necessary to try and make their own nations and governments and businesses better and more fair and honest. Like I said, the choices I make are, I don't hardly ever use a CC. I primarily use cash notes, as flawed as they are, in my day to day business and when I have to get something remotely if it's a small amount I use a personal check, larger than say around 50$ I use a postal money order. In fact, up until just a few years ago I frequently used to just mail cash, and despite doing that for decades, I never got burned, not one single time. I only quit doing that as the US mail service seemed to go downhill when "globalisation" c
The second probability is far from irrelevent. In fact, the first probability is proprtional to it!
Wikileaks, no DNS
I just say FYROM.
...but at times effective. I can't say anything about Macedonia, as I've not had any interaction with anything from that country to my knowledge (except for the thuggish looking gentlemen in black BMWs who cruise around my city with FYROM bumper stickers) but in our case, just blacklisting all Thai, Chinese and Korean IPs from sending us mail has done absolute miracles for our spam counts...
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
At least, they have never demanded that Georgia is called "Former Russian Republic of Georgia" just because there is an american state with the same name.
These countries should surrender their control to U.S.A.!
YEAH.
Need I say more?
So maybe the problem is the US system, hmm? Isn't it a double-standard to blacklist these banana republics because their law enforcement isn't cracking down on fraud or whatever but let Americans companies do whatever they want because "that's just how capitalism is". If your country's part of the Internet has rampant problems, maybe you should consider nationalising it?
Does the buck stop anywhere in your country? Nearly 50% of you voted for the current executive -- probably more than that for the legislative -- and the rest of you haven't done all that much to fight it, so if your country is democratic, as Americans seem to claim, then all American citizens are responsible for their government's actions.
I've been around well over 10 years and had to use mail interfaces too in the beginning. That doesn't mean pissing off people is OK, and let's not forget about the MILLIONS who don't know how to circunvent this stupid measure. Because this is stopping nobody - those who attack Slashdot from these networks know enough to set up an http proxy.
What the article doesn't tell you is the number of fraud incidents online, or the volume of spam. It does link to the recommendations made by a site, but it doesn't go in depth to explain why those recommendations were made.
This article, typical of a lot of editorial drivel these days, bemoans blacklisting without bringing up relevant facts or any theory for solution.
Macedonia has made a few laws. Good for them. How about arrests and convictions? The article also complains about the small number of users in Macedonia... 90K. And then it complains about the political situation that allow hackers/spammers/con artists in Russia or Israel to go unpunished. Big deal. Maybe the hackers will all end up in Russia, and then the blacklists will shrink? And as far as numbers go, if the volume of spam is high, or the volume of fraud is high, then the problem is worse in Macedonia than it is in Russia or Israel. But they don't mention any numbers, so we'll never know if that's true.
The bias here is typical. Cry for the little people. Complain, cry, moan. Poor Macedonians. Maybe the Macedonians need to step into the 21st century? Maybe, in addtion to making a new law or two, they need to go the next step? I love editorials that offer a solution. But this isn't one of them. Anyone can write complaints.
How about writing about ideas for a real solution?
-- No sig for you!
One of the projects I've worked on for my current employer is fraud detection code.
They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble
It's not about numbers. It's about percentage. Sure, most of our fraud comes from the US, but it's a miniscule percentage of the US business. Whereas Indonesia accounts for a small percentage of fraud but nearly all indonesian orders are fraud.
We did a lot of analysis to identify indicators and assign scores to them. Funny things turn up. Like we found that Florida had a very high fraud liklihood. So did the Bronx.
Working with UPS we found that they do it by zip code. They keep tabs on how many shipments to each zip result in a missing package report, and then they won't drop off packages in those zip codes without a signature.
If you didn't know how they arrived at the list of zips and looked them over you might think the company was being mean. But it would be foolish for a business to not use reasonable data like that to avoid trouble.
Anyways...
Don't want your third world country cut off electronically from the rest of the world? Cut off your spammers. Better yet, use your nic.$TLD site to serve videos of them being hanged. Otherwise, continue enjoying the cash coming in from the spammers and realize that you'll be pariahs in the Internet community.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Soy español. Un respeto a los sudamericanos, marica anónimo.
Go ahead and block all the mail you want. We are talking about http here, and only Slashdot. The only site to ever ban me (together with several million people).
Of course I complain to Telefónica, and I don't use the mail address they so kindly bundle with their broadband service. The other point you seem to disregard is their virtual monopoly in the country. Basically everything goes through their servers.
Please read the posts you reply to. "Find another ISP" isn't quite an option when there is a monopoly and the competition subcontracts their ranges. Mail is not a problem since I have accounts by dozens, including yahoo, hotmail, gmail, opera, fastmail, etc... plus my own dedicated servers located in the USA. They're not going to block all those.
'What kind of Nigerian? Yoruba or Ibo?'
What kind of Mexican? Yucatan or Veracruz? What kind of American? Florida or Alaskan? As you said, you couldn't really make that distinction.
I really didn't think this point would be easy to miss, but aparently for some people it was. America is a continent comprising north and south. Are you a NORTH American or a SOUTH American? I think it's okay to refer to countries as countries but not to refer to CONTINENTS as countries. To me that's just fucking stupid. For instance it really pisses Canadians off that citizens of the USA go around say that they are "Americans". And what are the Canadians? Chopped liver?
Just as it pisses me the fuck off when people speak of all Native Americans as if they were just "Indians"
Native Americans never had a "country" in the modern sense of the term. Now they just have Casinos! But you make an excellent point here, now that I've had more of a chance to think about it.
Are you pissed off when people speak of Europeans? Are you pissed off when people speak of Americans (which has Native Americans as a subset)?
No that doesn't annoy me. But it really annoys South Americans that we US citizens think of ourselves as "Americans" just like it pisses off the Canadians. I don't get as annoyed when Europeans refer to themselves as "Europeans" or when a citizen of Tanzania refers to him/herself as an "African". But if you ask which COUNTRY they come from, and they tell you a continent instead of a nation...well that's just fucking retarded.
I don't give a damn about the fine details of Nigeria. It has no effect on my life, and I'm not going to sit down and study each of the thousands of cultures this world has to offer.
Look. I'm not saying that "everyone has to become an Anthropologist"! But when people start confusing countries with continents thats just geographical illiteracy and start lumping people together that don't even remotely belong in the same group I find that irksome.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
They must have lost the stats on fraud from Russia, Israel and the USA itself, because Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble. Cutting off an entire country only hurts the legitimate users. And I thought all this time I was surfing the 'World Wide' Web :/
Now that everyone has complained about the "hypocracy" of the West, sit back and think for a minute: it's the RATIO of fraud that's the problem, not the total incidence. If there are 1,000 incidents of internet fraud in the US per day and 5 incidents of fraud in Macedonia each day, it looks like the US should be blacklisted, not Macedonia, right? Wrong. The US has a lot of internet orders. Throwing out some made-up numbers, we might say that 1% of US internet orders are fraud and 50% of Macedonia orders are fraud. Under those numbers, if I were a business, I would avoid Macedonia, but not the US because it the RATIO of internet fraud that's the problem -- not the total number. If you ship 1000 orders to the US, you'd have a LOT of real orders that would help you pay for the fraud. But 1000 orders to Macedonia would bankrupt you because you'd never have enough legitimate orders to pay for the fraudulent ones. Why is Macedonia's numbers so high? Maybe because the government doesn't care much about cracking down on internet fraud. And just as an FYI, "Macedonia's negligible internet population cannot possibly account for that much trouble" is non-logic when you realize that it's the ratio of fraud, not the total incidence of fraud. The fact that Macedonia has a small internet population would actually accentuate the degree of fraud because it means a small number of criminals could easily skew the ratio of internet crime to epic proportions!
...anything useful in this thread. Who has given you the authority to characterize slashdoters as "crazy" and "nutters"???? I am sure that this community needs people that can provide useful comments. We have no need for colourful language, thank you.
Not that it matters, but the author of the article is an American (as in from the US) who happens to live in Macedonia.
Yes, it is true that
P(fraud | country X) = P(fraud) P(country X | fraud) / P(country X).
But note that denominator: P(country X). The smaller it is, the higher P(fraud | country X), all else being equal.
You claim that P(fraud | country X) is proportional to P(country X | fraud). This is true only in a trivial sense, if the country is held fixed and the truth value of fraud is.
Despite Tony Blair's policies, the UK is not a US state, and therefor is "international". Some US retailers just don't do international for whatever reason. It's a whole new set of regulation, you have less recourse in the case of fraud, etc. They just don't wanna deal with it. It's nothing personal against the UK.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent