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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 thought it was a continent
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.
1 in 30 according to ECCS international 2003 report.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Clickable link for above
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Africa is not a country. It is a continent.
such as Africa, Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia, etc..
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.
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.
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...
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.
Thus blacklisting Macedonia is a much more efficient solution
Of course, let's exclude the minorities because it's easier! Blocking entire country's netblocks (China, Korea, etc) from email is one thing. Online store policies preventing shipment to Macedonia is one thing.
But to purposely block ALL 'net traffic from countries "not worthy" is just retarded - it provides no benefit to ANYONE, except for the blocker to say a big "FUCK YOU!!!" to those who want to browse the internet just like everyone else but happen to live in a country who's time is "not worth it"!
Geez, as if blocking a whole country from even viewing your site actually helps anyone!
I dunno - perhaps the owners of that mental health site were worried their precious web pages would become dirtied by TCP/IP packets from Macedonians?
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then why the hell should we give them access to our servers?! If the government is corrupt and the criminal element runs rampant, then you block them to protect yourself. It isn't "collective punishment" or any such bullshit. When >50% of transactions from a given country are fraud, it's decision time. When that number raises into the 80-90% and up range, its kind of obvious that its time to stop pissing away your own money for some unrealistic ideal and some criminal's bankbook.
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 .
...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
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.
But it will be in the future. Otherwise, why would Jean-Luc Picard have an English accent?
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
'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.
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
If I have the expectation that you will not pay, why should I even consider doing business with you?
Why is this moderated flamebait?
The poster has a very good point. There is a reason why 419 scams are named as they are--after a section of Nigeria's penal code. Simply stated, the occurrence of types of wire fraud is higher in some countries than others--while putting together a security incident response team for a client, we found a whole "419 ISP" infrastructure located in Ghana, including several subnets, mail servers on multiple operating systems, and loads of what we assumed were semipublic terminals dedicated to sending out fraudulent crap.
We gathered through a bit of digging that an Israeli company was at least partially behind the whole deal, but this was by no means an isolated incident.
I have very very serious problems with the criteria for inclusion in many commercial blacklists--including censorware, antispam and others. However, in many cases, inclusion is justified. If a country sees a high rate of blacklisting, well, do something about it.
A few years ago, Switzerland had free SMS phone gateways--many UK providers blocked SMS traffic from here, as their subscribers were being mercilessly spammed. The block was justified, and the local telcos took action; now it's no more. Asking others to at least investigate whether there's some good reason behind a blacklist, and if so, eliminating it, is not excessive.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
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...