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China and its Relation With Spam
smooth wombat writes "Asia Times has a nice article about why China is becoming the spam capital of the world. Steve Linford, of Spamhaus fame, is quoted several times in the article and offers some insight into how the Chinese ISPs operate.
Steves quote at the end of the article pretty much sums up why China isn't doing anything to curb the hosting of spam website servers in the country:
"They simply don't want to know - China Telecom doesn't care because they're government-owned and there is no pressure coming from the government. Meanwhile, our statistics on spam volumes and the number of spammers setting up in China are going up and up and up.""
Since I'd never be able to get their email with their netblocks firewalled off on port 25.
Just block everything that comes *out* of the Great Firewall until they decide that spam is a problem. Please?
I simply ban China and most other Asian countries at my router.
End of Line.
Isn't there some way we can identify the entire Chinese IP block and just shut them down? If they don't care, then they can just go back to being isolationists as they have been for the past 5,000 years. They didn't mind and neither did we. But this kind of behaviour sucks.
Honestly, I can't think of anything else that could possibly be done short of forwarding all chinese spam to the UN and seeing if they can actually do ANYTHING in the next decade or so.
SPAM(TM) Hot & Spicy Stir-Fry
Makes 6 servings
Ingredients
1/3 cup reduced-sodium teriyaki sauce
1/3 cup water
2 to 3 teaspoons HOUSE OF TSANG® MONGOLIAN FIRE® Oil
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 (12-ounce) can SPAM® Lite, cubed
1 cup broccoli florets
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup pea pods
1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
1 tablespoon plus 1-1/2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 (14-ounce) can whole baby corn, drained and cut in half
1 (7-ounce) jar mushrooms, drained
6 cups hot cooked white rice
In small bowl, combine teriyaki sauce, water, Chinese hot oil and ginger; set aside. In wok or large skillet, stir-fry SPAM®, broccoli, onion, pea pods and bell pepper in vegetable oil 2 minutes. Add teriyaki sauce mixture; cook until bubbly. Add baby corn and mushrooms; heat thoroughly. Serve over rice.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Which is suprising considering the Government control on all things media.
From: Confusious
To: teiresias
Subject: Ancient Chinese Proverb
Body: "Increase your penis size with ginger root and secret ingredient. Act now and get a free webcam. Did I mention it make your wang huge!"
-Teiresias
Because of this, it is now meaningless to say that spam itself originates in any given place - it is truly a cyber-product.
No, I think the source has remained unchanged - the pocketbooks of those willing to actually pay for the schwag sold via SPAM email. As long as people are willing to pay for herbal Viagra, cheap mortgages, etc. based on spam, so too will spam annoy the rest of us.
I hope the land around you yields, a crop like all the other fields, and then your waiting might make sense...
People other than Americans can speak English, and no, I don't mean the British. Plenty of people in China speak English, too.
Ironically if the spammers make more money in China then the internet will be more profitable there then in a Capitalist society.
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
Someone on /. once made comment that these spam actually oroginate from US but ISPs make them "look like the spam is coming from another country" and went on to give some 'ununderstandable' explanation. I asked for an explanation as to what he means exactly and how its done but got no answer. (I can't seem to find the link to that comment)
Steves quote...
Or lack thereof...
I get no mail of any value from China. I don't know anybody there. So I don't feel bad about automatically trashing all mail that originates in Chinese netblocks. It's amazing the effect that has had on what spam I actually see.
If everybody did this, it could become a real problem for the Chinese. (duh)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
and then I'm hungry for more 2 hours later.
or are those silly bastards who do the "first poooooooooost" thing almost as annoying as getting 1500 variations of "hot, wet, young asian delight" in my email box every day?
Let's re-route all of our chinese spam to those guys.
---- How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. -Shakespeare
... The US is still the main exporter of SPAM...
...I just started blocking IP subnets from china...
Actually, after reviewing logs on my firewall I found a lot of brute force attacks coming from Korea, and only a few from China, so most subnets blocked are Korean owned. But, needless to say, I'm spam free.
If you were willing to put some effort into it, you could combine it with a whitelist, which would allow your Chinese customers to get email from the old country.
Wait a minute ... effort, ISP ... those two don't go together. Ok, never mind about the whitelist.
See what I've been reading.
Keeping all the criminals in one place (China) is great. I blocklist all of China, Taiwan and Korea and don't have to worry about these trespassers. I do feel sorry for those folks that have to communicate with them, but just consider it the price of doing business.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Probably it will stop when the Chinese govenment introduces their own "IPv9" network protocol to have better control about what is good for their citizens and what is not.
"Asia Times has a nice article about why China is becoming the spam capital of the world. " You forgot to mention which country is the spam capital of the world now ... the U.S. And why is that? Because the ISP are privately owned and there is no pressure coming from above?
IAAL
If we surf INTERNET, we find out you have second post. INFORMATUON SUPERHIGHWAY tells us these things.
5 mod point to the person who provide a link or describes how to block the chinese ip net block.
is go after the companies that sell their products through spam. outlaw that as an advertising form, fine companies that advertise through them and you have your solution
Only two dozen posts in and I see half of them appear to suggest blocking email from China. This is a good individual solution on an ISP by ISP basis but not a good universal solution. Businesses have to deal with other businesses in China, and well there are plenty of families who legitimately want to email from China to the US and back.
Any solution that involves blocking everything from China won't work for everyone, and every solution that tries to selectively opt in or selectively block from China is a greater expense to set up.
Considering most of the spam originating from China is poured into the US, and the money's paid to the ISPs are money flowing from out of the US economy and into China's, I hardly think they will care any time soon.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
If an ISP in the United States, or other competitive markets, acts as a home for spammers, they get cut off from many other ISPs. The legitimate customers of the ISP find they can no longer send email to a large number of other people. They either find out why (spam) or don't, but regardless, they're likely to jump to another ISP, one that allows them to send email to the people they want. Spammer ISP finds itself with a bunch of spammers, but the inability to send email to a bunch of people. At this point, even the spammers give up on the ISP, and without any customers, it dies.
A government mandated/socialized ISP doesn't have to face this problem. It will always have customers.
Welcome our Chinese Spamming overlords.
550 - Thank you for your support of the steganographic communications payment protocol.
550 - Your continued support of Falun Dafa [Falun Gong] in the face of continued oppression from the butchers of Beijing is appreciated.
550 - The following token shall constitute both a receipt for your payment and a public key with which you may send your next message to your allies in the resistance.
550 - KEYBLOCK 6x5 F81IZ FOLG3 VOLSX CIOP3 F7JJ2 EYMNX
Now, is it my fault if my crontab edits the last line of that message to a different series of random characters every 30 seconds? Is it my fault if the owner of the spam-relaying machine is... dealt with... in the name of protecting his fellow citizens from mysticism and supersition?
Hmm, I suppose it is.
But hey, there's a critical shortage of corneal and kidney transplants. And a critical oversupply of server administrators who support spammers. I'm just the invisible hand of the market, smoothing out the discrepancies.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
You mean they don't check outgoing e-mails, which might have anti-Communist content? Gasp!
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Obviously, you did not read the article. Perhaps I am being too harsh - perhaps you did read the article, and found it to reinforce your pre-existing prejudicial views towards the Far East. I quote from the article.
The spam chain is complex. Basically, though, most people responsible for sending spam are based in the US, though a growing number are now organized criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia. China is the location of choice for the servers that host the spammers' websites and for buying and selling lists of spam zombies, or personal computers (PCs) deliberately infected with spam-enabling viruses.
The criminals, as you so derisively call the citizens of these far-east countries, are using the Chinese as middlemen. Yes, this makes them accomplices, but using such inflammatory satements such as criminals, trespassors is rediculous.
It is fortunate that you don't have to communicate with those countries, because I would assume with neanderthal views such as your own you would have very little to contribute to any intelligent conversation.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Slightly off topic, but do people here seem to have a problem with getting spam in every language under the sun?
So far I have receieved spam in:
Chinese
Russian
German
Urdu(Maybe, I'm not sure what it was, something that looked south Asian)
French
and Japanese(which recently has been almost every day all about the same thing, some girl meeting club or something, probably run by the Yakuza)
I have only been to a country that speaks one of those languages, and yet I get spam in all of them, fascinating.....maybe because I have an easily searchable university address...
Monstar L
Given the PRC government's (not to be confused with the legitimate government of the Republic of China in exile in Taipei) methods for dealing the the people demanding anything, I don't think that's too likely.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
http://www.okean.com/asianspamblocks.html - Detailed blocks so you get fewer innocents.
Even without spoofing IPs, if you take control of a PC connected to a Chinese ISP, you can spam "from" there.
This can be done with or, using OS holes and illegal break-ins, without permission of the computer owner.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some Chinese making $1/day off of spammers to rent the use of their PCs.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have no family, contacts, or business in China. I do not speak Mandarin or Cantonese or any other Chinese dialect. There are no domestic businesses, as far as I know, whose Web content is hosted in China.
/dev/null.
It therefore does me no harm whatsoever to blacklist the entire country. Using blackholes.us as a foundation, I built procmail rules to accomplish this. Whenever the occasional spam message of Chinese origin reaches me, I make another change to the rules. As it is, my procmail.log shows fifteen to forty-five spam messages a day from China being routed to
I realize this isn't a suitable solution for everyone, but it's done a pretty fair job for me.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Can we null-route Florida yet?
Source: http://www.spamhause.org
The Chinese government turning a blind eye to spam is all part of their national firewall initiative. Instead of the Chinese government trying to block all undesired outbound traffic, they instead let the spam situation get out of hand. This in turn will cause all major ISPs to block *all* traffic from China.
In effect, if you're in China on a Chinese ISP, the only place you can 'go' is to another Chinese ISP, and the government won't need to worry about keeping up to date with their national firewall!
It's Brilliant!!!
I'm glad it's all going to china. It will make it REALLY easy to block the SPAM.
Set Firewall to block all port 25 connections from Asia based IP addresses.
Maybe I have an over simplistic view on the matter.
In addition to blocking spam, we mod our /etc/hosts.allow to keep these systems from connecting to many services:
. 0.0:deny. 0/255.0.0.0:deny ..etc..
ALL:61.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:62.0.0.0/255.0
ALL:80.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
ALL:81.0.0
ALL:82.0.0.0/255.0.0.0:deny
It's better to block, then individually authorize. Most of the Chinese IPs are not only spamming, but constantly probing for vulnerabilities in SSL, SSH, FTP and other services.
Time to declare an all-out Internet WAR!
Now, if someone can translate the "Arts of War" into for Internet uses, we'd win.
Knock China off the net you say?
Hehe, the Chinese Government would call that a good solution to the twin problems of "evil ideas" coming into China over the wire and "dissident communication" getting out.
OK, seriously, I'm surprised China doesn't have two-way filtering on port 25 and other ports, blocking anything that doesn't promote Beijing's ideals.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Of course, that's when the payback happens, because it's going to take more than a promise to be good to convince many admins to remove a blacklist entry, null route, or whatever. It basically boils down to a choice between quick money from dodgy spammers now, or long-term money from serious business investments further down the road. At the moment, it sure looks like the Japanese are the only ones that have really grasped the concept of long term business plans being better than cash now; tomorrow's problems belong to someone else.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Easy to cut and paste format. It's not directly linked from the other blocklists, but it's in the sitemap.
As Brig.Gen Jack.D.Ripper would have said:
I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration,
Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and theinternational Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Isn't why companies selling their products via spam aren't taken to court........ especialy with overwhelming evidence (over 20 million copies).
One purchase of a coughextendercough by some authority, and when the parcel comes the sender can be taken to court........ if not spamming itself but even for claming that herbal viagra causes "little johnny to grow"..... especialy entertaining if a woman gets that spam......
I'm looking for a way to blackhole the entirety of China.
Every single hacking attempt on my server originates from a Chinese IP. This is also true of every single spam connection attempt as well.
Now there are probably some of you reading this saying "But where do you draw the line? Oh the slipperly slope!" If you are one of these people I have this to say: give me a break.
I have no Chinese customers nor any relevant content on my site. Given their draconian Government firewall it is a bit hypocritical to criticize me for wanting to block access particularly when I'm doing it for secuirty purposes. This is not going to harm the Utopian dream of a free and open internet. In a brief grep through the logs I was unable to find a single legitimate hit to my server from any Asian addresses. The same check showed literally thousands of hacking/spam attempts per week. The line ends with China and they drew first blood.
So my question is this: does anyone publish or maintain a list of IP ranges that I can block through IPtables? That entire country is a stain on the internet and I'm looking for the bleach.
Given the PRC government's (not to be confused with the legitimate government of the Republic of China in exile in Taipei) methods for dealing the the people demanding anything, I don't think that's too likely.
When China can't use the net for business relating to their massive exports, the government will have an intense interest. They may not give a damn about human rights, but they sure care about their economy.
FP: Fuck Piquepaille!
hit the spammers with your slashdot effect:
http://www.aa419.org/ladvampire.html
thank you.
just block the spammers networks and make your western/modern-world backbone providers also act and disconnect their networks from the chinese spam/scam networks.
send abuse also to your upstream/hosting/broadband/peering providers and make them block the fucking asian and southamerican spam/scam/virus-infected networx
Quite soon the chineese government won't have to try to censor the net. The western world will just filter off all the traffic coming from China, doing the job much more efficiently.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How about some porn site flyers - telling receipients this is what your servers send to us!
Ask them: Do you approve or do want to be added to the mail lists?
It's a start.
But I think that's because my last name is of German origin. I'm an American mutt, but spammers don't know that.
This is all very interesting, and I was even thinking to just block the asian nations would solve a lot of spam. But then I realized that I don't get much spam from there.
Most of my spam, greater than 90%, comes from the zombied US DSL machines as proof of their addresses when trying to connect I believe a large portion of the spam that exists also links back to chinese websites, not delivered from chinese mail servers.
I recently turned on greylisting and all the viagra/herbal/biggus diccus stuff is 100% gone. Not one in a week, normally there are >30 per day. Now all my spam is from France and somewhere in Asia. But that's like 2 a day.
http://www.okean.com/thegoods.html
I thought someone might find the link useful.
No Nyarlathotep, No Chaos
Know Nyarlathotep, Know Chaos
Here's a site I ran across recently. It's a bit out of date, but has good info:
http://www.unixhub.com/block.html
It has a complete ARIN list of Chinese and Koren IP's as of 2002.
Post your email address here. Offers will be coming soon.
You're on slashdot. Why don't you already know this?
Infuriate left and right
Until the fines are substantial enough, and the collection if the money is local to the sender, you're not going to see it happen.
People are looking after their own pockets. As long as there are fools to fill them, not ever the threat of a bullet to the head is going to deter them if its in some other jurisdiction.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I am going to post this link in every discussion commemorating the ongoing spam war until someone explains me why the outlined economic solution won't work.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Attn Chinese:
Do not sleep with a fan on in a closed room. The fan will use up all of the oxygen and you will suffocate! This is true information from Korea, but the CIA is trying to supress it.
Thanks in advance.
whereas the US, the actual number 1 spamming country, is doing so much isn't it?
but China is far away isn't it? the US passing the CAN-SPAM act was just a random fluke, China isn't stomping out spam because THEY ARE EEEEEVVVVVIIILLLL!!!!1*
*if they do do something, they are anti-free speech, anti-business EEEEEEVVVVVVIIIILLLL!!!!!!111 commie scum.
the people who are actually buying the crap is very small like 0.001% So that is 1 in a Thousand People who buy this stuff.
I salute you, sir.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
but there is at least one problem
they have nukes toooooooo
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
I second this.
In Soviet China, Government spams YOU!
"It's too bad she won't live, but then again who does?" - Gaff
...if the government there starts pressuring for spam controls, we can take pleasure in knowing that spammers will be sent to gulags in Red China. Now if only they would come over here and start taking the spammers to the mainland... ;P
The Chinese government already blocks their citizens from a lot of the internet.....why don't we just block the rest of it from their countries? Eventually, if enough of the internet is just *missing*, they might try to fix the spam problem
Yeah, one of my clients got their Exchange server hit pretty hard by a spam ring; we ended up getting blacklisted by Spamcop of course. After trying to track down the messages between the message tracking tool and W3C logs, I started denying full IP blocks in the firewall. This spammer had zombies in San Juan, Taiwan, Buenos Aires, Chile, Puerto Rico, Isreal, Iran, Taiwan, China, and Japan. By the time I had all the locations blocked I found the beauty of NCSA logging on the SMTP service and was able to track the spamming to a single compromised account that had a very common logon of 'info' which just so happened to match the password. Suffice to say increasing password complexity was the next step. I think we cut down our outgoing e-mail queues by over 40,000 message a day.
Based on what I'm reading Falun Dafa seems to be a pretty innocuous form of meditation that the Chinese government likes to bully around (This is the first I've heard of it, so I may be completely wrong). Wouldn't it be more effective if you used the name of some Chinese militant group that tries to bring about the fall of the Chinese government? A few Chinese spammers start disappearing and I think the rest might get concerned.
How hard would it be to impliment filtering that scanned email bodies for links to China, Korea, and Taiwan and then filter those emails out? Would it be hard to impliment this in spamassassin or such?
I do security
One of the biggest ISP in Europe is using ip addresses that matches 82.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 so I think you are stopping email from Europe too.
But maybe you don't want it either.
Iraq: war to save the U
code and target your own spammers/scammers/fakers/lamers...
shut them all down.
I stop noticing Asia being a spam problem after this sucker got put into use.
http://mail.btfh.net/asia-spam.txt/
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
It's called behavior modification.
Right now, chinese ISPs simply don't give a shit. Because spam isn't "their" problem. You're the victim, not them. So why should they give a shit?
The only way to make them give a shit, is to make it their problem. By blocking all email from china, you force them to come to terms with the problem.
If their customers can't email anyone outside of china, and their customers start raising hell about it, maybe then they will finally start dumping the criminals from their networks.
Wasn't all that long ago that chinanet ran a lying autoresponder for abuse@chinanet that responded to every complaint with:
"In your SPAM eMail,I can't find the IP or the IP is not by my control.Please give me the correct IP.Thank you."
No wonder china gets blocked?
Until china's abusive attitude changes, they will become more and more widely blocked. They are hellbent on turning their entire country into a LAN, who are we to argue with them?
I've seen a similar idea a while back on here and I echo that same sentiment:
Is having a possibly innocent person's nuts hooked up to a car battery or be tossed into the gulag worth a silly prank like this? I know people here have a hairy coniption over spam, but lets not forget the true face of the Chinese government (or any government for that matter) when they get sufficently riled up.
At best, this shoots the messenger. If nobody bought anything from spam, it would disappear overnight.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
If spam in any way threatened the hegemony of the Chinese government - people would be beaten, tortured, and killed - not necessarily in that order.
As it is, I think they LIKE the idea that the U.S. hangs itself with spam. Hacking into Chinese computers to do it make the irony that much more thick.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Hmm, I bet most westerners don't do a lot of correspondence with China, might be safe for a lot of people to just block the whole country.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
The spam is not comming from china - china is simply hosting the spammer's websites. Here is the spam ecology:
American spammers pay Russian crackers to write viruses. These viruses infect Windows machines across the world. The spammers use the zombie machines to send spam which link to websites hosted in China. This has been the prototypical arrangement for many years.
*Limit one per customer.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Ya, start talking about waging your "war" on China and other Asian countries, but why don't you stop using anything that is made in China, stop playing your PlayStation, stop watching Anime (many of these are produced in Korea). Asians should be the ones who complain about those spams selling Viagra and university degrees (all because of impotent and degree-less Americans).
"I get no mail of any value from China. I don't know anybody there. So I don't feel bad about automatically trashing all mail that originates in Chinese netblocks. It's amazing the effect that has had on what spam I actually see."
Looks like China doesn't need an internal firewall. The one helpfully being provided by the outside world will do nicely.
A lot of people do block the entire country. I certainly do, and will until the heat death of the universe.
For what it's worth, the Chinese government treats Falun Dafa / Falun Gong the same way you'd expect to treat a militant group.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
whoop de doo. if everyone obeyed the law we wouldn't need as many police. so since people are going to keep breaking the law and hoping to increase their dicks, working up the chain to the sitehosts who know spam is happening makes sense.
Even though most spam is sent through zombied networks in the US and Europe, a lot of spam still originates within Asia. Here's a list of the top IP netblock spam sources I see from APNIC along with the percentage of spam they represent:
211.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 8.0%
61.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 6.0%
218.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 4.2%
221.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 4.1%
219.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 3.7%
220.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 3.0%
210.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 1.9%
203.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 1.1%
202.x.x.x (Asia-Pacific): 1.0%
This means fully 1/3 of the spam received at my mail servers originates within APNIC. Of course, we can't forget our friends in that other big spammy IP block on LACNIC (Brazil, another huge identity theft/phishing locale):
200.x.x.x (Latin America): 3.6%
Now, if you're a local company or running a personal mail server for contact with only your known contacts, blocking most of that address space becomes quite tempting. If you're a national or international or have any possibility of communicating with folks in those areas of the world, blocking would be a bad idea. Still, there are many mail admins that have taken just this step with many of the above-mentioned IP blocks.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
"This is why I've been saying that the (current, temporary) solution to spam is to find any fiber optic line that connects China to the rest of the world and go at it with an axe. When they behave like responsible adults, they can have another one."
Hypocro-Irony. The one demographic that abuses networks with their illicet P2P traffic, and home server hosting, telling others to behave like adults, and cutting them off if they don't do so.
if there are no messengers left, then spam can't be relayed.
If spam is coming from their machine (and it is, in the scenario above), they are not innocent. They are either willfully participating, or so fucking stupid they shouldn't be allowed to breed.
554 is more powerful than 550:
:)
554 5.7.1 thank you for your support of falun gong/free tibet now/free and democratic china.
I find the three pronged approach more satisfying. I might go for the four pronged approach and throw in taiwan eventually
May the ISPs live in interesting times...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
to the internet? I mean if we blackhole more and more of their servers are we not cutting of more and more Chinese from communicationg with the rest of the world ?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
We need to dupe some poor spam creating company to push a spam email through one of these Chinese ISP's that claims Taiwan independance.
As soon as that happens, the Chinese government will shut down the spam servers in a heart beat.
Maybe we could convince Eddie Veder to try to spam the world about freeing Tibet.
I was watching Lou Dobbs on CNN, and he was discussing how disturbing it was that China has a government policy to become the world leader in biotech, high tech etc. They want to be world leader in everything. So, I guess if you want to become a world leader, you have to be #1 in everything including being #1 in spamming. Nations will tremble at their might.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
"If china can no longer do business with the US because of their spam policies, the business sector in china will quickly put pressure on the gov't to change the situation and it will change."
Sounds suspiciously like protectionism. Got to keep the US SPAM industry from collapsing, due to cheap imports. All those poor SPAM workers in sweatshop conditions. Don't their workers deserve a job, and a better life too? Americans always holding back the rest of the world. A SPAM a day can help feed a hungry Chinese family. So people, open your hearts, and ports to SPAM.
sorry, i don't speak mandarin. or cantonese. or any other chinese dialect. i can't read gb2312 or big5 or any other chinese encodings.
/dev/null they go. about 200 messages a day of purely-chinese-language-spams, according to my filters.
so into
now if i could just figure out how to filter out all the purely-spanish-language-spams, life would be good.
nuke their nukes. Then there's no problem :)
- Thomas;
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
you obviously do not admin a mailserver.
most spam is sent directly from chinese "bulletproof hosting", or from trojaned hosts in korea.
a small (very small) percentage is from the us, europe or latin america. precisely because us, european and latin american ISPs are very quick to act and shutdown spammers.
the same is not true of china or korea. china because they simply don't fucking care, and i don't know what korea's problem is.
how about a good old bgp blacklist. they will start to care when they are slowly cut off, and ignored from the rest of the internet...
anyone, anyone!!!!
put email addresses like content@beijingnet.com everywhere you can and let the spambots pick them up; if they get enough hard-to-block spam, maybe they'll start applying the needed pressure.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
"Maybe I have an over simplistic view on the matter."
Or maybe just part of the demographic that has an unreasonable faith in technological solutions to social problems.
Hey if they can work for the likes of the Government/RIAA/MPAA/Etc? Then they'll work for us, with our P2P/Black/White/Mauve-lists, bad selves.
The spam generated by Zombies can only exist due to the leaks in the MS products.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I suggest you reply to them in the following manner via a disposable email account:
--
Received your coded message. Operation "Rx Meds" is on track. Further supplies for Tibet liberation front will be delivered via usual contacts when in cases marked "Herbal Viagra" when payment in full received via cook island account.
Long live free Tibet!!
Long live Falun Gong!!
--
Rest assured, with all the net monitoring that goes on, their government WILL put him out of business, or at least you will keep him up at night waiting for a knock on the door.
My rights don't need management.
I have to wonder if they don't do this on purpose - I mean, if 90% of the traffic comming out of the country is spam, and ISPs block all mail traffic as a result, the few mails offering details about something the gov't wants hushed up would be dropped.
Non, je ne veux pas coucher avec toi ce soir.
"So if Americans stopped buying the junk, the whole problem would go away in a few weeks at the most."
And if American's stopped using drugs, a lot of problems would go away.
Since we're wishing for the unatainable, I want a pony.
Why not consider raising the bar. Rather than firewall Chinese IP blocks, make it a boycott. Block all traffic originating in China. Publicize it and while you're at it, boycott Cisco, Oracle, Bill Clinton and all the freedom loving US corporations and politicians that enabled the Great Firewall of China. Put those bastards behind a global TCP/IP boycott and we can move them off their totalitarian ways right quick.
Should take about a week or two, by my reckoning.
illegitimii non ingravare
# Really give the Chinese Spammers a mouthful...
changequote([[,]])dnl
define([[confSMTP_LOGIN_MSG]], [[EFGIC: U.S. Congress Condemns China's Oppression of Falun Gong on\nU.S. Soil and in China\n\nHouse Concurrent Resolution 304 calls on China's agents in\n the United States to halt all operations being carried out against\n practitioners of Falun Gong on United States' soil, as well as the brutal\n persecution of millions inside China.\n\nLONDON (EFGIC) - Last week, the US Congress introduced a concurrent\n resolution calling on the Chinese government to end its brutal\n persecution of Falun Gong in China and stop all activities against Falun\n Gong practitioners inside the United States.\n House Concurrent Resolution 304 (full text), introduced by Congresswoman\n Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, references China's own constitution and\n international human rights accords in calling for China to uphold\n freedom of belief, assembly, and speech for the millions of Falun Gong\n practitioners in Mainland China.\n Resolution 304 also specifically mentioned section 401(a)(1)(B) of the\n International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (22 U.S.C. 6401(a)(1)(B)):\n \"Whereas the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of\n religion, the right to assemble, and the right to speak freely, and the\n people of the United States strongly value protecting the ability of all\n people to live without fear and in accordance with their personal\n beliefs...\"\n Harassment, libel, and imprisonment have been widespread in\n Jiang Zemin's four-year campaign to eradicate Falun Gong. Torture and\n abuse in custody have led to thousands of wrongful deaths.\n]])dnl
changequote(`,')dnl
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Perhaps the Chinese government likes it this way for other reasons. If the whole world firewalls off China, that will be more effective at blocking subversive communication than any amount of official censorship. Why pay Cisco et al (boo!) to do it when you can induce others to do it for free and make a buck on the way?
You mixed anti-PRC propoganda with pro-PRC propoganda. HA-HA!
"Got a better system for limiting SPAM?
Without reinventing SMPT or POP love to hear it"
What makes you think the solution to what is essentially a social problem, more technology?
That's why I made my comment about "faith". Not because of a "science vs religion" issue like the last poster mentioned. But because the first thing we reach for, for what ails us is science (and technology). In the geeks worldview (shared by most) is that technology will solve spam, and wars, and world hunger and, well everyone gets the picture.* There's no room in that worldview for other solutions.
*I should also note, there's an unstated lazyness for lack of a better word. Dialog, and negotiation are both foreign, and they take much time and effort. Lacking the immediate results of a technological solutions (the light bulb comes on).
United States 160,662
India 43,824
Korea, Republic of 24,560
United Kingdom 14,285
France 12,881
Japan 12,417
Germany 12,166
Canada 11,746
China 10,952
Spain 6,509
Oh yes I stay in india
Of course, you could fix this by spamming anti-Chinese government spam through the servers in an attempt to spread the truths that the Chinese government seeks to suppress from its people.
Then watch how quickly spam servers get shut down!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/13/1 758203
Actually, the Chinese are one of the key strands that has *built* the culture here in Vancouver. Perhaps you're going to tell me it's an accident that Vancouver has consistently been voted the number one city on the planet? Why don't you take your racism and stick it up your arse.
I get a lot of American offers and Never, ever get any chinese product ad.
.10
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I think the problem and the potential danger of China is not in spam 'per se'. As someone else pointed out, open proxies and malconfigured dsl boxes are everywhere.
Personally, I haven't seen that many spam originating from the China netblocks. I did however experience a couple of DDoS attacks on large networks which all seemed to be originating from China Telecom and China Railway corporations.
My $0.02 is that China is too busy focussing in blocking google than it is focussing on real security issues of their networks.
That is based upon the mistaken assumption that all systems have similar bugs and similar vulnerabilities.
In other words, Security cannot ever be improved.But a large portion of that can be handled by the vendor. Just shipping with the ports blocked will prevent worms from cracking your computer.
If 90% of the workstations were running Linux, it would still be easier to crack one of the remaining Windows boxes via worm.
You might see an increase in the percentage of Linux machines that were cracked
but the total number of cracked units would be a fraction of the number of cracked Windows boxes today.
Marketshare != Security
Security != Marketshare
And the spammers, if chinese, do NOT want the government to take negative notice.
Remember, even if the country is more or less capitalistic, the government is still totalitarian. They execute people for drunk driving and such...
I don't read AC A human right
Some of you might have thought it somewhat weird to read the stance of Internet Society of China (ISC). I know I did. Well, it turns out that Internet Society of China isn't a chapter of Internet Society (ISOC), as the name might lead you to believe. Lynn St.Amour, President, CEO of ISOC writes in a letter to the editor of The Economist, in reply to a similarly confusing article:
Complete letter
Blog Ho
Blacklist ISP's/IPs of those chinese spammers and block their emails. The Chinese government will be happy (since it is a form of web related censorship) and if they don't like it, they need to stop that spam.
So long as they don't spam other chinese servers there isn't really a downside to it for the chinese authorities.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
What would you expect from a country whose government has poor ethics, no baseline for right and wrong, and a warped sense of morality? They are communitsts, if curbing this plague isn't going to profit them, why would they care?
Just don't let any email server in China to send email. Block all incomming chinesse email server requests. Why not they block rest of the world's 'free information' why not block there messages to rest of the world. (Just allow the universities, definately no goverment and some web hosting companies ) I mean this is not a nice soln. but then after a few months the goverment will enforce there rules. If they can play hard so can we. Then all we would need is chinesse food workers to go on strike. Solution is to pressure the goverment into havin antispam policies.
Win2K was cracked almost instantly.
Win2K + sp2 was not.
The Linux box was attacked about twice an hour.
Un-advertised boxes, located by simple scans.Yes, I see your point. That is why every bank is robbed every day.
It isn't about trying, it's about succeeding.
A good security model means that they don't succeed.And if they don't infect the machines, so what?Look at the statistics for Apache deployment vs IIS. Yet Apache systems are cracked less than IIS/Windows boxes.
The real world does not seem to reflect your claims.Nice try. No one said Linux was flawless.
But it doesn't have to be flawless to be better than Windows.
And better means fewer compromises.Again, you've just stated that there is no such thing as "Security".
No matter how much effort is put into Security, you believe that it will be cracked and that it will be cracked as often as insecure systems are.
Yet, strangely enough, every bank is not robbed every day even though they have lots of money in them and lots of people going into them.
All you see is Marketshare.
Marketshare != Security
If I were able to block 100% of spam and let through 100% of legitimate mail, then I have still failed because of the fact that I still need to do blocking. My mail server still gets pounded by spam. And if was able to do that, and everyone else copied from me to do so, too, then spammers would figure out how to make their spam look like legitimate mail, and then we'd be back to square zero.
See ... the goal is not (entirely) about preventing spam from getting into my mailbox. The goal is to not have the costs of spam imposed on me, my network, my servers, my users, and my customers.
Those who choose to use providers that let spammers (actually, they are taking a pink commission to do this) cause me to lose computer and network resources are not really all that legtimate, IMHO. So while they are not necessarily directly responsible, they are indeed indirectly responsible. So I have no qualms about forcing them to go through hoops, like getting whitelisted in advance, to be able to have their email accepted. At least I'm allowing almost every network to make an SMTP connection so I can see if the email is from a known (whitelisted) legitimate sender.
Much of this issue is about knowing in advance if the email is legitimate. If I whitelist your email address, then I am considering you to be a legitimate sender. Even still, it's a weak form of identity, since a spammer might discovered that you are whitelisted and start forging your identity by using your email address as the sender on spam.
You are responsible for making your email rise above all the spam in terms of legitimacy (while spammers are trying to make theirs rise above yours). Only if I known it to be legitimate can I consider it to be so.
If all the legitimate customers of some ISP that harbors spammers were to leave it, then that ISP would be nothing but illegitimate, and then everyone could block them solidly, right at the border routers. Some of those ISPs might not be able to survive without some legitimate customers. In part legitimate customers are the hostages used to prevent being totally blocked. Are you a hostage for your ISP's partnership in crime with spammers?
If every ISP feared total loss of all legitimate customers (which will lead to total blockage of their network and in turn loss of their spammer customers, too), they would not host spammers.
I do block the masses of cable and DSL connections. Does that mean your home mail server on such a connection gets affected? Probably so. I do that blocking by (sub)domain name, so if by chance you have one of the few clueful ISPs that do this, and get static IP, you can have your address identified in reverse DNS with a name different than the ISP's generic identity (such as by using your own domain name). Then you can get through. Or use an outside mail forwarder / smarthost (in many cases the provider of those cable or DSL lines does not have their own mail servers blocked, so try using those).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Block at the backbone level, except for the ISPs that specifically request access to the Chinese IP blocks.
If people can't connect to China, spammers will stop using it as a destination for orders of spamvertised products.
If China wants people to be able to connect outside The Great Firewall of China, they can fix their spam problem.
All we have to do to get the Chinese government involved:
Get ahold of a few SPAM friendly Chinese ISP's.
Send a few million SPAM messages advocating the violent overthrow of the Chinese government.
Sit back and watch the s**t hit the fan.
Voila! No more Chinese spam hosting problems.
I've had just enough of this spam, phishing and viruses crap. The entire internet community has been far too willing to accept ISP's pitiful apologies(!) about how they can't stop it. Would it really be so hard for an organisation that runs one of the major backbone routers to simply drop packets from IP's that are registered with those that are non-compliant?
If any doubt the need for drastic measures like this, they should get their firewall to log everything that hits it. Even if you simply look at the rubbish that hits port 80, you'll be unpleasantly surprised.
all of their packets to /dev/null.
That'll get their attention!
RicKB
Rick B.
The title pretty well sums it up. What if an underground effort to counter act the Google filters the Chinese gov places against democarcy, started using spamer techniques to inform the Chinese masses... After all news and information is at the heart of the internet. Could the power of spam become a force of good? Or at least enlightenment. I'm not takling about spyware, more like a seti style smtp engine which received email feeds form some central source. If milions of users world wide sent info-email to Chinese citizens how would there goverment stop it?
Food for thought
No, you misunderstand. Spam e-mails DO originate in China. If you actually report some of them with SpamCop, you'll see for yourself.
If you want a really bad one, look up wholesalebandwidth.com. From what I can tell (and I'm no expert on it, so I could be wrong), it's a high-tier ISP-level spam host. Meaning, they have a backbone connection and can spam all they want because their backbone contracts don't care and they own their own connection.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Most "bulletproof" hosts are made to jump between connectivity providers and countries very frequently to avoid being shut down. In comparison, we are allowed by our upstream to operate freely and openly. This makes our operation simple and reliable.
Our ISP allows us and our customers to send bulk email. They will never shut us down due to complaints. Most other so-called "bulletproof" hosting providers cannot guarantee this.
However, they're really a US company run by a known spammer in Ann Arbor, MI. Microsoft is suing them.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/193224 5