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.""

Comments

Spam from Confusious

[teiresias]

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!"

The source?

[AndyBassTbn]

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.

Re:The source?

[jxyama]

>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.

not quite. spam will exist as long there are advertisers who believe there are people who are willing to pay for junk stuff based on spam. advertizing - all it takes is the belief that it's doing something, at least until the money runs dry.

no mail of value

[lophophore]

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)

Solution? Bounce with the 550 power.

[Tackhead]

> "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.

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.

Slashbot math lesson

[klipsch_gmx]

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.

You misunderstand.

[pavon]

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.