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China Signs Anti-Spam Pact
Iphtashu Fitz writes "The Chinese government has joined an international anti-spam effort started by the U.S. and UK. Over the weekend China stated that it would join international enforcement efforts against spam by adopting the London Action Plan on Spam Enforcement Collaboration. The London Action Plan was launched after a conference on spam enforcement hosted jointly by the UK Office of Fair Trading and the US Federal Trade Commission in London in October 2004. It was the first international forum to focus exclusively on spam enforcement. China is well known for being one of the biggest origins of spam, with as much as 20% of all junk e-mail originating from within its borders."
China is being really smart. This is not just a move to demonstrate they are against spam or limit liability; I think it's to show that they can be a lovable government. Would Mao care about spammers? China appears to be taking a page from Canada in how to be a liked country. They are ratifying a London anti-spam accord and that to me spells maybe some change in their normally opressive attitudes? How long before China starts ratifying UN human rights accords and the like? It could not be soon enough and this is a sign that they are moving in the right direction. I applaud this and only hope that it is as good as it looks. Please, China, keep progressing towards a free society. (and I could say as much for the USA, too)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It seems to me that a tremendous amount of SPAM comes from Florida, USA! So, when will the US decide to sign a similar pact to deal with it?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
China is well known for being one of the biggest origins of spam, with as much as 20% of all junk e-mail originating from within its borders.
But what about the so called "bullet proof" hosting that you can get in China? A lot of the Viagra spammers have their ordering site in China and no number of complaints filed make any difference. I think that might be a bigger issue than spam originating *from* China.
Let's find better technological solutions to spam control, and less government-based solutions.
After all, government never get it quite right. Moreover, there is the enforcement issue. It's just not workable. Anyone can purchase a web server in any other country other than the one they live in, so enforcement becomes a joke at best, or worse becomes so draconian that it will hurt hammers as well as spammers (or may not hurt spammers at all, since they can skate the loopholes in the system).
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
And will attack in the morning.
Mod this as troll, mod it as flamebait. Apply Godwin's law (which is nothing but a dodge anyway...).
Then read about how Hitler signed a treaty with Joe Stalin saying the Germans wouldn't attack.
There's no indication on the spammer forums of any fears about China-based hosting yet.
So, thus far, any crackdown is vaporware.
Seriously, I haven't had a single spam get through my SpamBayes filter in months, and I rarely get any of my valid mail dumped in "unsure". I see no reason why anyone with a modicum of technical nous should even be caring about spam, unless they are paying for metered bandwidth.
I'll tell you why they're doing this. It's not just because almost all Chinese IP space is now RBL'd, it's because many ISPs like mine have gone beyond this and simply filtered all Chinese IP traffic of all types from ever hitting our servers. It's not just about spam. Chinese IP space is also responsible for the lion's share of system probes and DoS activity. I got tired of seeing 5000 connection attempts so we've just wholesale blocked their entire IP space at the router level -- it's not like there's any legitimate TCP activity coming from that space that any of my clients care about.
Until these countries can regulate the illegal activity of their systems, they don't deserve to have unfettered access to the Internet IMO... not when the abuse-to-legitimate traffic ratio is 1000000 to 1.
I don't know why, but Gmail seem to be completely useless at filtering japanese spam. I don't know how many times I've told it "YES, this is spam!" and it keeps sending me. I'm sure a major part of the Gmail user base is doing the same. I rarely get English spam in my inbox nowadays, and it's very accurate there, but with japanese spam being such a common problem I can't see why Google isn't doing something about it. It's almost as if their spam filter don't even support unicode so it just let all those mails pass unchecked. :-p
So then I tried to just block *.jp, but Gmail doesn't support blocking by the hidden "Received" header the mail server set, where I could clearly see it came from Japan, despite the "From" field OF COURSE being faked.
Gmail is a great service, but it sure isn't perfect, and blocking on custom mail headers doesn't seem like a too hard work for their developers either, as all the headers are stored like regular text in the mails anyway.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!