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China Bans Running Your Own Email Server
Erwin_D writes "Under the guise of banning spam, China has ruled that running your own e-mail server has been banned, unless you have a license. To qualify for such a license, an 'e-mail service provider' must abide by some chilling rules: all e-mail must be stored for two months, and e-mail with discussing vaguely defined subject as network security or information security may not be transmitted. While the rules contains all the good measures we would all like to see to combat spam, such as prohibiting open relays and outlawing zombie network, the law is also geared toward controlling free speech. From the article: 'I believe that the intent to have an antispam regulation was a good one ... Unfortunately, it seems like during the policy formulation process, it got hijacked and went to one extreme.'"
Soo, if I hack some unsuspecting Chinese's machine and install some MTA on it, will the owner go to jail? Sweet.
Why should this surprise anyone?
"Altough this raises several other issues, this is THE SOLUTION to spam."
Hmm... In that case, don't you think the cure seems to be worse than the disease? Reminds me of the New Hampshire license plates... "Live Free or Die".
S
... is the need for a license to run a mail server in a personal environment. Don't most ISPs in the western world have similar government imposed retention and intrusion legislation that they have to abide by? I see old emails delivered to courts from ISPs on a regular basis in the press US and European press.
Maybe somebody could clarify US and UK law for me.
Sure, until this happens everywhere else. Make no mistake about it. This is what all governments and corporations want. They want to keep their grubby little hands on your data and money. They don't want you to provide your own services. They also don't want your data stored, processed and transmitted by anyone but them.
End Of Times!!
You would be correct, if spammers didn't take measures to disguise their messages and get around spam filters. If people want their messages, fine. But forcing your "speech" on others is NOT constitutionally protected, especially if the material you are advertising is more often than not fraudulent.
"in the worst case american webmail..."
Like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, whose parent companies have a presence in China and are more than willing to comply with China's censorship regime and turn people in?
If you want free speech in China, you do not use an American company to do it with.
Google.cn image search for tiananmen and go to page 5 and you'll see images of tank man.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
Not only that, only 111 million Chinese use the Internet out of a population of 1.3 billion. Most people in China are really not going to notice this or care.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Certainly. However, you seem to forget that we may approve or disapprove without need of approval from China.
Under the guise of preventing spam, most US ISPs have decided that running your own e-mail server must be banned, unless you pay extra for a commercial account. They enforce this by blocking SMTP connections except to their own servers, which they do not provide SLA or privacy guarantees on.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
...whereas us, with all our "freedom", find out that our government is spying on us only when some whistleblower exposes it. What, we've just learned that at AT&T, NSA has the potential to spy on ANY communications that go through the switches there. Does anyone really feel 100% shielded from our own government here in the US? Atleast it's all out in the open there, pretty much. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
why do *WE* keep financing these people?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Spam isn't a free speech issue. Spam forces the burden of the cost onto the receiver, rather than the sender. It is exactly analagous to junk faxes, which cost very little to send but a great deal to receive.
Marketers are welcome to send emails to those people that have given their permission. Spammers abuse a private resource.
Because as we of course all know, no malware anywhere ever ships itself with it's own SMTP server in order to act as an open relay or mail exchanger. All zombie networks and open relays out there are simply people wanting to run their own email server and failing.
Right?
Absolutely correct. We have NO right to tell them how to run their country.
Then again, if they're doing something we find egregious or offensive, we're under no obligation to simply accept it, either. We can (and should) be using our wallets to express our unhappiness with Chinese policies like forced abortion, Tiananmen Square, forced repatriation of North Korean refugees, pirating of movies/CDs/whatever ("Redberry"? Come ON!), and so on. Why the hell we keep selling them technology that they'll just turn around and use against us --- militarily or economically --- baffles me.
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Email addresses are effectively public domain - like standing out in public. It's the inbox owner who must decide what they want.
That's stupid and dangerous. You've clearly never run a mail server of any real size. There is a very real and quantifiable cost to spam filtering. For an organization of any significant size (we're talking at least tens of thousands of email addresses), spam and virus filtering needs its own infrastructure. A lot of companies outsource to someone (e.g. Postini). That costs thousands (I know this, I am not talking out of my ass) of dollars every month. Even if the infrastructure is kept in-house, there is a significant up-front investment in hardware, plus the cost of staff to administer the spam/virus filtering infrastructre (if the org is big enough, this could be close to a full-time job). Not to mention the extra bandwidth costs when four spammers do a simultaneous distributed spam run, etc. etc.
It's not enough to allow the "mailbox owner" (a term that dodges the fact that corporate email is owned by the corporation) to decide whether or not they want to use spam filtering. First of all, most end-users have no idea how to make it happen, second, the company has to pay for the disk to store the shit that users never clean out.
Spam is not first-amendment-protected speech. If someone is standing on a soapbox yammering about their religion or hawking viagra or whatever, I can choose not to listen, and it doesn't cost me anything either way. Spam, on the other hand, does cost businesses a lot of money, and it costs the spammer virtually nothing. If spammers had to pay per recipient the way direct (postal) mailing marketers do, spam wouldn't be a problem.
It's 2006. Why are we having this conversation? This was all debated and decided in the late 90s. Did you miss the memo?
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Is this a sign of the increasing freedoms that politicians argue(d) liberalised trade with China would bring about?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Sure, until this happens everywhere else. Make no mistake about it. This is what all governments and corporations want. They want to keep their grubby little hands on your data and money. They don't want you to provide your own services. They also don't want your data stored, processed and transmitted by anyone but them.
The more they tighten their grip, the more (email) systems will slip through their fingers.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Well, you have the DMCA which was introduced by the US Goverment. Pretty high level of influence when you consider that private entities can force search engines to remove certain results.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
I think what happened at Tiananman Square was a tragedy, but now imagine what would happen if you were to stop a US tank.. Even cops could shoot you if you didn't "freeze" right away. I'd say that tank man was a troll while the camera man was just waiting to catch the pictures. The fact that he actually STOPPED the tank meant something.
I could say the same about America. Seems like 90% of the email I get from America is spam, and about 50% of the spam I get that originates in other countries is sent on behalf of American companies.
(The other 50% is Japanese porn sites. God only knows why... I've never visited a Japanese porn site in my life.)
America, look to the log in your own eye before you criticize the speck in China's.