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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.'"
That's how it is in China. There are many, many people there who have no idea that Tienamen Square ever happened...
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.
This shouldn't come as a suprise to anyone. Remember this Wikipedia Blocked
I'm not fat, just big boned...
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!!
From the article
"China's new rules also prohibit use of email to discuss certain vaguely defined subjects related to 'network security' and ' information security', "
From the regulation that the article links to
taking advantage of emails to engage in activities which are detrimental to network and information security is strictly prohibited in accordance with related laws.
There is a big difference between "engaging in activities that are detrimental to information security" and "discussing information security"
But with a title like "China Outlaws Outlook" are you really surprised that they are sensationalizing it.
SecurityPub.com
That China is a sovereign country with its own set of rules & customs. It has the right to determine it's own destiny without need of approval from the West.
...and e-mail with discussing vaguely defined subject as network security or information security may not be transmitted.
What you say? China set us up the bomb?
Seriously though, is this a big surprise. No doubt it's a sad day for liberty in China, but with the Chicoms' history when it comes to the Internet, we had to see stuff like this coming.
This sig rocks the casbah.
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.
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.
This is china remember. This is how things work over there.
2 points for them trying to combat spam.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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?
Whatever, it's their country and if they want to oppress themselves all the power to them. More so this is a draft n'est pas? How many american bills when drafted seemed daffy?
It's entirely possible that this is
[ ] Incorrect news
[ ] Making the wrong conclusions
[X] Jumping to conclusions
[X] Flamebait
[X] Copying another post, sorry I had to
Personally I look forward to getting back to Canada and out of the USA so I can get the icky feeling off myself.
Because Canada
[ ] Is so much better
[ ] Has less immigrants
[X] Doesn't have Bush
[X] Can tolerate more than one point of view
[ ] A nation which enjoys equal protection under the law
[ ] Has quality politicians
[ ] Has Effective journalism
[X] Has poutine
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
No. Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China and operates independently of PRC law in all areas except foreign policy and defense. See http://www.gov.hk/
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?
> all e-mail must be stored for two months
except here it is part of an "anti-terrorism" law package.
If the US Government can do it, I don't see why the Chinese can't monitor emails, IM, mobile phone calls, etc. I don't think anyone in China can believe that there's a safe medium for communication that the government won't tap.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Actually you are espousing one of the most common misconceptions about the first Amendment. It protects free speech in a PUBLIC FORUM. My email is in no way shape or form public.
It travels from a privately owned computer, over privately owned wire to my privately owned ISP which I then download from onto my privately owned computer. Where exactly does the email ever enter a public forum hence making it protected?
People can easily see my address from the street... does this give them the right to drop their trash on my lawn? No, they would be subject to a fine for littering. Even if it is a flier of some sort, espousing a political opinion, they will still be fined for littering. Same should apply to spammers.
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
That got really butcherded in the editing room, I guess... I wrote:
Just FYI, here is how China handles eminent domain
Support the FairTax
For the vast majority of US households lucky enough to have better than dial up, the ISP forbids running "servers" of any kind. So there's no difference on that front except the penalties. In China, you will be put under then jail and your organs sold to the highest bidder for running anything like a press. In the US, right now, you will simply lose your connection to the network.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't know if I should laugh or cry when I hear this kind of oversimplified nonsense - it displays the same level of understanding as the average Hollywood movie's understanding of history, science and reality in general (ie. whatever sells the movie or sounds good in a slogan must be true).
Let's take Marx - he lived in an era where belonging to the working class meant that you were desperately poor, and where the middle and upper classes believed that different classes were almost different species; rich people in general would treat their dogs, cats and horses with more kindness and respect than they would a worker. This is the proper background for his ideas - in that age the only way to improve the conditions for the poorest people seemed to be violent revolution, and democracy certainly didn't seem to be something to rely on; it was only available to the top of society anyway. So the options seemed to be either the dictature of the wealthy or the dictature of the proletariat.
The problem with communism has never been that the ideas were wrong - only a heartless egotist would say that helping those in need is wrong, and only and idiot would say that there should be no restrictions in place for big business (unless you ARE one of those big businesses - only Microsoft thinks it is OK for Microsoft to be a monopoly). The real problem with communism has been that the writings of Karl Marx have been turned into a bible, a fundamental truth that can never, never change, and that has been seized by the reactionaries and is being used to promote a scary image of anything that smacks of limiting the profits of the few small segment of society that owns almost everything.
Meanwhile the communist idea has evolved and keeps evolving; the parts that are wrong, outdated or simply stupid are being thrown out and new parts come in. This is what you see in China - yes, they have some sort market economy and you can own property, but the system is fundamentally communism, a communism that evolves and improves. They are doing the right thing.
Marx was the single most influential economists of all times. He is the most widely read economist. His theories have penetrated just about all aspects of modern business.
... then they went bankrupt.
The primary theme of Das Kapital was the various ways in which the market undermines itself. A large number of business books have picked up on this theme and essentially teach business leaders that their goal is to undermine the market (or bust). In the dotcom market, you saw a large number of dotbombs play this game. To dominate the market, they sold goods at below cost
I loved MP3.com. This company had a great product for distributing music from independent musicians. They were even starting to attract big time musicians. The wanks in charge of the company decided that they had to dominate the music industry or perish. MP3.com bet the company on an idiotic "beam up" program that clearly violated copyrights of other publishers. The company was given a choice between turning off the program, or paying a $200m fine.
Having been taught to dominate or die in business schools. MP3.com chose "to die".
The primary theme of Marx's writings is the various ways that business undermines itself. When adapted to business schools, these writings become a recipe book on ways to undermine the market. Marxist thinking leads immediately to a Machiavellian market where business leaders spend their days trying to find ways to undercut their competition, their customers and employees.
Das Kapital is not about they way that you structure a utopian society. The book is about the various ways businesses tend to undermine their market and their community.
I am not saying that business leaders are Marxists, but that Marx has had a negative influence on the way we view business.