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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...
... 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.
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
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.
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!
Correction... China is still a dictatorship... according to communist theory (which china does not practice) free speech and criticism of the government is NESSISARY, not something to be stifled.
Yell at them for their policy all you want, but get out of the cold war era and blame them correctly. I will use one of my favorite quotes from an American president:
"How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
Just FYI, here is how China handles eminent domain
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