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Spam from Taiwan
TristanGrimaux writes "According to a recent study done by CipherTrust, two thirds of the world's spam is sent by Taiwan servers. The US follows with 24% and in a distant third is China with only 3% of the servers who actually sends the spam." The article cites easy access to broadband and lack of crackdown on offenders as the main contributing factors.
Taiwanese receive a lot of spam and many of them appreciate it. There is a growing backlash against spam recently, but it's still the norm. Taiwan has something like 97% IE usage, which would also account for so many bots. Most users here have no interest in switching to FF or other browsers because so many websites here only work in IE. It's a vicious circle.
"If a mailer manages to supply those crippled IPs" ... well that's the trick - a mailer can't supply those IPs because they're simply not valid public IPs. If one of CipherTrust's collection points is reporting traffic from any of those IPs I listed, they have a very obvious network configuration problem (or they're getting spoofed, which is 100% avoidable).
Regardless of what the actual cause is, this is the reason why I don't trust any network-realated research they publish.
I just checked again and the site says "Reputation: Spam" for those IP addresses. I didn't make a 'lame interpretation'; that's exactly what I stated and that's exactly what's listed on the site.