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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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Instead of figuring out where most of the spam comes from, they should figure out which geographic location churns out the most humorous spam. It could be a world wide competition.
As for following the money...I let the SEC do that. About once a week, I get a spam message pushing one stock or another. I forward them to enforcement (at) sec.gov. The message gets looked over by a lawyer.
I don't know that it does anything about the spam, but hopefully whoever paid for the message gets paid back.
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France
*Total Population: 60,876,136
*Internet Users: 26,214,174
China
*Total Population: 1,313,973,713
*Internet Users: 111,000,000
I think, that number speaks for itself.
*ref. from CIA World Fact Book
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Most people I know there earn about US$15k/yr, and upgrading the RAM in your Pentium3 machine and then the Hard Drive, and then the video card is sort of common practice. Forking out big $$ for Windows XP isn't real easy so a lot of people are running some SP1 version of Windows XP they bought for $1 off the street, and this version gets owned pretty fast, and can't be patched from windows update. So there are lots of bots.
Now 24Mbit internet access is like $5-$10 per month, so you can see there is quite a big engine there for generating spam.
The culture there is such that they love the latest thing, so I could imagine that there would also be a tendency for people to install software off the net that has malware in it as well.
Another thing I noticed is that your average grandmother there seems quite good at using a computer. So I could imagine that there might be more pensioner types sitting there doing some amount of spamming for a little bit of money.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
That's a cool project for a Windows honeypot. Thanks for the link. Outside of honeypots, I've been blanket filtering addresses from APNIC on my mail server for about a year now using some ideas I learned from this project (I filter at the mail request level rather than iptables). It's sad to filter an entire geographic region like that, but my users never talk to people from the Pacific Rim that I know of. My server (running XMail) is small, but my logs for the filtered emails constantly show the spam blocked exceeds the number of legit mails by a factor of four.
Since I started filtering, I've turned a couple of other admins onto the idea. I wonder if TW/KR will find themselves in some odd form of network segregation in the future as more people adopt the practice of filtering their IPs. That might push the authorities into a little more action.US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Taiwan makes more than 66% of the notebooks on which we read that spam, so they're actually overperforming on the content:reader ratio. I wish they'd get more into eBooks.
--
make install -not war
Impossible! Go USA! Go USA! We can win the spam race!
Philosophy.
More like follow the offshore bank accounts, Grand Cayman Islands, etc.
I lived there. Internet access is expensive as it was a government protected monopoly. Check the rates. Cable and Wireless is the company. To visit, see www.candw.ky.
When they first put in internet, they got 2 satelite T1 links for the whole island. Little Cayman and Cayman Brac still did not have internet. They charged $0.25/minute for access on dial up.
Needless to say I didn't get internet until I returned to the states.
They have since gotten a Fiber Optic cable to Jamaca and they now offer DSL. They are running a promotion for $25/month for the first year. That is CI $ not USD. The price is close to US $30/month. Restrictions such as can't compete with the phone company by using VOIP is the norm.
The plan appears to be capped at 256K unless you upgrade to a faster plan. For example the 1024 plan is CI $74. The 512 plan is $59.
Cayman Islands is a nice place to go for diving and sun, but not for internet based business.
The truth shall set you free!
Well, we have shades of red and red here. :)
... but the ROC does!
Does the People's Republic of China collect taxes in Taiwan? No, the Republic of China does.
Does the PRC actually try to enforce its criminal laws in Taiwan? No, but the ROC enforces its laws.
Does the PRC define the commerce regulations, health regulations, education standards, voting laws, aviation regulations, etc. within the borders of Taiwan? No -- but the ROC does.
Does the PRC have military bases on Taiwan? No
What the U.N., U.S. and Europe say in polite diplo-speak is one thing. The working reality (and the *money* reality) is that Taiwan is a separate country, perhaps not in name, but in operational fact.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
You don't do the business itself from the Caymans, just your under-the-radar finances.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I believe the main issue is that broadband here is pretty much monopolized by Hinet. If you have a phone (landline), chances are you have a Hinet e-mail address. For some reason Hinet never, ever, authenticates their e-mail servers allowing them to be used from anywhere for any purpose. As a result a lot of companies (like AOL possibly) have just banned the whole entire Hinet domain, which often results in e-mails going outside of Taiwan never getting to their intended recipient. Hinet is a mess, I don't why they're so bloody awful at maintaining their servers responsibly, but its providing to be a huge problem both worldwide and for Taiwanese people themselves.
By the way... Most spammers who sent you letters to visit their web pages want's you to click their Google adSense ads. So, help them! Keep clicking Google banner untill your arm get tired and guess what happened. Google will close their account in one second because Google systems will decide that advertiser trying to cheat. It is impossible to open account again! SPAMMER DEAD!
Let the SEC do it.
The SEC. Ha. A worthless three letter agency, if you ask me.
The SEC's lawyers wanted my help on stock tout junk faxes. I told them I had the information they wanted and I could get the rest and testify- but only if they were going to put the junk faxers out of business. They had no intention of doing anything. They are just going through the motions, drawing government salaries. I declined to help them.
Like the FCC, another worthless three letter agency.
They fined Fax.com $5.4 million for sending out junk faxes. The FCC's lawyers wanted my help too, if I had bothered with them the fine would have been $240 million. I have files full of those junk faxes.
The FCC did nothing whatsoever to collect. NOTHING
If you or I owed the government money I can assure you they would be collecting from us.
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Prince Desmond Okotiebor Etete himself MUST account for at least 10% of all spam...
I run my own mail server for my private email that I only use with friends.
Lately, I have been getting spam about stock investments, and I notice that
it was pretty consistent so I started investigating what was going on with
my server. I started marking down ip addresses of the offending servers
and blocking them if I felt they were not legitimate mail servers or if it
was from a country that I know I will not get email from on my personal email
account.
I have been blocking a new server every day for 2 months.
Here is the scarey part. I still get the same email spam every day, but
only once.
My hunch is telling me that the purveyor of this message is using some
sophisticated means of harnassing zombie machines to send messages, and is
only sending a few messages at a time so that automated blackhole lists
never catch on fast enough. (such as spamhaus)
I have noticed that these machines are almost always located in Asia,
Latin America, or Eastern Europe...
It got so bad, I just started block entire class A's from countries I know
I am not going to email to or from.
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After WW2 and the end of the Japanese occupation, a civil war was fought between the Communists under Mao and the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT were effectively defeated by 1949, and Chiang evacuated to Taiwan. For much of the Cold War, "Free China" (ROC) was the only government of China recognised by most states and international organisations. However, as part of the 'detente' in the 1970s, most countries switched their recognition to Communist China (PRC). The ROC is obviously a state in all but name, but the situation is maintained to avoid nuclear war. The PRC has said that if the ROC declares independence then they will invade, while the US has stated that it will defend Taiwan, and has meanwhile provided large amounts of military aid. So, basically, it's a mess.
ROC used to rule the whole China, mainland and Taiwan combined. They lost the civil war in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan. Neither PRC nor ROC see each other as a ligitimate government of China. At least both constitutions claim largely overlapping territories. It's a stalemale over half a century.
How people are so casual about the facts is beyond me.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
Except it's hardly ever the company itself that is doing the promotions... it's third-party people that target them and convince others, via spam, to invest in the company, which drives the prices up, which allows them to unload their own stock at a profit.
All while being 100% unrelated to the company.
$0.02 (CDN)
Legally, the civil war in the 40s has not finished yet. Neither side of the war has been eliminated. No treaty or cease-fire agreement was signed. Both sides just prefer not to fight for now.
This situation is very complicated. Indeed, it's getting more complicated as more political powers want to get involved in it. I think the best way to resolve it is to leave it to the Chinese people of both sides to sit down and talk. Any open foreign involvement and provocation from the Taiwan Independence side will risk a full-blown war in the region.
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
The article is not about senders of spam but of servers that control them. There is a huge difference.