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China Getting 'Serious' About Spam?
Ritz_Just_Ritz writes "Apparently, the Chinese MII (Ministry of Information) is going to crack down on Spam from within China. This will include training for 1000 mail administrators and recruitment of 20,000 'anti-spam volunteers.'"
no need to click the link kids that it pretty much. anyway thank god... now about korea?
Did someone say cake?
Ministry of Information Industry (MII), Internet Society of China (ISC) and China Communications Standards Association (CCSA) launched a national anti-spam campaign on June 21, reports Nanfang Daily. An insider at ISC said MII has set up a hotline at 01-12321 for spam-related tip-offs and is preparing to send out one million anti-spam notices. The report said that professional training will be offered for 1,000 email administrators and that 20,000 anti-spam volunteers will be recruited. "is preparing to send out one million anti-spam notices" - Oh the irony.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Where can I sign up? I wanna read people's mail!
Are these 'anti-spam volunteers' real volunteers, or are they volunteering-to-get-out-of-bayonette-testing volunteers?
Just curious.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
With all the censoring China does, it sounds to me like it's just an excuse to hire 20000 people to read through everyone's email and make sure they're not discussing something they "shouldn't" be talking about.
Current estimates by Trend Micro show China responsible for over 14 billion spams per day.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Even if this is true, Chinese people have more freedom now than they did 20 years ago, and things will continue to progress in this direction. Government crackdows are getting harder to pull off, there is a lot of unpublished internal dissent, and the government is begging for a revolution if their response is to just crack down harder. Piss off 1 billion people alltogether, and its pretty hard to keep them contained.
You can't solve all your problems with a great wall. Spam has been a problem for a long time, and it's one of those easily overcompensating balancing acts. Some services are overfiltering, and it's no surprise. There are all sorts of clever ways to try and sort things out, trying to recognize certain words or phrases or check to see if you know certain people, but in the end, there are always exceptions. What about that girl you met last night that really does work for the Mega Ab Destroyer 8000 Co? When it comes down to it, a fairly light filter that you check yourself, complemented with a whole lot of your own personal judgement tends to work. People need information about spamming techniques and what to watch out for, not just hard filtering.
Canada keeps looking warmer and warmer.
Yeah, well, wait till November rolls around. Then you'll be saying, "Screw this freedom crap. I'm goin' to Mexico."
What?
Over at SpecialHam, the forum for bottom-feeder spammers, it seems to be business as usual today. No mention of any crackdown in China. Typical message: "Please give me ICQ UINs of poeple who make installations at trojaned computers. I need to install some software." There's some gloating over the collapse of BlueSecurity. Some new ways to spam Myspace. But no real concerns about enforcement today.
will spammers get the death penalty? Think I just found the ultimate ethical delimma for the average slashdotter. Is it good if China executes a spammer, but does so in it's new fleet of mobile lethal injection vans and harvests the organs for sale? When cheering the execution of spammers, which at least half the readership here has been waiting for, can you be sure your celebration is for a real spammer or a political dissident?
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
I agree with you.
eldavojohn, I think you're pushing things a bit far. Everyone agrees that the chinese government is opressive. But this is not Orwell's 1984. The government provides stability, which was rarely present in chinese history. There is no mass shuffling of money from the poor to the rich, although there is increasing disparity these days as industrilization makes it harder to make a living in rural communities. The government really does put the well being of its people first. Ahead of their foreign reputation, which is why we all see them as the bad guys.
I believe China will evolve into a democracy in its own time.
Yes, but it has to be properly worded. It should say:
"Thank you for your interest in Falun Gong. Information
is being mailed to you."
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
May I point out that, although totalitarian regimes _do_ violate human rights and mis-use laws against dissidents, sometimes they actually have to solve an actual problem? E.g., even Stalin's USSR and Mao's China at their darkest hour, while they did have a some of the most brutal suppression of dissidents, they also had laws to deal with plain old crimes like theft, embezzlement, murder, etc. They also had plenty of civil laws too, like for example, divorces, inheritance, child support, etc.
I.e., it seems to me pretty stupid to assume that any law in China is somehow _guaranteed_ be 100% for oppression purposes, and only disguised in a more propaganda-friendly guise. Maybe someone there genuinely got fed up with spam. Maybe a bunch of bosses in the PRC just had one day too many of finding their inboxes full of "H3rb@1 \/i@gr@" emails. Or maybe it was the "Thousands of 18 year old teens waiting for you!!!" mails. China's conservative leadership tends to take a very grim view of pornography, plus they have _much_ higher age of consent.
Are those volunteers paid to either read other people's emails and to point fingers at demand? How do you know that? How do you know it's not just people paid to register email addresses and use them all over the place, and see what spam lands in those inboxes? Or maybe run honeypots to see who's actually commanding the army of spam-bots with Joe-job faked sender addresses? Or whatever? For the size of China 1000 admins and 20,000 volunteers is a spit in the ocean, if their goal was to read all emails. But to run a honeypot net or to get reliable reports of who's been spamming their inboxes, it may be just enough.
Basically the D&D mentality that some people are by definition evil, hence they can only ever give evil laws, is so fucking stupid that it's not even funny. _Noone_ defines themselves as evil, sworn enemy of all goodness, and able to only ever do evil stuff, like in retarded D&D-type settings and cheap fantasy flicks. The Real Life isn't divided neatly like that.
In RL even the most horrible dictator may really think they're only doing just what's good for their country (even if for everyone else it doesn't really count as good), and not just acting out of some Sith-like determination to extinguish all goodness. RL "evil" is more about not caring about collateral damage done than being some sworn destroyer of all that's still good and pure. And sometimes, even if by accident, their notion of "good" may actually be good.
That's all I'm saying here too. Just assuming "The Chinese government is evil, hence any Chinese law _must_ be 100% for the sole purpose of crushing freedoms and harming people" is just bullshit. We just don't know that. Assuming you can "translate" like that, is just some self-righteous bullshit, nothing more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.