Why do we need to have some central group of people telling us what hints file we have to put in our DNS servers? Why do we need to have some central group of people deciding what TLDs go into some group of root servers?
The simple solution also lets the market decide about what TLDs survive, and what TLDs fail. Everyone who runs a DNS server gets to create their own root zone file, and put in whatever TLDs they want (I do recommend all the 2-letter national TLDs). They can even point them to whatever servers they want or even run some themselves for own, or their customers. Or they can just outsource it to whoever they want to let decide it for them.
A little chaos is a good thing. It's called competition. We don't all get our food from the same place. We don't all get our computers from the same place. Why do TLDs have to be any different. Sure, we might want to have the same TLD as someone else, and if so, then we can choose to do that. So we end up with people peddling root zone files. It's your choice.
And if you don't have a DNS server, you can simply use whatever want you want to (if they permit it). And an ISP can ever set up more than one if they have varying issues to give customers more choice about.
The big advantage I see to this is that it avoids a lot of the legal wars going on now over ownership of domains, and whether domains are subject to trademark rules, and such. Make it totally open there's no longer a target to sue.
Although that license does appear to prohibit use of these products, I doubt MS'll audit a company and punish them for it.
While that may be true about MSFT lawyers, it may not be true about the lawyers at a company deploying Windows XP. More and more companies are being frightened by efforts like BSA, and while some might be switching over to free (as in no draconian licensing) software, most are just setting up more rigid internal procedures, including strict interpretations of EULAs. In other words, if you install VNC on a Windows XP box, while you might have nothing to fear from MSFT, you could get fired.
You don't need my home address, unless I am asking you to send something to my home address. You have no valid need or purpose for that information.
The real problem here is not the complexity of protocols to match privacy policies with privacy preferences, but instead is the fact that so many businesses are just too fucking nosy!. Now I know that those people in suits in the fancy shmancy corporate offices do tend to be idiots most of the time, but this spying on people has got to be stopped. What is wrong with those people that makes them so fucking sick that they need to be spying on everyone so much?
I find it interesting to note that quite a number of the dot-coms that went into business to spy on people were the ones that failed. But that's only a marginal level of significance. Many others, like doubleclick (which I block at my proxy server), still exist, and need to be taken out by any legal means (I'm doing my part by cutting out their level of hits, even when that means slashdot won't get the ad revenues).
The VM in the early 2.4 kernels would grossly lock up when it was out of memory. I was told this was due to the fact that the design assumed you had at least as much swap space as RAM. It could not handle the case of (memory need > swap) even though (memory need < swap + ram). I have several systems which have lots of ram and no swap at all, and they would die quickly. And it wasn't because I was overusing memory with the processes. This would happen even if the ram got used up when writing data to a file larger than ram space. The later 2.4 VM fixed that. Hopefully when Rik's VM is cleaned up, it should solve the problem with lack of (or small) swap.
If your program(s) push Linux to the point where it actually runs out of available RAM faster than it can free it up, then "all hell breaks loose". It has to swap something out, and just about every program is eligible to be swapped out. That includes GPM (if you are on a virtual console) or X (if you are in X Windows). You need to account for all of these things to determine your RAM needs. Add up the memory usage of all your active programs, plus the buffer demands they have doing disk I/O, plus the kernel, and you need that much RAM. If the program is doing a LOT if disk/file writes, you can expect the buffer demands to be the majority of this, too (because the kernel believes what you just wrote you might soon want to read back, so it tries to keep lots of it in RAM even if that means swapping out GPM and X).
Then set up your own redirecting server like info.netscape.com does, and set the DNS and/etc/hosts to point to there. Now you can spy on yourself. And if the server it goes to is separate somewhere else, and the computer with the browser is stolen, it may even be "phoning home" to help you track the location.
It's even worse. While they did correct for the red-shift, they did not apparently correct for the "lateness" of the light. Since we are seeing galaxies a few billion LY away in the colors they had a few billion years ago, we are not really averging their current colors. Earlier stars form from the basic gasses of the big bang were hotter and bluer. Later stars have heavier atoms, and are not quite as hot, and so they shine at a lower temperature, hence more red. So if we could correct for the time it takes for light to travel, and see the current light right now it might be more red (certainly more if you do include red-shift in this), or less red (if red-shift made it redder than age).
The color swatch at space.com is WRONG! The correct hex code taken from the academic page is #fff8e7 (which is gamma corrected assuming a display gamma of 2.2 which is only an average for various available monitors).
Operating ponzi schemes or ripping senior citizens off with bogus roof repairs is not violent, either. But we put people that do those things in jail. It's not a victimless crime. Spam is simply another case of someone taking (resources and time) from another by fraud. So yes, imprisonment seems appropriate to me.
In 1996, students owning computers was a smaller percentage than it is in 2001. Those who are further away from being computer science and engineering students, while less likely to be using Linux, are also less likely to find good warez sites online, or know how to deal with the issues of pirated software, or even know they could, so they just buy a legal copy instead. But if the focus is narrowed to just computer science and engineering students, I bet you'd see some shift from commercial software (pirated or legal) to free software. So these different mechanisms in different student demographics can both work to the same end result... less piracy of commercial software.
Just because it has high speeds and is packed with so many extras does not mean the engineers designed it right. Too often they just stop if it works with Windows, and often Windows is even doing things inconsistent with the hardware specs.
The problem with that idea is that most of those are either already closed, or are blocked. Of course there are still some open relays. You'd have to find a fresh virgin one if you want your mail to get through.
The problem in China is that a very high proportion of the servers online are open relays. I dare say this could well be in excess of 90%. To simply block them one by one when spam arrives is ineffective. More spam comes from the next one as spammers (substantially in the US) just move on to the next relay. This proportion is staying high because system administrators do not close the relays. Certainly this can be due to the language barrier. I cannot write in Chinese, and they likely cannot read English. Moreover, because of their inability to read English, they may not understand the nature of the spam going through their server (from the US, back to the US, peddling junk). If they even notice at all, they notice an overload that at some point dies down. The server likely gets DoS'd for a while and the spammer stops using it and moves on, probably not coming back to that one for a long time. To the sysadmin, it was just a day or two the server wasn't working right. Now their mailbox is full of complaints containing spam, none of which they are able to read. So the problem does not get fixed. The percentage of servers that are open relays remains high. Spam still comes through. Sysadmins in other countries get tired of constrantly tracking a moving target and pull out the big guns, download the APNIC or TWNIC assignment tables, load the database, and watch the spam load drop in half in one day.
I have not been able to identify a single good ISP in China. Every one I know about, I know of because they leak spam. Certainly there are some I don't know about, and there could be a good one in there. And it's certainly not fair to them, as I'm sure they'd love to expand their customer base, but their good deeds still don't get them anywhere.
The problem is pandemic to China, Korea, and Taiwan. It's easy to conclude its a cultural thing. And you know what... I haven't ruled out that this plays some part. A lot of that spam actually originates right there in China (or Korea or Taiwan). I simply have no idea how widespread it might be perceived as just a normal way to do business.
I do make an effort to be sure I don't block other countries. I get the assignments and then aggregate the assignments by country code. The assignments for CN, HK, KR, and TW then get extracted and used to build the hash table my Postfix daemons use to block the mail, in addition to other data, including some other IP ranges, many dialup domains, ORDB, ORBZ, and any server which fails to have a reverse (PTR record) DNS name which resolves forward (A record) back to the connecting IP address. I'm getting an average of 1 spam in my inbox each day, and hundreds per day banging on the locked door (counting all of them, not just Chinese or Asian). If I were to today open up China, I'd probably get 40 times as much spam as I get now (since I have most all of it effectively blocked now).
I won't. If they stop the open relaying, I'll remove the blocking of their mail servers. I'm not blocking their mail servers because of Chinese government blocking web sites; I'm blocking their mail servers because I don't want to have spam delivered to my servers, and I happen to know spam comes from their servers. To me it's strictly an orthogonal issue. I'll leave my hidden SSL proxy open for my Chinese friends, though.
Closing the relaying of a mail server is a security issue, not a filtering issue. One does not filter any content at all. It's simply a case of whether the connection comes from inside or outside. If from outside, then if the mail is not destined for a location this server serves, then do not accept the content at all. The destination is in the SMTP layer, which means it is the "outside" of the envelope. It's like the postman holding the envelope up to you and asking you if this person lives in your home. You can say no and not be handed the letter, so you will not even have opened it to see if it was junk.
There are some closed mail servers there. I've tested many and found a lot are closed. So there is no widespread pervasive reason to leave them open. If anything, the Chinese government should see the openness as potentially evading the Great Firewall. Allowing outsiders to send mail through because their own mail servers were blocked may be an intent. But it is a careless one if they don't at least narrow the access down to specific network space.
The problem is a huge number of mail servers in China are coming online wide open for relaying. China is just in the past couple of years moving quickly to the internet. When the US started it's big growth many years ago, spamming was less sophisticated, and fewer people were involved. And the US didn't have to deal with a huge online base of foreign spammers wanting to relay through. Most new servers installed by someone for the first time on the net even in the US were open relays. The problem for China is they are just now doing all the internet expansion, and there are now a whole lot more spammers outside of the country taking advantage of the openings. Combine that with China now allowing businesses as opposed to the prior state operated socialism, there are many Chinese people wanting to find some way to get rich in business, without really understanding how to do it since it has been suppressed for so long (other than Hong Kong).
More and more spam these days has clever subjects and/or sender names that make it harder to tell it's spam at first. Many people get high volumes of mail and can't spend the time to look at the subjects first, anyway. Your 1/2 second estimate is way off the mark. It's more like 10 seconds on average.
I block almost all spam directed to me at the server, because there is so much. I never get it in my box at all. But based on the 34,000 delivery attempts from 1 July 2001 to 31 December 2001, I would be spending more than a week every year just deleting spam. And that's if I stay awake 24x7. Looking at it another way, it's $18,000 out of my pocket if it were to take up my consulting time. So I let my servers do the deleting for me.
But this is all different for different people. My email address has made the rounds and is on a lot of lists. Yes, it is about the right to choose and it's OK for different people to make different choices.
It's also unfair that Chinese mail servers leave the door open for spammers, whether in China or outside, to send huge volumes of junk. It's also unfair that people like yourself who live in China are not doing more to get the problem fixed. The news article this whole thread started from does indicate some people are recognizing a problem, although they still don't seem to fully understand it. Maybe it will be hard for you to get the Chinese government to crack down on the open relays. It won't be any easier for someone from the United States to do so.
According to a report last month on Wired News, a growing number of network administrators in the United States and Europe have begun blocking e-mails from servers in China, Taiwan and Korea.
I've been blocking China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, and Korea, for nearly 2 years now.
"The majority of the junk mail (is) not created in China, so why (should) they block mail from China?" said Zeng Xiaozhen, a professor at Jilin University in the northeastern province of Jilin. He said spam was a global issue and China should make a law to punish creators of junk e-mail.
First of all, I am not blocking mail from China; I am blocking mail from SMTP connections with a source address in the IP assignments to China, regardless of where it comes from. My preferred method of filtering is to prevent the delivery of spam in the first place. That means I block it by IP address or validated domain name. Mr. Zeng Xiaozhen needs to understand that the issue is about open relays, which intermingle mail originating from China, and mail being relayed by spammers.
Separately, in a signed article posted on the Web site of China's party mouthpiece newspaper, the People's Daily, Xu Detian called upon the National People's Congress to pass a law banning the sending of junk e-mail.
More of the spam from Chinese mail servers originates from other countries because the servers are open relays. They need to outlaw open relay servers, perhaps with some very harsh penalties.
Also, since most of the open relays are older versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, it appears that software piracy is a big key here. I would assume that software systems Microsoft has sold in China came with documentation in Chinese. Pirate software often comes with little or no documentation. And what it does come with may not be the Chinese version in the first place, making it useless unless the administrator reads English (assuming most pirated software has some of that). If the Chinese government were to crack down on not only misconfigurations of mail servers, but also the use of any pirated commercial software (especially that connected to the internet), I think it would go a long ways to solving these problems. If the businesses doing this cannot afford a licensed copy of Microsoft Exchange server, maybe they need to switch to a system like Linux and use one of the Exchange-like clones, or ordinary mail software.
Doing NAT is still cheaper than upgrading everything to IPv6. And since NAT to services doesn't need any DNS tricks, it is easiest to deploy cheaply. Upgrading a server involves more time and more disruptions. Dropping a NAT in between is so much easier. Remember, the intent in this is not to upgrade the network to IPv6; it's to be able to serve connections from clients with only IPv6 addressess where there is no client side NAT (which requires the DNS tricks if the client software cannot address the massive IPv6 space).
I've sent certified mail several times. I get back a little green card with the signature of who received it. Often times the signature is obscured. The Postal Service doesn't keep much record of it, and I don't think they have the signature at all. It's possible for the certified mail to be received, and the green card coming back to get lost (although that has never happened to me). If I had to prove that my mailing was received, I have to keep that green card.
If I was suing someone and wanted to really screw them over, I could (and this is certainly very illegal to do) send them something else in the envelope, or even an empty one. Or they could screw me over (again, illegal) by claiming they got an empty envelope by certified mail. It's a flawed process. But mistakes can even happen. What if a new legal clerk in a law office is putting things together in envelopes, and mixes them up by mistake and ends up sending, by certified mail, the law firm's financial statement instead of the legal notice and summons. Now that summons is probably going somewhere else, but not by certified mail. That might get lost. Or the person receiving it might be one of the elder retired partners of the firm who dies the next day while their executor of estate opens it and just assumes it was just one of the cases he was working on and doesn't know it was supposed to be sent to the defendant. Stuff like this would be rare, but it can happen, either by mistake, or by malice.
Let me get the nit out of the way, first: they don't have prosecution on a civil matter; it's plaintiff and defendant.
So if the plaintiff sends notice by certified mail (a process known to have occaisional flaws), the court is going to take care of it next using... certified mail? As you point out, certified mail can be refused. What I think should happen is if certified mail fails, plaintiffs should be required to use a process server. Then if there is a no-show by the defendant, the plaintiffs should be required to show that everything was done properly, such as the correct address was the point of delivery, etc., before getting the default judgement.
Appeals have a limited time frame (what is this in a civil matter? lawyers?). What if the appeal time frame has expired before the defendant genuinely finds out about the judgement? How do you appeal after that time frame? Or what different method is used to reverse the judgement?
According to this story at Wired, Xybernaut's Mobile Assistant® V product will be used at COMDEX Chicago by the event staff to reduce queues. I could envision two different ways that slashdotters could protest. If they are actually going to attend, they could wear something that states their position about the company and its practices. If they are not going to attend, but live in or near Chicago (big place, should be a few around somewhere), they could do the usual protest thing on public property at the border of the convention (I'm sure the COMDEX people would never allow them in the convention area).
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Why do we need to have some central group of people telling us what hints file we have to put in our DNS servers? Why do we need to have some central group of people deciding what TLDs go into some group of root servers?
The simple solution also lets the market decide about what TLDs survive, and what TLDs fail. Everyone who runs a DNS server gets to create their own root zone file, and put in whatever TLDs they want (I do recommend all the 2-letter national TLDs). They can even point them to whatever servers they want or even run some themselves for own, or their customers. Or they can just outsource it to whoever they want to let decide it for them.
A little chaos is a good thing. It's called competition. We don't all get our food from the same place. We don't all get our computers from the same place. Why do TLDs have to be any different. Sure, we might want to have the same TLD as someone else, and if so, then we can choose to do that. So we end up with people peddling root zone files. It's your choice.
And if you don't have a DNS server, you can simply use whatever want you want to (if they permit it). And an ISP can ever set up more than one if they have varying issues to give customers more choice about.
The big advantage I see to this is that it avoids a lot of the legal wars going on now over ownership of domains, and whether domains are subject to trademark rules, and such. Make it totally open there's no longer a target to sue.
While that may be true about MSFT lawyers, it may not be true about the lawyers at a company deploying Windows XP. More and more companies are being frightened by efforts like BSA, and while some might be switching over to free (as in no draconian licensing) software, most are just setting up more rigid internal procedures, including strict interpretations of EULAs. In other words, if you install VNC on a Windows XP box, while you might have nothing to fear from MSFT, you could get fired.
You don't need my home address, unless I am asking you to send something to my home address. You have no valid need or purpose for that information.
The real problem here is not the complexity of protocols to match privacy policies with privacy preferences, but instead is the fact that so many businesses are just too fucking nosy!. Now I know that those people in suits in the fancy shmancy corporate offices do tend to be idiots most of the time, but this spying on people has got to be stopped. What is wrong with those people that makes them so fucking sick that they need to be spying on everyone so much?
I find it interesting to note that quite a number of the dot-coms that went into business to spy on people were the ones that failed. But that's only a marginal level of significance. Many others, like doubleclick (which I block at my proxy server), still exist, and need to be taken out by any legal means (I'm doing my part by cutting out their level of hits, even when that means slashdot won't get the ad revenues).
The VM in the early 2.4 kernels would grossly lock up when it was out of memory. I was told this was due to the fact that the design assumed you had at least as much swap space as RAM. It could not handle the case of (memory need > swap) even though (memory need < swap + ram). I have several systems which have lots of ram and no swap at all, and they would die quickly. And it wasn't because I was overusing memory with the processes. This would happen even if the ram got used up when writing data to a file larger than ram space. The later 2.4 VM fixed that. Hopefully when Rik's VM is cleaned up, it should solve the problem with lack of (or small) swap.
If your program(s) push Linux to the point where it actually runs out of available RAM faster than it can free it up, then "all hell breaks loose". It has to swap something out, and just about every program is eligible to be swapped out. That includes GPM (if you are on a virtual console) or X (if you are in X Windows). You need to account for all of these things to determine your RAM needs. Add up the memory usage of all your active programs, plus the buffer demands they have doing disk I/O, plus the kernel, and you need that much RAM. If the program is doing a LOT if disk/file writes, you can expect the buffer demands to be the majority of this, too (because the kernel believes what you just wrote you might soon want to read back, so it tries to keep lots of it in RAM even if that means swapping out GPM and X).
Then set up your own redirecting server like info.netscape.com does, and set the DNS and /etc/hosts to point to there. Now you can spy on yourself. And if the server it goes to is separate somewhere else, and the computer with the browser is stolen, it may even be "phoning home" to help you track the location.
It's even worse. While they did correct for the red-shift, they did not apparently correct for the "lateness" of the light. Since we are seeing galaxies a few billion LY away in the colors they had a few billion years ago, we are not really averging their current colors. Earlier stars form from the basic gasses of the big bang were hotter and bluer. Later stars have heavier atoms, and are not quite as hot, and so they shine at a lower temperature, hence more red. So if we could correct for the time it takes for light to travel, and see the current light right now it might be more red (certainly more if you do include red-shift in this), or less red (if red-shift made it redder than age).
The color swatch at space.com is WRONG! The correct hex code taken from the academic page is #fff8e7 (which is gamma corrected assuming a display gamma of 2.2 which is only an average for various available monitors).
Operating ponzi schemes or ripping senior citizens off with bogus roof repairs is not violent, either. But we put people that do those things in jail. It's not a victimless crime. Spam is simply another case of someone taking (resources and time) from another by fraud. So yes, imprisonment seems appropriate to me.
In 1996, students owning computers was a smaller percentage than it is in 2001. Those who are further away from being computer science and engineering students, while less likely to be using Linux, are also less likely to find good warez sites online, or know how to deal with the issues of pirated software, or even know they could, so they just buy a legal copy instead. But if the focus is narrowed to just computer science and engineering students, I bet you'd see some shift from commercial software (pirated or legal) to free software. So these different mechanisms in different student demographics can both work to the same end result ... less piracy of commercial software.
So why don't you go ahead and block all of China? Or are you just not getting any spam from there?
Just because it has high speeds and is packed with so many extras does not mean the engineers designed it right. Too often they just stop if it works with Windows, and often Windows is even doing things inconsistent with the hardware specs.
The problem with that idea is that most of those are either already closed, or are blocked. Of course there are still some open relays. You'd have to find a fresh virgin one if you want your mail to get through.
unfair? yes
ineffective? no
The problem in China is that a very high proportion of the servers online are open relays. I dare say this could well be in excess of 90%. To simply block them one by one when spam arrives is ineffective. More spam comes from the next one as spammers (substantially in the US) just move on to the next relay. This proportion is staying high because system administrators do not close the relays. Certainly this can be due to the language barrier. I cannot write in Chinese, and they likely cannot read English. Moreover, because of their inability to read English, they may not understand the nature of the spam going through their server (from the US, back to the US, peddling junk). If they even notice at all, they notice an overload that at some point dies down. The server likely gets DoS'd for a while and the spammer stops using it and moves on, probably not coming back to that one for a long time. To the sysadmin, it was just a day or two the server wasn't working right. Now their mailbox is full of complaints containing spam, none of which they are able to read. So the problem does not get fixed. The percentage of servers that are open relays remains high. Spam still comes through. Sysadmins in other countries get tired of constrantly tracking a moving target and pull out the big guns, download the APNIC or TWNIC assignment tables, load the database, and watch the spam load drop in half in one day.
I have not been able to identify a single good ISP in China. Every one I know about, I know of because they leak spam. Certainly there are some I don't know about, and there could be a good one in there. And it's certainly not fair to them, as I'm sure they'd love to expand their customer base, but their good deeds still don't get them anywhere.
The problem is pandemic to China, Korea, and Taiwan. It's easy to conclude its a cultural thing. And you know what ... I haven't ruled out that this plays some part. A lot of that spam actually originates right there in China (or Korea or Taiwan). I simply have no idea how widespread it might be perceived as just a normal way to do business.
I do make an effort to be sure I don't block other countries. I get the assignments and then aggregate the assignments by country code. The assignments for CN, HK, KR, and TW then get extracted and used to build the hash table my Postfix daemons use to block the mail, in addition to other data, including some other IP ranges, many dialup domains, ORDB, ORBZ, and any server which fails to have a reverse (PTR record) DNS name which resolves forward (A record) back to the connecting IP address. I'm getting an average of 1 spam in my inbox each day, and hundreds per day banging on the locked door (counting all of them, not just Chinese or Asian). If I were to today open up China, I'd probably get 40 times as much spam as I get now (since I have most all of it effectively blocked now).
I won't. If they stop the open relaying, I'll remove the blocking of their mail servers. I'm not blocking their mail servers because of Chinese government blocking web sites; I'm blocking their mail servers because I don't want to have spam delivered to my servers, and I happen to know spam comes from their servers. To me it's strictly an orthogonal issue. I'll leave my hidden SSL proxy open for my Chinese friends, though.
Closing the relaying of a mail server is a security issue, not a filtering issue. One does not filter any content at all. It's simply a case of whether the connection comes from inside or outside. If from outside, then if the mail is not destined for a location this server serves, then do not accept the content at all. The destination is in the SMTP layer, which means it is the "outside" of the envelope. It's like the postman holding the envelope up to you and asking you if this person lives in your home. You can say no and not be handed the letter, so you will not even have opened it to see if it was junk.
There are some closed mail servers there. I've tested many and found a lot are closed. So there is no widespread pervasive reason to leave them open. If anything, the Chinese government should see the openness as potentially evading the Great Firewall. Allowing outsiders to send mail through because their own mail servers were blocked may be an intent. But it is a careless one if they don't at least narrow the access down to specific network space.
The problem is a huge number of mail servers in China are coming online wide open for relaying. China is just in the past couple of years moving quickly to the internet. When the US started it's big growth many years ago, spamming was less sophisticated, and fewer people were involved. And the US didn't have to deal with a huge online base of foreign spammers wanting to relay through. Most new servers installed by someone for the first time on the net even in the US were open relays. The problem for China is they are just now doing all the internet expansion, and there are now a whole lot more spammers outside of the country taking advantage of the openings. Combine that with China now allowing businesses as opposed to the prior state operated socialism, there are many Chinese people wanting to find some way to get rich in business, without really understanding how to do it since it has been suppressed for so long (other than Hong Kong).
More and more spam these days has clever subjects and/or sender names that make it harder to tell it's spam at first. Many people get high volumes of mail and can't spend the time to look at the subjects first, anyway. Your 1/2 second estimate is way off the mark. It's more like 10 seconds on average.
I block almost all spam directed to me at the server, because there is so much. I never get it in my box at all. But based on the 34,000 delivery attempts from 1 July 2001 to 31 December 2001, I would be spending more than a week every year just deleting spam. And that's if I stay awake 24x7. Looking at it another way, it's $18,000 out of my pocket if it were to take up my consulting time. So I let my servers do the deleting for me.
But this is all different for different people. My email address has made the rounds and is on a lot of lists. Yes, it is about the right to choose and it's OK for different people to make different choices.
202.0.0.0/8 contains IP assignments to many other countries. Why not go get your own list of what IP addresses actually are assigned to China.
It's also unfair that Chinese mail servers leave the door open for spammers, whether in China or outside, to send huge volumes of junk. It's also unfair that people like yourself who live in China are not doing more to get the problem fixed. The news article this whole thread started from does indicate some people are recognizing a problem, although they still don't seem to fully understand it. Maybe it will be hard for you to get the Chinese government to crack down on the open relays. It won't be any easier for someone from the United States to do so.
I've been blocking China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, and Korea, for nearly 2 years now.
First of all, I am not blocking mail from China; I am blocking mail from SMTP connections with a source address in the IP assignments to China, regardless of where it comes from. My preferred method of filtering is to prevent the delivery of spam in the first place. That means I block it by IP address or validated domain name. Mr. Zeng Xiaozhen needs to understand that the issue is about open relays, which intermingle mail originating from China, and mail being relayed by spammers.
More of the spam from Chinese mail servers originates from other countries because the servers are open relays. They need to outlaw open relay servers, perhaps with some very harsh penalties.
Also, since most of the open relays are older versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, it appears that software piracy is a big key here. I would assume that software systems Microsoft has sold in China came with documentation in Chinese. Pirate software often comes with little or no documentation. And what it does come with may not be the Chinese version in the first place, making it useless unless the administrator reads English (assuming most pirated software has some of that). If the Chinese government were to crack down on not only misconfigurations of mail servers, but also the use of any pirated commercial software (especially that connected to the internet), I think it would go a long ways to solving these problems. If the businesses doing this cannot afford a licensed copy of Microsoft Exchange server, maybe they need to switch to a system like Linux and use one of the Exchange-like clones, or ordinary mail software.
Doing NAT is still cheaper than upgrading everything to IPv6. And since NAT to services doesn't need any DNS tricks, it is easiest to deploy cheaply. Upgrading a server involves more time and more disruptions. Dropping a NAT in between is so much easier. Remember, the intent in this is not to upgrade the network to IPv6; it's to be able to serve connections from clients with only IPv6 addressess where there is no client side NAT (which requires the DNS tricks if the client software cannot address the massive IPv6 space).
I've sent certified mail several times. I get back a little green card with the signature of who received it. Often times the signature is obscured. The Postal Service doesn't keep much record of it, and I don't think they have the signature at all. It's possible for the certified mail to be received, and the green card coming back to get lost (although that has never happened to me). If I had to prove that my mailing was received, I have to keep that green card.
If I was suing someone and wanted to really screw them over, I could (and this is certainly very illegal to do) send them something else in the envelope, or even an empty one. Or they could screw me over (again, illegal) by claiming they got an empty envelope by certified mail. It's a flawed process. But mistakes can even happen. What if a new legal clerk in a law office is putting things together in envelopes, and mixes them up by mistake and ends up sending, by certified mail, the law firm's financial statement instead of the legal notice and summons. Now that summons is probably going somewhere else, but not by certified mail. That might get lost. Or the person receiving it might be one of the elder retired partners of the firm who dies the next day while their executor of estate opens it and just assumes it was just one of the cases he was working on and doesn't know it was supposed to be sent to the defendant. Stuff like this would be rare, but it can happen, either by mistake, or by malice.
Let me get the nit out of the way, first: they don't have prosecution on a civil matter; it's plaintiff and defendant.
So if the plaintiff sends notice by certified mail (a process known to have occaisional flaws), the court is going to take care of it next using ... certified mail? As you point out, certified mail can be refused. What I think should happen is if certified mail fails, plaintiffs should be required to use a process server. Then if there is a no-show by the defendant, the plaintiffs should be required to show that everything was done properly, such as the correct address was the point of delivery, etc., before getting the default judgement.
Appeals have a limited time frame (what is this in a civil matter? lawyers?). What if the appeal time frame has expired before the defendant genuinely finds out about the judgement? How do you appeal after that time frame? Or what different method is used to reverse the judgement?
According to this story at Wired, Xybernaut's Mobile Assistant® V product will be used at COMDEX Chicago by the event staff to reduce queues. I could envision two different ways that slashdotters could protest. If they are actually going to attend, they could wear something that states their position about the company and its practices. If they are not going to attend, but live in or near Chicago (big place, should be a few around somewhere), they could do the usual protest thing on public property at the border of the convention (I'm sure the COMDEX people would never allow them in the convention area).