China Wants Out of Spam Blocks 404
SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "Apparently, China is feeling the effects of the e-mail blocks Western ISPs are placing on Asian mail to prevent spam, as previously reported here. A group of Chinese legislators is calling for the blocks to be lifted because they're making it difficult for them to communicate via e-mail, and a signed article in The People's Daily is calling on China to ban spam. Maybe now some of the lazy admins of these spam-spewing mail servers will clean up their acts."
China just doesn't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
- They want to reap the commercial benefits without accepting the other consequences of a global computer network: namely, the inevitably open society the Internet promotes. Their feeble attempts at firewalling and sheltering their people are eventually going to collapse under the insurmountable weight of the reality that information wants to be free.
- They want to use email, but can't accept that people don't want crap to be mass-mailed to them. This is a sure sign that China's only interest in the Internet is monetary, and that it is our duty to block off abusive
.cn mail servers to show them that this bullshit doesn't play on the open Internet.
China's always going to be in an awkward situation with regards to the Internet as long as they cling to their obsolete totalitarian, isolationist regime. Write your senators and tell them that all this dicking around with China is a farce, and must be stopped. Don't allow them on the Free Internet until they become a Free State, I say.Chinese laws: genuine effort, but ineffectual (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of my days in grad school in the early 1980s. I had two Chinese roommates. They subscribed to People's Daily to learn English (even though it had spelling and grammar errors, it was probably a good idea).
Anyway, after a while the paper began to sound repeative. It would continaully brag about some "new effort" to do something such as "end corruption" or "end pollution" or "improve education." That was done by passing laws saying "don't do this" or issuing a directive to "do that." Nothing would actually hapen, it appears, as I would read about a very similar effort a few months later.
So, although the Chinese are beginning to realize they need to do something about spam, don't hold your breath. Hopefully, they will come around some year to doing something effective . . . such as having ISPs actually respond to abuse reports and close open relays, for example.
Re:China just doesn't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, boy. Where to begin? I think my favourite part of you post was the last line. You misunderstand the idea of freedom if you assume that you must be free to oppress others. China has a dictatorial regime, true; but if the internet is free then it should be embrace it, just as it embraces pornographers, neo-Nazis, gun nuts, religious zealots and all of the other dreadful things that we tolerate under the banner of free-speech but really wish weren¦t there.
Second point is this idea that we can force change onto countries by ignoring them. The Americans don't seem to have learned much from Castro in the last 30 years. If change is to be brought to China then the only options we have available are
to allow it to come fully into the free world and evolve
war. I know which option I prefer.
Of course it is unfair (Score:3, Interesting)
Spam basically makes email useless, it is certainly not the near real-time media it used to be. Blacklisting can make email almost useable again. Of course, it is nowhere near as useful as before the spammers took over, but at least the signal no longer totally drowns in the noice.
Unless something effective is done to spam at the political level, we probably soon have to either give up email entirely, or switch to whitelists. With whitelists, only people in your address book can send mail to you directly. Other people may be able to come through after various kinds of verification. This will cut of many once useful features of email, but at least some core functionality will survive.
Please do not blame the people who try to make email survive in spite of the spam onslaught. Without these people, email would die.
Korea anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Subject: Re: Korean Schools Proxy Project?
From Joel:
"> It is possible that Appleton, Wisconsin, High School has an open connect proxy on port 3128 and the Tuscaloosa Unified School District has an anonymous mail relay.
But, apparently, one group wired every K-12 school in South Korea and they made the same goddam error EVERYWHERE."
RE: from Rob
Thanks for explaining this, Joel. Somebody sent me a couple dozen spams (morts, credit card, work at home) in the last week, each relayed through a different Korean elementary school. None bothers to record the originating IP. Amazing.
A letter to the ambassador is in order.
Re:Overzealous Spamguarding (Score:2, Interesting)
That understates the problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, if you get 10/day, you actually don't have much of a spam problem compared to usenet regulars etc. I get hundreds of pieces of spam per day which is less than a lot of other people get. I manage to filter about 75% of it but the rest still takes much more than 30 minutes/year to deal with.
Third, even if it's just 30 minutes a year, which 30 minutes is it? A pinprick to the butt is much less annoying than one to the eyeball. An incoming email is an interruption almost like a phone call, breaking your train of thought and interfering with your work. A 5-second interruption several times a day is much worse than, say, no spam at all during the entire year except you're required to spend 2 hours on April 15 (tax day) looking at spam.
My filters get rid of lots of spam but occasionally catch a legitimate message, so once a week or so I spend a few minutes looking over the filtered messages. Batching them like that reduces the spam annoyance factor a lot, but it destroys the immediacy of the legitimate email.
The reason yahoo is on spam lists isn't unknown--it's obvious. Insane amounts of spam comes from yahoo addresses and has no signs of slowing. The obvious solution for you is get an address from a more responsible provider.
Why not default to SMTP blocking at ISPs? (Score:3, Interesting)
If Chinese ISPs were
Re:Common sense! NO open relay = no block (Score:5, Interesting)
We fixed a problem of recieving spam from their open relays by blocking them from sending to us.
We asked them to close their relays and they said no or didn't respond, so we blocked them.
I wonder if the trick might be to write mailservers that backtrack the email's headers and check for open relays before passing it on. No need to have an actual list, it would be automagic!
Censorship Firewalls & Spammer Blocking - Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, if I wanted to put my Tinfoil Conspiracy Hat on, I'd say it was collusion between the unelected George Bush and the thugs in China's government to prevent cooperation between our democratic-leaning peoples, or some such rot. And if either side wanted to accomplish that, this might be the most effective way to do it. Truth is unfortunately stranger than fiction....
Market forces are the right approach (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, it *would* help if somebody would translate a bunch of anti-spam configuration information into Chinese and Korean.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)