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71% of Spam Servers are Located in China 410

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-can't-that-wall-work-both-ways dept.
aspelling writes " We all know that majority of consumer electronics and other goods sold in US stores is produced in China. But China specialty extends beyond consumer electronics, clothes and automotive components. According to Commtouch Software research 71% of all spam servers are located in this People Republic. "Since Jan. 1, we've seen probably a 30% to 40% increase" in spam traffic" Commtouch CEO says. BusinessWeek reports about this issue."
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71% of Spam Servers are Located in China More

71% of Spam Servers are Located in China

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  • Obligitory.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rooked_One ( 591287 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:11PM (#9207454) Journal
    Isn't 71% of everything made in China? I've always thought all spam, both meat and annoyance flavors, were made in China...

  • Taiwan (Score:2, Informative)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 )
    We got hit by the 61. and 219. IP blocks hard from Taiwan

  • Avoid the Noid, he ruins web experiences (Score:5, Informative)

    by ericspinder ( 146776 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:12PM (#9207458) Journal
    The direct link want your e-mail address (*shudder*)
    Go to the press release [commtouch.com] (it is listed on the page) and click on the link for the white paper

    But surprise, surprise, the "best solution" is the one they sell, but it's still an interesting read.

    • Re:Avoid the Noid, he ruins web experiences (Score:5, Informative)

      by Yokaze ( 70883 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:32PM (#9207749)
      Question: How does "71% percent of spam servers are located in China" quoted in the article correlate with the whitepaper stating "Figure 1: North America and International Spam Messages Sent Daily" depicting 2005: North America 8.5 billion, International 11 billion?

      Maybe it is in the subtle difference of spam messages sent, and servers used to send them.
      • That's a good question, I followed the link from the story, then tried to download the whitepaper, but bailed on the registration. The press release begged to be browsed, and I found the link to the "no reg" link to the whitepaper. I went looking for the "chinese connection", but immediately didn't see it, however the bulk of it looked interesting, so I thought that I would "show the path" rather than have 20 slashdotters complain about registration.

        After posting I went back for a detailed read and whil

      • Well, it works like this:

        1) The top spammers (the people) are from the USA.

        2) They like to use relays (computers) in China, since most of the ISPs here don't like spammers and spamhauses (ISPs set up to do nothing but host spammers, they may even pretend to take down accounts while just shifting them to different ones, etc. Evil, really.)

        3) They're also now using worm/virus-infected hosts as relays. I recently helped a friend clean out a rather nasty infestation which was being used as a spam relay

  • Use blacklists... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:12PM (#9207463) Homepage Journal

    If you don't know anyone in China (or Asia) you can use a blacklist for the whole region. My firewall with OpenBSD's awesome spamd [openbsd.org] autoupdates its tarpit blacklists every couple of hours. One good list for Asian IPs is here. [okean.com]

    I love the idea of tarpitting, seeing spammers connections being tied up for ~3300 seconds (my highest) warms my heart. If more people did it that'd mean less overall spam traffic.
    • Maybe 71% of Spam Servers are Located in China, but are 71% of the chinese spammers? I doubt it. That would be lot of spam!
    • Yeah, but too bad tarpits don't work with NAT + contrack. If you use tarpit and contrack it will take up a resources for each hit. :(

    • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bob Zer Fish ( 568540 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:22PM (#9207604) Homepage
      Just for other people's info... since I didn't know:
      Tarpitting discourages spamming without permanently blocking an offending IP address. Tarpitting works by monitoring traffic and applying sluggish responses to remote IPs showing spam-like behavior. For example, if an IP sends too many messages to users during an email session, tarpitting starts slowing MDaemon's response. If the spam-like behavior includes excessive unknown addresses during a session, the remote server can be suspended from access for a user-specified amount of time.

    • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:35PM (#9207780) Homepage
      There's just something that seems fundamentally wrong about connecting to a global network and then blacklisting half of it.

      It's like buying Lucky Charms cereal, then filtering out all the marshmallows and throwing them in the garbage because they're not healthy. Very true, but if that's how you feel, why bother buying Lucky Charms?

      Surely it would be more effective to implement challenge-response, or simply boycott email in favour of IM or a secure messageboard/contact form, or whatever you prefer. The problem is with email, not with Asia.

      Besides, I think this study is bogus. All the studies I've previously seen pointed squarely at the USA as the primary source of spam. Empirical evidence from my own email box bears this out. Most of the spam I receive tends to come from residential cable modem/DSL lines in various countries, predominantly the states. I suspect that these are either virus-hijacked boxes, or people being paid to send spam through their home connection (ie, the ads placed on telephone polls: "Have an internet connection at home? Make up to $4,000/month with no effort required! Call now!")

      • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Funny)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:50PM (#9207973) Homepage Journal
        Spam is all Bush's fault. I didn't get this much spam when clinton was president. And when Carter was president I didn't get any spam at all!

      • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by the_mad_poster ( 640772 ) <shattoc@adelphia.com> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:56PM (#9208037) Homepage Journal

        Except, it's more like buying a box of lucky charms expecting to find marshmallows and the regular oats (or whatever it is) cereal and finding a bunch of dirty needles in it as well. SPAM is not supposed to be a part of the web. It's an unwelcome, criminal blight on it and it's being perpetrated by people who are actively trying to ruin a good thing for everyone else. I find it perfectly acceptable that these people be relegated to their own corner and thrown off the web.

        • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Cecil ( 37810 )
          You may find it perfectly acceptable now, but what about if they turn around and start doing the same thing to us? I, for one, don't even find it acceptable as a one-way thing. People in Asian countries have as much right to email me as anyone else. Isolationist tactics will destroy the internet as we know it, and negate much of the good that it has done and is doing around the world. This is not the path we want to go down. It's a poor solution, and it's certainly not the right solution.

          • Oh baloney. There are a bunch of open relays in China, so block them. If the admin's too dumb to close the relay, that's the admin's problem and we shouldn't suffer for their inability to maintain their server properly. In fact, I support blacklisting ANY open relay that's being used by spammers regardless of what country it's in.

            Besides, you don't have to block them altogether. You can blacklist the IP blocks in your mail server and not in your web server. If the IP block can't use e-mail responsibly, I s

          • That's fine (Score:4, Informative)

            by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @05:35PM (#9209234)
            You are allowed to ban whomever you like. There are servers I control that are accessable from as little as one subnet (and others that are on a physically private network). That's my right.

            It also could work to help force people to get their shit straight. Many ISPs (domestic and foriegn) are just non-responsive to SPAM/hacking complaints. One proven tactic that works is the threat of mass bans. Between a proposed UPD and a ban by the members of Nanog, UUNET was convinced to become more responsive to complains of network abuse.

            The Internet does not have a police force so the community polices itself. If a group won't play by the rules, they shouldn't be supprised to find themselves excluded from a large part of it.

      • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tacocat ( 527354 )

        You didn't read the article did you?

        It doesn't claim that the source of spam is 71% China. It claims that the indicated web server in the spam is located in China 71% of the time.

        You can blacklist the entire Asian world and you won't guarantee any reduction in spam itself.

        Challenge - Response is the most fucked up solution I've ever seen. I tried and it got spammed heavily for using it. It doesn't work. It's a resource pig and it pisses a lot of people off.

        The problem isn't Asia or anyone else. The

    • Re:Use blacklists... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mysticode ( 696150 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:44PM (#9207898)
      That's not going to help too much. According to the article, 71% of the URLs appearing in spam messages point to websites hosted in China however 60% of spam messages are sent from the US. In fact, China (although second) is only the location of the mail servers sending about 6% of the spam messages that they analyzed. The post was not too clear on that but the source article is.
    • If you don't know anyone in China (or Asia) you can use a blacklist for the whole region. My firewall with OpenBSD's awesome spamd autoupdates its tarpit blacklists every couple of hours.

      OpenBSD has added greylisting [puremagic.com] support to spamd in 3.5, and that feature is very efficient in dealing with spam as well as e-mails from infected Windows machines. SpamAssassin has much less work todo now :-)

  • What does the govt. have to say about it?

    Or do they just concern themselves with what's information is comming into their country..
    • I wonder if it'd be possible to use those spam servers to spread anticommunist propaganda into China.

      The problem would be solved in short order... at least until the next crop of servers pops up.
    • I'll tell you what they say. It's, "That will be $100,000 USD for this month's hosting fees, Mr Richter. Thank you for your patronage, and it has been a pleasure doing business with you. Please come again."

      They don't give a rat's ass what goes on, as long as they are earning hard currency for doing it. If CCCP hadn't fallen, you can guarantee they'd be doing the same thing.

  • The Great (fire)Wall of China (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kent_eh ( 543303 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:12PM (#9207472)
    If China can keep much of the rest of the internet inaccessable to their citizens, why can't the rest of the world block the polution that China is transmitting?
    • why can't the rest of the world block the polution that China is transmitting?

      Because the moment the world accidently blocks John Chang's e-mail from China to his son in the USA, people would start bitching about 'censorship of the internet' and how 'the first amendment was being trampled on because they can't chose to recieve thousands of spam messages.' The only reason China can get away with this is because they have a communist government. The moment it falls apart (if ever) you can expect to see the f

    • why can't the rest of the world block the polution that China is transmitting?

      What, and deny ourselves the email equivalent of B grade Kung Fu movies?

      "Do Viagra need you? Make man you strong and sexy you. Click please link here below."
    • Find the closes chinese emabassy and reforward your spam there. then keep moving the target to different agencies in case they block your IP. if enough people did it it would become a self moderating DOS attack.

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by crumbz ( 41803 ) <[moc.liamg>maps ... uj>maps_evomer> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:13PM (#9207479) Homepage

    Yet another IT service being outsourced overseas........

    Write your congressperson and demand that SPAM jobs be kept at home!

  • blacklist the netblocks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by apachetoolbox ( 456499 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:13PM (#9207480) Homepage
    I have no reason to ever get traffic from china when I'm talkin about my own personal servers.

    First question is what netblocks can I block to effectivley ban all of china?

  • That's the thing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:13PM (#9207482) Homepage
    Hardly surprising, since as soon as you spam a million people, an hour later you're hungry to spam a million more. ;)

  • Firewalling? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by essiescreet ( 553257 )
    What about the big firewall stuff that China uses to restrict access? I guess it doesen't affect email?, or maybe it's government approved?

  • Old Joke (Score:4, Funny)

    by nightsweat ( 604367 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:15PM (#9207516)
    Me Chinese, me play joke, me send ads for erectile disfunction drugs, marital aids, sites with farm animals, septic tank cleaning, unlimited monthly income potential, hot stock tips, offers to meet girls in your area, and tiny little remote control cars to your inbox.

  • C'mon... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Adam Booth ( 628536 )
    Hey, It's China. Give them a break. Almost all of our stuff comes from China, why not the spam? We still owe them for Chinese food.
  • Why not start blocking IP addresses for SMTP from China? Also start some sort of whitelist of known good STMP servers to help the legit email users in China. If the country can get (or doesn't care to) get spammers under control, like has happened in other counties, then the rest of the world should take matters into their own hands.

    If China is really the source of much of it, we would see a dramatic decrease.

    Or am I missing something?

  • remember what Russia used to say (Score:4, Insightful)

    by samantha ( 68231 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:18PM (#9207552) Homepage
    It was along the lines of "the capitalist countries will sell us the rope the hang them with". Those driven to financial gain eschewing possible ethical concerns will at best impose a lot of friction and drag on the system. They may end up poisoning the internet sufficiently to end a lot of net freedom we take for granted. I am sure China is more than happy to take our money as we bury ourselves.

  • blackholes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Feyr ( 449684 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:19PM (#9207567) Journal
    there was a tip posted to NANOG this morning. you can use china.blackholes.us as a RBL (look at their page, they have other lists) to effectively block all mail from china's IPs

  • Word to that... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Adam Booth ( 628536 )
    I too have gotten tired of spam, and run my own mail server on my domain. I have complete control over my email, and complete control over the spam. I get less than 1% spam. However, it's sad that it has to come to that. Not everyone can run their own email servers. What about my mom or grandmother who can't even manage to set up their email account under M$ Outlook? For anyone who has the skill/interest, setting up your own email service is a good idea.

  • Why block China? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Unnngh! ( 731758 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:20PM (#9207586)
    Several people have mentioned blocking all of China, but what good will this do? Okay, most of the spam originates from there, but this wouldn't be an interesting study if most of the spam were obviously from China. I would imagine that most spammers are using relays of some sort and have a pretty good idea what they are doing. The country-wide blacklist may not be a bad idea but I question its effectiveness.
    • cash incentive

      once the block affect too many of their own businesses, they will take action. so long as they don't have an incentive to secure and close down the relays, they won't

    • Re:Why block China? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mz6 ( 741941 ) *
      If you don't have any correspondence with anyone in China, blocking shouldn't hurt a thing. The article even states that they doubt all of the spammers are from China and rather the majority are in the US and Europe. This means that, obviously, the spammers are using a relay through Chinese servers. Blacklisting China would stop the mail coming from that country... As was already mentioned, this would only make sense if you are not dealing with any people or companies from there.

    • Re:Why block China? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:35PM (#9207779) Journal
      Reply to you and the 10 other people saying this -- it's not a question of moral blame, it's a question of a technical solution. If you have no reason to expect mail from a .cn domain, then blocking all .cn mail makes a huge dent in your spam problem. The fact that the spammer might be your next-door neighbor is irrelevant.

      I face a *huge* spam problem, mostly from .ru, and dumping everything from that domain makes an enormous difference.

  • Does this mean that statistic reflects servers in a more or less 'official' capacity (aka open relays)? What percentage of spam is relayed from trojaned Windows machines on home broadband accounts? I would assume that this has got to be a high number - and higher every day. As we know, MyDoom, for example, as just spam a trojan in disguise. With such a high percentage given to China, I would assume that they haven't taken into account spam relayed through zombies.

    • Does this mean that statistic reflects servers in a more or less 'official' capacity (aka open relays)? What percentage of spam is relayed from trojaned Windows machines on home broadband accounts? I would assume that this has got to be a high number - and higher every day. As we know, MyDoom, for example, as just spam a trojan in disguise. With such a high percentage given to China, I would assume that they haven't taken into account spam relayed through zombies.

      I was going to post something similar. I

  • But most of my email... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:22PM (#9207607) Homepage Journal
    lately seems to originate in Africa. Nigeria to be exact.

    Grump

  • Where are the banks? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:24PM (#9207636) Homepage
    If you put a credit card number into a site, what bank gets the transaction? That's how to track spammers.
  • Hormel, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!
  • Why has no one mentioned the difference between servers and relays? It's no secret there are lots of open relays in that part of the world - I want to know how these folks think they have determined the actual "servers" are there and not the relays.

    Lots of open usenet servers in china - but how is their propogation? Lots of open mail relays, but I very much doubt the source of the spam are these machines in PROC.

    • Any spam you get for "bulletproof hosting" is no doubt for a server located in China. That's why they're bulletproof. No one in the country cares that they're sending spam; it's a legitimate business.

      It brings in Western currency and that's all anyone cares about. It's amusing that they're more whores to the almighty dollar than we (the US) are!

      Spamhaus lists China as #2 [spamhaus.org] though. I'd tend to believe their analysis over anyone else's, especially when you consider how much spam 0wn3d machines on Comcas

  • Another source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by broothal ( 186066 ) <christian@fabel.dk> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:26PM (#9207667) Homepage Journal
    Strange, because USA is still #1 in all 3 categories listed (scroll down) on spamhaus.org [spamhaus.org]
    Besides - who cares where the exploited servers are? Soon (my guess is - less than 6 months) the majority of spams will be sent via zombies taken over by some worm or virus. These computers will be spread all over the world. The only solution is to nip it in the butt. Make spam illegal (as it is in Europe) and sue the pants of the spammers. Enough of those stupid atempts [slashdot.org] to pretend something is being done. We all know that the spammers are from Gods own country - hijacking machines whereever it's easiest.
    /me sets mode -rant
  • 90% of my spam gets filtered out just by looking for chinese characters on the subject header lines. I do not read chinese.

  • Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nnnneedles ( 216864 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:27PM (#9207683)
    75% of spam is american. American lowlifes selling american products..

    At least according to my own experience, and according to research conducted outside of america..

    I don't believe for a minute that the spammers are actually chinese.. You can recognize the writing of a typical american "internet entrepeneur" in most spam mail..

    And the servers? Sure, but most spam servers are innocent infected computers anyway...and if you look at the number of american computers in the world compared to the number of asian numbers..it would surprize me if the majority of servers aren't american..

    I have never seen a single spam email with chinese letters..why?

  • Don't jump so quickly on the Chinese (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smr2x ( 266420 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:28PM (#9207687) Homepage
    Spam may be coming from Chinese _servers_, but I doubt 71% of the spammers are Chinese. Everyone in this thread seems to think that actual Chinese people are doing the spamming. I don't think this is the case.

  • Its a small business (Score:4, Informative)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:28PM (#9207691)
    "Since Jan. 1, we've seen probably a 30% to 40% increase" in spam traffic" Commtouch CEO say"

    This accurately mirrors what I've noted, I run the mail sweeper for a medium-sized enterprise and analyse spam to improve the quality of our filtering.
    I note a lot of the spam has similar formats (apart from the 419 scammers, but they're easy to filter out), leading me to suggest that spamming is dominated by a relatively small clique of big-time mailers

    This does at least make it easier to write rules to stop it. We don't use Bayesian filtering, a human-monitored system can be more efficient if done right.

  • just say NO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:30PM (#9207724)
    I would be perfectly willing to not receive any e-mail from China, or even all of Asia for that matter. Unfortunately, not running my own mail server, I can't block their addresses direcly, but it would be nice if someone mapped out the IP addresses to block and came up with some good mail server rules. Clearly this would have to be done as an option on an acount-by-acount basis, so it has to be done in the mail server and not the firewall, but I expect enough people would opt-out of Chinese oriinated e-mail to make it worth while for any system that supported such an option and coul long-term have a significant impact on this source of spam.

    • Re:just say NO (Score:4, Informative)

      by taustin ( 171655 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:46PM (#9207924) Homepage Journal
      www.blackholes.us has zone files to block, by country, all the major sources of spam (except the US, and there is has the major spamhaus ISPs).

      Implementing it by mailbox would be up to your ISP. The tools they need are readily available.

  • ahhh...so clear now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by justforaday ( 560408 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:33PM (#9207763)
    Well, that explains why so much of spam is for penis enlargement products... :-p
  • ..this isn't news at all. Can't say how many spams I've seen from them.

    I didn't RTFA but did they point out that the vast majority of web sites that yon spam wants to send you to are also in China?

    Time to start blocking off entire segments. Hell, pull the plug on the country.
  • This, of course, raises the question as to when Internet blockades become legitimate poltical tools... Should we cut China off the Internet until it cleans up its act? I don't agree, but I'm surprised that it hasn't occured to anyone yet.
  • Other countries should threaten to stop importing products from China (or impose high tariffs) unless the government stops SPAM from being generated there.

    Once that's done, we'll have to move on to whatever country the spammers move to next.

  • How nice of them to block-list my ISP then! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dman33 ( 110217 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @03:52PM (#9207999)
    Our Chinese clients started complaining that they no longer had access to our US based FTP server and e-mail addresses just last week. Turns out, China blocked the DNS servers that our ISP uses! Great... yippee.

    We are switching ISPs anyway, so I am not terribly concerned, I just think this is wildly hypocritical.

  • RTFA! (Score:5, Informative)

    by koehn ( 575405 ) * on Thursday May 20, 2004 @04:08PM (#9208203)
    Doesn't anyone read the article?

    It said that 71% of the URLs in spam go to web servers in China, not that 71% of spam comes from China!

    The vast majority of spam that hits my mail server comes from the US (comcast, rr.com, etc) machines that have been compromised.

    Tools like bigevil.cf (SpamAssassin plugin) help me to filter those spams with Chinese URLs.

  • What's really happening out there ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gd ( 86983 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @04:45PM (#9208714)
    ... is that those servers are used by spammers as open relay, not that those spams are originated there.

    There're just too many clueless email admins over there. They lack the skills of configuring a well behaved MTA (it's a pretty tough job these days indeed), and the language barrier is just making things worse. Most of the people are just configuring their mail servers according to howto-like articles written by some clueful guys, and those articles are mostly just laying out the steps, no how and why things should work that way. If you hop to any of the tech forums' email section, you'll find it's full of questions like:

    "Help, I just configured my email server according to XXX but things didn't work out ..."

    "Help, why my smtp auth doesn't work? It'll accept any username/password ..."

    "Help, why I can send out email by can't receive?"

    "Help, I got blacklisted by XXX, how can I get myself out?"

    etc., etc. ...

    So, it's a matter of educating them how to do things right. As a Chinese myself, I am trying hard to help out those poor guys by answering questions on those forums, and by helping them out translating the documentations to Chinese.

    So please, don't shut the door to them, they just need to be educated.

  • Cut Spam: Block the APNIC IP's to your mailserver (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kili ( 265889 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @04:47PM (#9208740)
    I went to: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space [iana.org] and greped it for APNIC. I tarpitted all these address blocks on port 25 so my mail-server never sees them. If we get asian clients some day I guess I'll have to specifically white-list their MX(s).

    Relevant portion of the file at iana.org:
    058/8 Apr 04 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    059/8 Apr 04 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    060/8 Apr 03 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    061/8 Apr 97 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    202/8 May 93 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    203/8 May 93 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    210/8 Jun 96 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    211/8 Jun 96 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    218/8 Dec 00 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    219/8 Sep 01 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    220/8 Dec 01 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    221/8 Jul 02 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)
    222/8 Feb 03 APNIC (whois.apnic.net)

  • The products/services are mostly from the U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @05:11PM (#9208971) Homepage
    Those are the people we should be going after. Spam, even under the recent federal law should be enforced against the people paying for the service.

    Do you sell the penis pills advertised? Yeah? Did you request the advertisement? SLAM!

    Forget about blocking all of China. I feel safe in the belief that it wouldn't stop the spam at all.

  • Spam not the only Chinese problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by randall_burns ( 108052 ) <randall_burns AT hotmail DOT com> on Thursday May 20, 2004 @05:29PM (#9209181)
    I was involved as a DBA [outlander.com] in the first database integration for Falcon [hnc.com], which eventually became the world's most popular credit card fraud detection system. According the the fraud analysts that I worked with, the lion's share of counterfeit credit cards were manufactured in China. This is the type of business that takes a fair amount of operational support-you need to create factories and the kind of things that it is impossible to do without the local authorities knowing something is up. What this has in common with spam: in both cases these are profitable businesses that require protection from the authorities to stay in--and that protection can be bought for a reasonable price.


    Ultimately, I think we'll need smarter spam filters. That isn't too different than what we were doing at HNC. IF the letter is from someone you don't know and talks about Human growth hormone or altering of bodily parts, it is a pretty good bet it is spam. It is really just a matter of good pattern recognition.

  • Willing participants or innocent victims? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Thursday May 20, 2004 @05:53PM (#9209361) Homepage
    Many of the comments here are anti-China, which we can understand, because SPAM is so much hated by all of us.

    However, there is differentiator that needs to be made here: how many of these servers are actually run by spammers, vs. how many are hijacked by spammers without the owners' consent?

    Isn't this an over generalization that demonizes entire people like: "All Arabs hate us!" or "All terrorists are Muslims!" or "All Jews are evil!"?

    Another point is a differentiation between the people and the government. What the government does is not necessarily the same as what the people want or like.

    Think about how G. W. Bush is behaving abroad (in your name) and even domestically, and ask yourself do you want everything he does to be actually in your name.

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