China Bans Running Your Own Email Server 304
Erwin_D writes "Under the guise of banning spam, China has ruled that running your own e-mail server has been banned, unless you have a license. To qualify for such a license, an 'e-mail service provider' must abide by some chilling rules: all e-mail must be stored for two months, and e-mail with discussing vaguely defined subject as network security or information security may not be transmitted. While the rules contains all the good measures we would all like to see to combat spam, such as prohibiting open relays and outlawing zombie network, the law is also geared toward controlling free speech. From the article: 'I believe that the intent to have an antispam regulation was a good one ... Unfortunately, it seems like during the policy formulation process, it got hijacked and went to one extreme.'"
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
So China is still a communist dictatorship? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The final solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... In that case, don't you think the cure seems to be worse than the disease? Reminds me of the New Hampshire license plates... "Live Free or Die".
S
The only real difference here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe somebody could clarify US and UK law for me.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Insightful)
End Of Times!!
Re:The only real difference here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So China is still a communist dictatorship? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you consider "news" as a revenue source, then "yes", the "surprisier" the better.
If you consider news to be news, then they do not have to.
Re:The only real difference here... (Score:2, Insightful)
if China didn't have driving licenses or passports and introduced them tomorrow, the headline on
Re:The only real difference here... (Score:3, Insightful)
>
> Maybe somebody could clarify US and UK law for me.
UK: Alpha test site. It's a "Voluntary Code of Practice on Data Retention" [wikipedia.org], for values of "voluntary" approaching the sort of statements like "the income tax system relies on voluntary compliance".
China: Beta test site. The Cisco router controversy, the Google censorship controversy, the Yahoo/journalist controversy -- notice how all the toys get tried out in China first? And now, 2-month mandatory storage, and keyword filtering (based, presumably, on Bayesian guesstimates of email subject matter), on topics like "network security" or "information security". If Google can figure out what you're talking about for gmail.com, imagine what governments can do.
USSA: Production site. Data retention is indefinite. ISP never has to lift a finger or pay a dime. No Such Agency exists that would ever do such a thing, but if it did, it would probably measure its computing and storage power in acres, rather than yottabytes.
Re:spam is free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail, whose parent companies have a presence in China and are more than willing to comply with China's censorship regime and turn people in?
If you want free speech in China, you do not use an American company to do it with.
Re:That's the way it is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The only real difference here... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's the way it is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Americans often forget... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing new here...move along... (Score:4, Insightful)
Atleast they know they're being monitored... (Score:3, Insightful)
and yet we still buy "Made in China" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:spam is free speech (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam isn't a free speech issue. Spam forces the burden of the cost onto the receiver, rather than the sender. It is exactly analagous to junk faxes, which cost very little to send but a great deal to receive.
Marketers are welcome to send emails to those people that have given their permission. Spammers abuse a private resource.
Re:The final solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Right?
Re:Americans often forget... (Score:2, Insightful)
Absolutely correct. We have NO right to tell them how to run their country.
Then again, if they're doing something we find egregious or offensive, we're under no obligation to simply accept it, either. We can (and should) be using our wallets to express our unhappiness with Chinese policies like forced abortion, Tiananmen Square, forced repatriation of North Korean refugees [google.com], pirating of movies/CDs/whatever ("Redberry"? Come ON!), and so on. Why the hell we keep selling them technology that they'll just turn around and use against us --- militarily or economically --- baffles me.
Re:spam is free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
That's stupid and dangerous. You've clearly never run a mail server of any real size. There is a very real and quantifiable cost to spam filtering. For an organization of any significant size (we're talking at least tens of thousands of email addresses), spam and virus filtering needs its own infrastructure. A lot of companies outsource to someone (e.g. Postini). That costs thousands (I know this, I am not talking out of my ass) of dollars every month. Even if the infrastructure is kept in-house, there is a significant up-front investment in hardware, plus the cost of staff to administer the spam/virus filtering infrastructre (if the org is big enough, this could be close to a full-time job). Not to mention the extra bandwidth costs when four spammers do a simultaneous distributed spam run, etc. etc.
It's not enough to allow the "mailbox owner" (a term that dodges the fact that corporate email is owned by the corporation) to decide whether or not they want to use spam filtering. First of all, most end-users have no idea how to make it happen, second, the company has to pay for the disk to store the shit that users never clean out.
Spam is not first-amendment-protected speech. If someone is standing on a soapbox yammering about their religion or hawking viagra or whatever, I can choose not to listen, and it doesn't cost me anything either way. Spam, on the other hand, does cost businesses a lot of money, and it costs the spammer virtually nothing. If spammers had to pay per recipient the way direct (postal) mailing marketers do, spam wouldn't be a problem.
It's 2006. Why are we having this conversation? This was all debated and decided in the late 90s. Did you miss the memo?
Creeping freedoms (Score:3, Insightful)
Is this a sign of the increasing freedoms that politicians argue(d) liberalised trade with China would bring about?
Re:So China is still a communist dictatorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yell at them for their policy all you want, but get out of the cold war era and blame them correctly. I will use one of my favorite quotes from an American president:
"How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
Re:So China is still a communist dictatorship? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, since China nowadays allows foreign privately owned corporations to operate in the country, it is a modern globalized capitalist dictatorship. Not that there's much difference to the poor bastards having to live under their evil overlords.
Workaround (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In other news (Score:3, Insightful)
The more they tighten their grip, the more (email) systems will slip through their fingers.
Re:That's the way it is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So China is still a communist dictatorship? (Score:3, Insightful)
China =is= a communist dictatorship. And I could care less about the communism, keyword is
This isn't a troll, it just happens to be true.
Re:That's the way it is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The only real difference here... (Score:5, Insightful)
generally: people tend to be more critical when other ("worse") countries do things.
China: now store email for 2 months
USA: (see next-but-one story) already store email for 2 months but now making it indefinite
China: no emails about bypassing security
USA: no talk of bypassing security in any form
Re:Sensationalizing at its best (Score:1, Insightful)
(The other 50% is Japanese porn sites. God only knows why... I've never visited a Japanese porn site in my life.)
America, look to the log in your own eye before you criticize the speck in China's.