The Harmonious Society
By Ryan on Monday 22 October 2007, 12:49 - Spamtrackers - Permalink
It may come as something of a surprise
to some, but spamtrackers.eu is not visible from China, where it is
blacklisted.I do not know the reasons for this blacklisting, other than perhaps it has to do with an automated rejection of content based on the 'spammy' content. Indeed, to a robot reading spamtrackers.eu, the content is the same as all the usual spam and phishing operations. The difference, of course, is that the spam wiki is there to present the content and to help the public by analyzing it.
And of course the irony of blacklisting one of the internet's best resources on spam while leaving thousands of spammers to go about their business, does not go unnoticed. After all, according to Spamhaus, China is (a distant) second only to the United States in the total number of spams sent.
This blacklisting of the EU website is what led us to establish connections in China, notably with the anti-spam ISP DNSPOD. By having a separate website and network of concerned citizens who fight back against spam in China, the idea was that we could assure that our research and public safety documents could also benefit the Chinese people.
But, as many have noted, spamtrackers.hk is currently offline.
[Edit: As of Tuesday, the 23rd of October, the site is back online, following the conclusion of the congress]
There is a DDoS attack ongoing against DNSPOD, but this is only affecting a couple of the nameservers. The ability of DNSPOD to securely maintain their service and thus the resolution of their customers using DNSPOD nameservers should be applauded.
However, it is not the DDoS attack that has brought down spamtrackers.hk. This has been assured by the the state authorities, which have shut down the server (and many others) to help create a 'harmonious society' in anticipation of the 17th CPC National Congress (what's that?)
Hopefully, once that this congress is over, the server will be re-opened and thus allow Spamtrackers to help end spam in and originating from China. This would indeed help create a more harmonious society.
Related reading:
- China Digital Times
- Associated Press: China's Internet controls tightened ahead of sensitive political congress
- ...
Comments
The HK spamwiki has been changed to run on mediawiki now, and have regular backups from the eu database. This will assure that the data is kept up-to-date, and that internet users in China will have access to the same amount of information as internet users outside China.
Sorry for the slight off-topic, but how is it possible that nobody can nuke the server running at 89.38.113.100?
It is the main web server to which all the domain names mentioned in spam emails for replica watches (such as aslowwe.com) point to. Registrar for all those domains seems to be in China (registrar@xinnet.com), and I have submitted multiple reports but their email server refused them with "quota exceeded".
I also noticed that aslowwe.com has the following set in who.is:
Domain Name: aslowwe.com
Status: clientDeleteProhibited, clientTransferProhibited
How is that posible? Who is protecting them? Where is the police?