small vent

Mon Jun 29 10:11:52 UTC 1998

On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
> A long time.  We're blocking huge parts of the Asian and European networks
> right now in the Spamblock system, and in fact, I'd estimate that 80% of all
> entries made are non-US these days.

95% of the spam attacks we see come from the USA, advertising USA services, 99%
with forged headers (yahoo, hotmail, msn, prodigy and earthlink are tops, juno
and bigfoot much less now).

5% and growing are people in Europe who seem to think they can get payment for
spamming on behalf of USA web sites!

However, in late October, Europe will require its member states to enact
legislation to control unsolicited communication of any type. Hopefully the
respective gov'ts will do something effective rather than try and sidestep
the issue (just after pigs master basic aerobatics :-).

Agreed that a lot of open relays seem to exist in JP... and there
are significant numbers in Europe as suggested. The time zone and language
differences are going to be a big PITA in terms of getting the problems sorted
quickly. In Japan, they seem to think <postmaster> is optional!!!

The UK is getting its act together on spam... as spammers's targets for relays
are driven out of the USA they are hitting further down the chain (machines on
slower lines rather than close to the cores), targeting ISP's customers not the
ISPs. I suspect that Europe will be the next spammers's paradise regardless of
gov't support etc.

Perhaps we should all hope that the year2000 bug will break all broken systems
totally, leaving only the clueful to run the place properly.

Paul
----
P Mansfield, Senior SysAdmin PSINet, +44-1223-577577x2611/577611 fax:577600 
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