Comments on: China Outlaws Private E-mail Servers

By: Darknet

Darknet — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:37:32 +0000

Dan: I totally agree. China already took control of their own DNS a while ago…next it will be a seperate Chinese Internet? Well the regulation states all e-mails must be kept for 60 days, so that saves them having to install anything directly, as they monitor all links anyway so if they want anything they sniffed whilst it flew past they can grab it directly from the licenced e-mail it originated from or was sent to..

Nigel: Who thinks it’s about spam? If I really thought it was about spam I wouldn’t have mentioned the great firewall of China and the repression of the Chinese populace in the first paragraph..

By: Nigel Mellish

Nigel Mellish — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 18:28:11 +0000

You really think this is about Spam? Are you kidding? This is about access to communication - an email version of wiretapping, plain and simple. The Chinese gov’t doesn’t want you to send or receive email unless it’s to or from a server that they can access.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:14:17 +0000

Although China is interested in spam control, you have to really wonder. No one, especially countries, do things for “free”. China loses nothing if it is seen as a hub for spammers - fighting spam will be a costly thing, and “registering” e-mail servers and requiring the lock-down of servers will do nothing if they do not police it, and police it they will. This costs money — but why? What’s in it for them to take these steps?

Yes, it looks like it’s very well crafted, this plan to lock down spam. However, the more important thing, the one that the Chinese goverment will pay good money for, is control. Knowing exactly where every e-mail server is in the country (and being able to punish rogue e-mail servers for no reason other than that they haven’t registered) gives them the next step of control they need. Once they know this, it’ll be a small step to require “monitoring software” to be placed on each server, to ensure that they remain “safe”.

Doesn’t anyone else see where this is going? Think of China vs. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. It doesn’t take much to see that this is one more step in the lock-down, not of e-mail servers and spam, but of free speech in China itself.

By: Darknet

Darknet — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 08:51:56 +0000

There is a link at the bottom “Source: VNUnet” if you click the orange VNUnet link it will take you to the source article. Cheers!

By: The shtint

The shtint — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 08:42:22 +0000

Where did you read this information? Is there a reference to a newspaper article or govn’t news release?

cheers,
The Shtint