more on Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet

Begin forwarded message:

From: Richard Wiggins <[email protected]>
Date: December 29, 2006 1:32:02 AM EST
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet

Dave,

It might be useful to lower the temperature of this discussion a bit.

Most folks in the US probably have very few correspondents in Asia,
including English speaking Asia.  In any event, a large percent of my
Gmail inbox comes from China or Korea, and  my spam folder includes
many  messages encoded in Asian languages, which I can't read.  It's
guaranteed that virtuallly all such messages are spam.

If you don't correspond with very many people in Asia it is entirely
plausible that 95% of the messages you get from Asia are spam.
Reliable estimates are that, with the recent (within the last 3
months) doubling of spam volume, 80% of all mail on the Internet is
spam.    It could easily be as well that if your mailbox resides in
Asia that 95% of your incoming spam mail is from North America.

Please, let's not be xenophobic about this.

/rich

On 12/28/06, David Farber <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]>
> Date: December 28, 2006 11:01:59 AM EST
> To: [email protected]
> Cc: Brett Glass <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Quake cuts off much of Asia Internet
>
> I saw what you're seeing - in spades.  We run a large enough network I
> guess (~ 40 million users around the world) and yes, we're based in  
> Hong
> Kong, so we ran into some of those slowdowns you mentioned .. and  
> we do
> like to think we're antispam.
>
> Sure, if you run a mailserver that's basically "friends and family  
> on an
> adsl line" - or even a tiny ISP in Podunk [oh wait, Laramie ..  
> similarly
> sized, that] you aren't going to see the big picture at all, much  
> as I'd
> like IP'ers to see it, and not randomly generalize and pontificate.  
> [or
> am I expecting too much?]
>
> Fun generalization that 95% of the asiapac email traffic you see is  
> spam
> .. but then you probably don't know anybody there (e&oe traffic on  
> lists
> you're subscribed to) so no particular loss for you if you go firewall
> off the asiapac [hint: that's not just taiwan, china and korea - it
> includes Australia for example, also badly affected by the  
> slowdown, and
> which happens to be one of the most proactively antispam countries in
> the world, with an excellent antispam law]
>
> A lot of countries (governments, even .. hard as it may be for some
> longtime IP'ers to believe) in the asiapac do take action against  
> spam,
> you know ..
>
> And last I saw, the US was still top dog when it came to originating
> spam, most of the spamhaus top 200 are in the USA (and several others
> are all over the map Russia / eastern Europe / Israel etc) - while
> China's actually gone and pulled itself out of a position that was
> firmly on top of the spamhaus spam sources list (they're 3rd or 4th  
> now
> I believe)
>
> This is not to play down the extent the problem there - it just serves
> to put things in a certain amount of perspective that IP often  
> tends to
> lack, thanks to stuff like "95% of email from the asiapac is spam"
>
> Get a real network, Brett .. you'll get some real stats that way. Or
> google around some, read the news a bit.
>
>        srs (http://www.apcauce.org)
>
> David Farber wrote:
>
> >
> > Dave: IPers might be interested in knowing that, as a result of this
> > slowdown, we have already seen a noticeable decrease in the  
> amount of
> > spam we've received -- much of which originates in Taiwan, China,  
> and
> > South Korea. (The flow of spam from South America, Poland, Germany,
> > Italy, and American "zombie" machines -- the latter mostly on cable
> > modems and Verizon DSL or FIOS -- has, alas, continued unabated. But
> > the impact is still significant.)
> >
> > Because more than 95% of the traffic we receive from the Asia- 
> Pacific
> > region is spam, it occurs to me that if these countries made an
> > effort to
> > limit the amount of spam they generated, it might ameliorate or even
> > eliminate the slowdown while the fiber optic cables were repaired.
> >
> > --Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET
> >
>