bugtraq - Re: All China, All The Time

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Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:54:39 +0100
From: Marcello Magnifico <rdo-lists@....is-a-geek.net>
To: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Re: All China, All The Time

> On 1/15/10 6:40 PM, Thor (Hammer of God) wrote:
> > [...] The other problem is that many people seem to think I'm saying
> > something against the Chinese *people* themselves

Unfortunately, such a security measure can be read that way, too.

> The solution of blocking China, however, is one which harms both
people 
> outside of China, as well as those inside of China. Therefore, it 
> translates into an attack on them.

Agree. This already happened in a different context.
About one year ago, a company in Italy couldn't write to another company
in the U.S., for shared business, only because the recipient's
postmaster (an ISP bragging around a lot about how efficient they were
in stopping spam) claimed (in the bounce message) to have cut off the
entire sender's country (Italy). Now, are Italian sysadmins also in
charge of teaching the many professionally unschooled ones in other
companies, they should not set up their SMTP servers open relay, and
why? Actually, I found myself doing that several times.

Given the mutual importance of economic relationships between Italy and
U.S., such a drastic measure (e-mail embargo?) was counterproductive, by
preventing off a U.S. company from dealing with another country.
Btw, in spite of some tries, no one in Iyaly was ever capable to contact
the U.S. ISP in order to solve the situation; so the Italian company,
already dealing mainly with electronic documents, had to slow down
communication by choosing means other than e-mail (fax or airmail), or
either change their partner in order to keep up with a strict rhythm
(dunno how exactly it ended).

As a general rule of thumb, drastic filtering criteria have blocking
consequences, especially on business. So, blocking a country may seem a
suitable measure for a home/club network where/if you know no local user
has (and will have) contacts with that country; not for business, as it
is already global and is going to be more and more alike.

	best regards
	Marcello