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A new great wall is being built, this time across the Internet.
Constructed by frustrated systems administrators and intended only to stop spam, the wall could eventually cut off much of the e-mail communications between the East and the West.
Anti-spam activists confirm that a growing number of beleaguered systems administrators are now blocking all e-mail originating from Asia from their systems, in an attempt to choke off a flood of spam from China, Taiwan and Korea, an action that has upset non-spamming Asian e-mailers.
"Spammers and geeks are managing to do to China's people what the government has attempted but been unable to do," said Mike Markham, an English language teacher in Beijing. "We are slowly being cut off from participating in the most democratic system ever developed -– e-mail."
Many systems administrators and spam-fighters said that apart from blocking all e-mail from Asian Internet service providers, there doesn't seem to be any way to stop all the spam originating from or being routed through Asia's e-mail servers. But they also worry that the blockades will lead to isolating huge sections of the developing Internet.
"E-mail as a communication medium is under attack," said Steve Atkins of anti-spam website Sam Spade. "If an organization discovers that blocking an entire country will stop a huge amount of spam, it does make a lot of financial sense for them to do so. But this retreat into e-mail enclaves also destroys one of the best things about e-mail -- the ability to communicate freely with someone on the other side of the world, even if it's just a 'Hi from China, I really liked your Web page.'"
Spam fighters say they have been unsuccessful in their attempts to work directly with Asian ISPs.
"Complaints to China Telecom, which we estimate receives upward of 50,000 spam complaints per day from Europe and North America, are all ignored," said Steve Linford, a member of the Spamhaus Project. "China Telecom's complaints address is auto-answered by a robot message that replies, 'It's not under our control,' to any message you send."
Blocking the spam-sending ISPs hasn't alleviated all of the problems. Refusing massive amounts of attempted connections also puts a strain on servers, in some cases bogging the system down in much the same way as a sustained denial-of-service attack.
"British ISP UXN found that simply blocking China Telecom wasn't enough because UXN's mail servers still had to deal with hundreds of connection requests per minute from Chinese mail servers," Linford said. "UXN had to actually firewall China Telecom's IP range from connecting to UXN's mail servers to stop the mass of connections from clogging UXN's mail service."
Even after being blocked, Asian ISPs rarely take action, according to most of the anti-spam activists.
"So far the Shanghai-province ISP "online.sh.cn" has responded to us blocking them by saying simply, "take block off," but is not willing to do anything to actually get off our blocklist," Linford said. "Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. are closing the doors fast on China's IP space, and at the rate this is happening the problem is going to almost certainly go diplomatic within months."
Julian Haight of Spamcop said he has received e-mail from Asian systems administrators who take spam seriously, but usually his complaints are also met with silence. Although he is now implementing selective blocking through Spamcop, Haight said he cringes at the idea of an all-out blockade against Asian ISPs.
"It's so closed-minded to just throw up a barrier like that because you feel like all the mail you get from China is spam," Haight said, "particularly when users in the U.S. are actually the ones doing most of it."
While some spam being transmitted by Asian servers appears to be sent by the locals, Western spammers are exploiting Asian mail servers and using them to relay mail. Many Asian systems often run old software or software that hasn't been configured securely or patched properly, experts say.
Some Chinese and Korean systems administrators said documentation for the software they use is often available only in English, which complicates securing their systems.
Cultural issues also contribute to the problem. Many spammers in Asia say they do not understand why spam is a problem.
"It's a sign of respect that someone sends you an electric business card. It means he wants you as a customer," said Zhao Peng, owner of a computer store in Hong Kong.
