Brielle's Ramblings

So, a lot of people have asked me over the past year or so how I manage to prevent getting so much spam from China without needing to outright block all of China's IP space either in iptables/firewall or DNSbl lists.

Well, I'm about to give you our secret.

The Chinese govt dislikes us (the SOSDG) - alot. We tend to host sites that their govt does not want its people seeing (Falun Gong anyone?).

So, what does any great opressive govt do to sites that are on its banned list? They filter out all of our IP space in their network so their users can't get to our servers.

This does have an interesting side effect though - the filter blocks more then just HTTP traffic (port 80 tcp). SMTP connections are blocked as well. Spammers in China can no longer reach our servers at all.

So, if you want to cut back on spam from China without having to implement blocklists or filters your customers may not appreciate, host a site that pisses the Chinese govt off on your mail servers. I've seen them block new IP ranges hosting Falun Gong sites in under 12 hours.

Easy because it requires no major changes on your end. Fun because you get to irritate everyone's favorite oppressive country and waste their time.

Oh man, this sure does take the cake for stupidity.

Strange-Looking Car Leads To Explosives Charges

Quick recap: idiot and his wife fill up balloon with acetylene for a superbowl party. Balloon builds up static and goes boom. :-)