North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Korean network problems, was FW: e-bay

  • From: John R. Levine
  • Date: Fri Sep 26 18:26:16 2003
  • Newsgroups: iecc.lists.nanog

> Yes, I should have clarified this.  I dont think the folks in Korea
> are any more or less competent than their NA counter parts-- be that
> end user or operator.

Unfortunately, my experience is that system managers in Korea are
considerably less competent than their NA counterparts.  The managers
are not stupid, but they are hopelessly underqualified.  Korea made a
big push to wire the country for broadband without any consideration
of who would run the gazillion computers with their swell new
high-speed permanent connections.  So they did things like setting up
every school in the country with servers with identical Windows
configs that are all subject to the same wide range of well known
Windows exploits.  Many of the people who are by default in charge of
these systems wouldn't know what to do with Windows Update even if
they could read the English language instructions, because they have
no computer background.

That, along with an extremely ill-advised law that made spam legal if
you put the Korean version of ADV: in the subject line, is why I set
up the korea.services.net DNSBL which blocks all the networks in Korea
except for a handful of networks with responsive admins and low spam
counts.  I'll be very happy to take out networks that solve their spam
problems, but so far none have done so.

Now and then someone writes and says "I fixed my open relay, please
unlist me" (no, it's not a list of individual open relays) or "your
list blocks mail that is very very important" (quite possibly, but
it's not as important to me as blocking the thousands of spams that
your ISP would otherwise have sent me and whoever it is that's using
the list to reject your mail.)

The Korean government knows that they've dug themeselves a hole, but
it'll be a while until they dig themselves out of it.  In the
meantime, my DNSBL continues to block a heck of a lot of spam and I
can live without the two legit messages a year that I otherwise would
have gotten from Korea.

Regards,
John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
"A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web