browsing through yahoo.cn back in 1999 or so when we still had dial-up connections, in order to find open SMTP servers to reply to a mailbomb sent by a "mate". You only needed to try a few universities and colleges - most of them had open SMTP relays.

AC obviously.

You can now buy Viagra over the counter apparently.

I got a portion of Singapore spicy fried rice from my local Chinese the other day and it had little cubes of spam in it!

Proof positive?

Well, if getting the Chinese authorities to act is the trick, why not open an account with one of the rogue firms, churn out a million or so FREE TIBET REMEMBER TIANANMEN DEMOCRACY NOW, and watch how fast the tanks show up to flatten the data center?

While not really the answer (the answer is to shut down the source, of course), why don't you just block everything from China? That's how I set up my firewall - nothing at all is allowed in from China; no email, no web access, nothing. And if you have specific people in China that want to talk to you then open up the firewall for those specific people. Simple. As an aside, I literally can not remember the last time I received any SPAM - it just doesn't happen any more.

I can't get any e-mail whatsoever through to the Chinese, not the police, not even the embasy in the UK - my mail just gets bounced.

I've got hackers trying to get in to my servers and even my domain names, and I can't get through to anyone in China, let alone for them to take any action.

Mind you, it just goes to prove how much of a numbskull that some of these Chinese, "hackers," actually are ... like trying to brute force a Linux box using the user name, "administrator." Doh!

@Michelle Knight, I get those pretty much hourly. It used to be funny, now i just sit in silence as these guys clutter up my log files before BFD catches them. It's not the chinese who are our major issue, its russia and africa... yes, africa has computers...

Dear Michelle,

failtoban may be your little friend here. Just install it and will block for 2h every IP that has tried 3 times to unsuccessfully access your server.

It won't care where the attack is coming from.

It woin't solve a distributed attack, but those are more scarce (by now).

Albert.

Rich 2 => Please don't block all Chinese content. There are some nice chaps such as myself out there - I run a renewable energy information company in China, doing my bit to save the world, and it's a bit of a shame to get blocked by very strict Europeans.

Mind you, I do receive 200 spam mails every day from mostly Chinese sources... :)

It would be nice for the authorities to crack down - I'm not sure how many more hundreds of spam emails I can put up with. McAfee doesn't recognise much of the spam from China, 95% of Chinese spam gets let through as normal mail.

...I'm not holding out much hope, simply because -- based on my own experience -- the Chinese just plain don't seem to give a rat's ass.

China's in my spam shit can forever. For. Fucking. EVER.

"You only needed to try a few universities and colleges - most of them had open SMTP relays."

Yeah, back then MS Exchange 5.5 came configured out of the box as an open relay.

Paris, because no one is more open than Paris