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Burmese rulers admit they detained hundreds of monks in crackdown
October 5, 2007
Burmese rulers admit they detained hundreds of monks in crackdown
Where are the monks? Burma's rulers say hundreds of them were imprisoned, and security forces are searching for four religious men who led last month's dramatic demonstrations against the military government.
AP quotes from a report on state-run TV that said 18 monasteries were searched and 500 monks were detained along with nearly 200 lay disciples. More than 100 people are still being questioned, according to the statement.
A special envoy from the United Nations said he wasn't optimistic about the conditions on the ground in Burma, also known as Myanmar. "Of great concern to the United Nations and the international community are the continuing and disturbing reports of abuses being committed by security and non-uniformed elements, particularly at night during curfew, including raids on private homes, beatings, arbitrary arrests, and disappearances," Ibrahim Gambari told the U.N. Security Council.
The government claims 10 people died during the protests, but opposition groups put the death toll closer to 200. During a meeting with senior clerics, a government official also claimed they seized a bunch of "nonreligious material" from the monasteries, including pornography, political literature and headbands adorned with the U.S. flag or a swastika.
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E-MAIL WAS truly the killer app, along with the Web, that made the Internet what it is today. A barren wasteland of adverting, conspiracy theories, and trite urban legends passed on as fact. Anyway, e-mail truly revolutionised our society in a very short period of time. It allowed us to communicate in ways never imagined. Brief notes to friends, relatives, or business colleagues can be passed around the world almost instantaneously, essentially for free. Originally designed for scholarly types to keep abreast of research, it has become a huge and powerful business tool. I could go into detail, but there is really no need. We all know how beneficial e-mail is within the business world.
Spam has recently been on my mind because of a strange set of circumstances. My personal e-mail account is almost devoid of Spam, I've taken steps to keep that from happening, and my domain provider has a pretty decent setup for blocking it. Even when it does mark something as spam it still forwards it to me, encapsulated, thus saving me from false positives. My work e-mail I use for nothing other than mails to clients and colleagues, so I had little spam there as well. Then a co-worker left, and I was chosen to have his e-mail forwarded to me. Now this guy has apparently been asking spammers to be put on every mailing list there is, because his account is just inundated all day long. So this, along with some other problems that I will get into, has brought Spam to my attention anew.
When Spam was first introduced to the world is a matter up for debate. Googling "History of Spam" will give you a multitude of interesting links. Regardless of when or how it was introduced, it's here and that's all that really matters. Just like nuclear weapons, once invented, they can't be un-invented. But spam has now infected the system of e-mail, made it sick, and is in fact killing it. Strangely what is killing it is not so much the Spam, but rather the defences raised to protect us from it.
First, Spam was simply an annoyance. The fact that it continued to grow is based solely in the stupidity of people, a market that is infinite in its depth. Those of us that really weren't interested in buying Viagra online, or get a second mortgage at 93% interest or whatever, were annoyed. At first it was one or two or three a day, now it can easily reach into the thousands of spams a day. Then hackers took up using Spam as a virus vector. Now we had a serious reason to block Spam. It became a security risk to networks around the world, networks that were the backbone of companies, companies that if their network were weakened would go out of business.
Doctors say the case is terminal
Recently my Aunt sent me an e-mail, which, like a good nephew I replied to right away. A week later she called and asked why I wasn't replying to her mail. Turns out that AOL was killing mail coming from blocks of IPs that include my domain provider. But most importantly, they don't do any kind of notification, to either side. They simply kill the mail, poof, gone, vanished, never to be seen again. It becomes an ex-mail. The same thing has happened to me in a business role, but instead it was due to the fact that I had sent a .doc attachment from outside the AOL domain, and their rules find this unacceptable. But it's not just AOL, all sorts of organisations are doing this.
This is the first serious symptom of e-mail's malaise. The doctors keep saying that treatment will fix it, and e-mail will be well again. But once the patient is out of the room the doctors talk about how long the patient has left. They know the case is terminal, they hope for a miracle, but sadly miracles don't usually come in time. All sorts of treatments are discussed - paying a very small amount of money per mail, having the e-mail client do some computation, meaning regular e-mail will take a little bit longer, but sending huge amounts of mail then takes a long time. All of this is the modern day equivalent of bleeding with leeches.
Communication systems rely on one thing and that's reliability. Once reliability is compromised, the system of communication becomes useless. What would you do if every once in awhile you tried to place a call, only to have your friends phone service say, "Based upon the time you're calling we suspect you're a telemarketer, so we aren't going to let the call go through". Or if the Post Office started shredding your mail because you had the same zip code in you address as some fraudster. I can't find any stats on the amounts of mails lost daily, but it's much higher than it should be. Beyond the ones that are lost, are the e-mails simply not sent. I've completely given up sending e-mail to anyone within the AOL domain. E-mail continues based on pure inertia but it is far from enough to keep it alive indefinitely. Let's examine some of the cases where Spam blockers are triggered, and see how we are destroying its usefulness.
Recently a friend sent me an e-mail where she was complaining about something her mother had done wrong with her mortgage application. What had triggered the Spam filter were the use of the word "Mortgage" and her use of capital letters (shouting or accidentally hitting the caps lock key). Now while I know that the word "Mortgage" is used in many Spams, it is also a fairly common word to use in discussions with other people, seeing as how there are millions of people that actually have mortgages. In addition, the use of caps, while not as common, is frequently used as a way to show irritation.
Yesterday my friend's mail server was going to be offline for a couple of days (don't ask), so she asks me to forward those e-mails that she hadn't received the day before. (probably related, and we'll get into that later). So I did what any user of Outlook would do; I selected those e-mails and hit forward. This creates a .eml attachment. Well two of her other mail servers denied them as being a potential virus vector, due to the .eml attachment. Another file type that is banned by some e-mail servers is .zip files. Again, a fairly common thing to be doing. Sending a friend or associate a series of files zipped up for convenience, or zipping them up to save bandwidth. Forwarding and attachments, of all kinds, are a very common usage of e-mail. It is quickly becoming un-usable.
Linking to certain types of websites is also verboten nowadays. Links to things like .asp sites can also lead to downloading forms of malware and viruses. While this is less likely to be something important, it's a bit unnerving anytime you basically get an e-mail that says "Go away you nasty spammer" because you sent a link to a friend. This is seriously a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Surely many kinds of links, once clicked, can lead to all sorts of undesirable results. However, blocking mail because a link could be damaging is asinine. Oftentimes I need to send a link for a program to someone. While I understand the possible sinister uses of links like this, it is also an important way to pass things on to other people, particularly computer neophytes who need to be led by the hand to fix problems. Often when I send a link like that I am trying to solve a malware problem, not cause it. As such by blocking links we are not only not helping the problem, we are actually making it worse.
Kill everyone with brown hair
In the end, rules for identifying Spam are the equivalent of saying "Most criminals have brown hair, so we should kill everyone with brown hair". The result of all this is that higher and higher percentages of e-mail are quite simply disappearing. Most of this is Spam, but every day more and more legitimate e-mail disappears, e-mail that is completely valid. Most of it is business mail, since the verbiage of business mail is closer to that of Spam, the false positives hit where it is the most damaging.
There is also another area where damage is being done. My friend with the mortgage mail and I send e-mail to each other all day long. Sometimes hundreds of messages a day. Basically we're sending mail while we are at the computer, and we are at the computer whenever we are awake. When there is a hiccup in our mail servers we notice it almost immediately. More and more often we are seeing delays ranging from hours to days in our mail getting through. The delays are in both of our servers, both independent with different filtering rules. Those supporting the systems give different reasoning for the problems at different times. Always, they say it's fixed, and then days, weeks, or months later it happens again. The frequency of these outages is steadily increasing. The underlying reason for these outages and delays are really all the same. The load on these servers is already pretty heavy just moving the mail through. Nowadays that's not all these servers have to do. They also have to apply filters to the mail, checking for Spam and trying to block that Spam. This takes clock cycles, and when you consider the amount of e-mail and Spam floating around in the ether, it's a large amount of clock cycles indeed.
These filters are in essence trying to do the one thing computers aren't good at. Pattern Recognition. It's not good enough to just cut any mail that uses the word "Viagra" it has to try to figure out the context. However, computers can't do that. So people create rules based upon looking at the mail that is out there. Unfortunately as the filters become well tuned, the Spammers can see the traffic reduced, so they change the text, and more rules are required. Then more clock cycles are required to process the additional rules. Yahoo in particular can show this. The boffins at Yahoo are constantly trying to do something about the Spam their users are inundated with. During certain times I get 10 spams a week, at others I get 10 an hour. This shows the Spammers constantly fine tuning their crap to pass the filters. At times the Spammers go on binges. Having taken over more computers here and there, they can increase the amount of spams. Since their business is based entirely on the basis of volume, the more they send, the more dupes respond to them, as such they are perfectly happy to increase the volume of spams to the limits. When these spam waves happen, mail servers around the world are brought to their knees trying to process the filtering rules on the hundreds of millions of e-mails floating around the ether. It's a losing battle. Spam is so prevalent simply because it's cheap to the sender. Each spam is worthless in more ways than one. It costs nothing to send, however, there is a cost on the other end to block it. The small amount of spammers can create countless amount of spam with no added cost per e-mail, but those administrators of mail servers need to purchase more and faster equipment in attempt to block spam and still let the occasional legitimate mail through. It's a recipe for disaster.
Blacklists don't work
So why do I say this is predicating the end of e-mail? In the past six months these problems are on the rise, along with the amount of Spam. Mail servers are taking serious hits in performance; even those mail servers of large computer companies, particularly the mail servers of large computer companies. Filtering obviously doesn't work. A significant percentage of the spam I receive, for some odd reason, have the name "John Elway" in the subject line, not to mention "Viagra." By the very nature of e-mail these Spams are passing through multiple servers on the way to your mail client, and they still pass through. Yet at the same time, mails that are obvious, to any casual reader, not spam are filtered out. In the above examples with my friend, whom I pass 100's of mails a day with, and have for years, you would think the servers would know that mail between the two of us is not Spam. Yet many times my outgoing server, or her incoming server still mark it as spam. Blacklists obviously don't work, but white-lists will work, simply by the fact that white-lists are based upon human interaction. Yet few Mail server administrators use white-lists, preferring automating filtering. This is a strategy that will never work. Computers simply do not have the proper insight to effectively filter out Spam.
There are vast amounts of open computers in this new Internet, with the multitude of computers hooked to the Internet 24/7, with little or no security. Most running Micro$oft software that is almost begging Black hats to take over these systems. Overall the very nature of today's Internet is just a vast fertile plain for Spammers and Hackers. Yet the software manufacturers obviously don't want to do anything that could stem the tide. Simple things like OS software, or mail clients, that actually monitors outgoing traffic, so that the user can easily see if their computer has been taken over. Like not allowing programs being run from outside parties, without the users consent. Like not allowing outside users access to the file structure on a users machine..
The first Inbox conference, held earlier this month in San Jose, Calif., was supposed to be about "everything e-mail" but was instead dominated by everything spam.
A highlight of the show, which was attended by about 200 e-mail vendors, experts and enterprise e-mail administrators, was the pending submission of Microsoft Corp.'s Caller ID technology, the first step in the company's CSRI (Coordinated Spam Reduction Initiative) framework. Also noteworthy was the news that Meng Wong, author of the Sender Policy Framework, is expected to formally submit the domain authentication scheme to the Internet Engineering Task Force this month.
Once the combined Caller ID-Sender Policy Framework authentication mechanism is implemented in e-mail systems, MTAs (Message Transfer Agents) will be able to check with a domain to see if the IP address associated with the message is authorized to send e-mail.
This won't be a panacea for the spam plague, but it should bring some relief. eWEEK Labs urges IT managers to press the IETF for a speedy approval of the standard.
Standing-room-only Inbox sessions focused on authentication and reputation services, which use an arbitrary set of rules to determine the reputation of an e-mail sender. The popularity of these sessions shows that enterprise e-mail managers should keep an eye on authentication systems' development. Managers, after all, must ensure that their message infrastructures can support the directory calls and other technologies, such as digital certificates, that new authentication and reputation systems will require.
Although the technology behind reputation systems hasn't been developed yet, some vendors at Inbox described the reputation schemes of the future. These systems will be built on the premise that the more responsibly a sender behaves, the more likely the reputation service will approve that sender's e-mail.
Inbox also made it clear that the definition of spam is still in flux. Best practices suggested at sessions, including "E-mail Security and Privacy Policy Essentials," outlined effective strategies for e-mail administrators to ensure that users know what is permitted and what is forbidden on their corporate networks. We suggest that these policies be guided by the principle that reducing spam starts by limiting the ways in which corporate e-mail addresses are used on the Internet.
Many vendors are ready to expand the definition of spam to include all unwanted e-mail. Given that current e-mail systems have difficulty sorting narrowly defined spam from "good" e-mail, we advise e-mail administrators to steer clear of products that attempt to take "unwanted" into account.
The road to a spam-scarce future
The Inbox conference provided a glimpse into a future where spam is reduced to a trickle, but that future is still some distance away. The keys to spam scarcity include:
Authentication The ability to tie identity to an e-mail message is vital to stopping spam. Inbox attendees discussed technical challenges, including what authority would be responsible for handling all these authentication requests. It will likely be several years before the fight for authority settles on a technology that provides effective authentication.
Reputation To get legitimate unsolicited e-mail past ever-more-vigilant anti-spam tools, senders will have to get a pass based on their ability to play by the rules. Unfortunately, presenters at the Inbox conference made clear that these rules—from accurate subject lines to requiring a real return e-mail address—are still far from finalized. The final authority that decides who is and is not playing the game correctly is also far from decided.
Security As e-mail systems receive closer scrutiny as a possible virus vector, get ready for a lot more message scanning..
Microsoft has filed eight more lawsuits against nearly 200 alleged spammers in the past two weeks, stepping up a year-old legal campaign against senders of junk E-mail.
The current round of lawsuits--Microsoft has filed 80 such suits worldwide--seeks injunctions against the defendants and may result in civil fines of as much as $1 million per defendant under the federal Can-Spam Act and Washington state laws. One person named, John Hites of Florida, is one of the world's most prolific spammers, according to nonprofit anti-spam group Spamhaus.org.
Microsoft and other big Internet service providers have been using a mix of technological and legal remedies to crack down on spam. The Federal Trade Commission last week said it won settlements from two senders of "phishing" E-mails that tried to dupe America Online subscribers into disclosing bank-account numbers and other information. Also last week, AT&T Wireless, Charles Schwab, IBM, and other companies formed a group to promote standards that could guard against identity theft.
According to Gartner, 57 million U.S. adults have received phishing E-mail; more than 75% of those arrived in the last six months.
But Bart Lazar, a partner at national law firm Seyfarth Shaw, gives the legal broadside against spammers mixed marks. The FTC last week said it wouldn't create a "do not spam" registry for fear it could be hacked. Says Lazar: "To say this has been anything more than moderately successful would unfortunately be an overstatement.".
FTC's rejection of anti-spam list is facing reality
June 21, 2004
The Federal Trade Commission may have said no to a "do not spam" registry, but within hours of last week's decision, grass-roots campaigns were launched in protest.
These anti-spammers, it seems, plan to be as persistent as spammers are when it comes to the issue of junk e-mail.
In some ways, that's good. While the FTC's reasons for not creating such a registry right now make sense, the clock is ticking to find a solution.
So far, the federal "Can Spam" law that took effect six months ago has had little, if any, impact on decreasing the volume of junk e-mail.
What is waning is the public's patience and tolerance for it.
After the FTC's decision, a nonprofit group called Seeds of Simplicity said it is starting an online campaign "for fed-up spam victims."
The organization hopes to get 20,000 signatures to send to the FTC and Council of Better Business Bureaus asking the two agencies to help ease the "overload of commercial information," including spam.
The group says spam is part of "stuffocation," which stands for "suffocation by stuff." While funny, they may have a point.
Meanwhile, a Chicago man who established Ethicalemail. com says he has gathered more than 100,000 e-mail addresses of people who want to establish a "do not e-mail" list.
The FTC's recommendation, said site founder Rocky Mosele, is "one more reason for the public to stop spam and bulk e-mail on our own."
He plans to give the addresses to "bulk e-mail houses" and tell them to remove the addresses from their e-mail lists.
His site's database of e-mail addresses will be "specially coded," he said, so that if recipients are sent junk e-mail, the spammers can be tracked.
No matter what his security measures, few codes are unbreakable, and Mosele's database is a dare to hackers and a lure to spammers.
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Canadian Internet drugs safer than from abroad, U.S. says
June 21, 2004
A U.S. report that says drug shipments to American consumers from Internet pharmacies in Canada are safer and more reliable than from other countries, is expected to fuel support for three bills before the U.S. Senate to legalize drug imports from Canada.
"You gotta love it," said David MacKay, executive director of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association in Winnipeg.
"The argument should never have been are drugs from Canada safe. It should be how do you get Canadian drugs safely into the hands of American patients."
The report, prepared by the U.S. General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, observed "questionable characteristics and business practices of some of the Internet pharmacies from which we received drugs," but said that most were from outside of Canada and the United States.
"Many foreign Internet pharmacies outside of Canada dispensed drugs without instructions for patient use, rarely provided warning information and in four instances provided drugs that were not the authentic products we ordered."
Drug prices in Canada are about 44 to 78 per cent lower than in the United States because of price controls, currency exchange rates and the buying power of large public sector drug plans.
Citing potentially unsafe sales of prescription drugs into the United States, multinational drug companies have waged an 18-month battle to curtail supplying on-line pharmacies in Canada. The cutbacks have forced Internet pharmacies to direct customers to Britain and New Zealand for certain products.
Americans are expected to purchase more than $1-billion (U.S.) of mail-order drugs from Canada this year, according to a recent survey by NOP World Health, a market research organization in East Hanover, N.J.
In its report, the GAO said it ordered 13 drugs with and without a prescription from websites in Argentina, Costa Rica, Fiji, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Spain, Thailand and Turkey during the first six months of this year, including 18 in Canada and five in the United States.
It said all the Canadian sites required consumers to supply a physician's prescription before being dispensed, while none of the foreign pharmacies did.
In contrast to orders filled in Canada, some of the drugs received from foreign pharmacies were counterfeit, the GAO said, including substitutions for Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra, Purdue Pharma Inc.'s pain pill OxyContin and Roche Holding AG's acne treatment Accutane.
It also found drugs damaged and shipped in unconventional packaging. For example, the narcotic OxyContin arrived in a plastic compact disc case, a bottle of the AIDS drug Crixivan came inside a sealed aluminum can that was enclosed in a box labelled "Gold Dye and Stain Remover Wax."
Investigators noted that drugs shipped from Canada did not have U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for use in the United States for reasons such as production in unapproved plants or carrying different labels.
But manufacturers testing found that the chemical composition of all drug samples obtained from Canada were comparable to the product ordered by the GAO..
