> On 1/15/10 6:40 PM, Thor (Hammer of God) wrote: > > [...] The other problem is that many people seem to think I'm saying > > something against the Chinese *people* themselves Unfortunately, such a security measure can be read that way, too. > The solution of blocking China, however, is one which harms both people > outside of China, as well as those inside of China. Therefore, it > translates into an attack on them. Agree. This already happened in a different context. About one year ago, a company in Italy couldn't write to another company in the U.S., for shared business, only because the recipient's postmaster (an ISP bragging around a lot about how efficient they were in stopping spam) claimed (in the bounce message) to have cut off the entire sender's country (Italy). Now, are Italian sysadmins also in charge of teaching the many professionally unschooled ones in other companies, they should not set up their SMTP servers open relay, and why? Actually, I found myself doing that several times. Given the mutual importance of economic relationships between Italy and U.S., such a drastic measure (e-mail embargo?) was counterproductive, by preventing off a U.S. company from dealing with another country. Btw, in spite of some tries, no one in Iyaly was ever capable to contact the U.S. ISP in order to solve the situation; so the Italian company, already dealing mainly with electronic documents, had to slow down communication by choosing means other than e-mail (fax or airmail), or either change their partner in order to keep up with a strict rhythm (dunno how exactly it ended). As a general rule of thumb, drastic filtering criteria have blocking consequences, especially on business. So, blocking a country may seem a suitable measure for a home/club network where/if you know no local user has (and will have) contacts with that country; not for business, as it is already global and is going to be more and more alike. best regards Marcello
