[snip]
Justin, et al, do you have any proof that these attacks are coming from Chinese attackers on Chinese machines? If so, look for commonalities amongst the attacks such as common netblocks etc. If not, the hype could probably be routed into the round file. Attacks happen all the time to the good and the bad. We still need good documentation and due diligence. Until then, join “North America Nonblocking Oriental Groups”
-Paul Lantinga
We may never know since mainland china admins never respond to abuse mails.
-Dan
When a netblock admin does not respond to abusemail, a nullroute should be
set. Regardless of nationality. Unresponsive admins are a threat to your
(and my) network as well as any other network connected..
Justin, et al, do you have any *proof* that these attacks are coming from
Chinese attackers on Chinese machines?We may never know since mainland china admins never respond to abuse mails.
as opposed to jingoistic american site admins. and flying pigs.
randy
Do you send the complaints in Chinese?
Alternately, do you respond to complaints sent to your abuse address that
are written in Chinese?
You can fly into any international airport in the world and assume
that the ground control staff can speak English.
In the same way, the lingua franca of the global Internet is English.
If we are going to be politically correct and insist that every NOC
in the world be capable of communicating in all of the major languages
of the world, the Internet will grind to a halt.
> We may never know since mainland china admins never respond to abuse mails.
Do you send the complaints in Chinese?
I have, it didnt change anything. They continued to respond with deafening
silence.
Alternately, do you respond to complaints sent to your abuse address that
are written in Chinese?
We havent received any chinese complaints to our abuse mailbox yet, but I
would throw them through babelfish if I received any, and I have native
chinese speaking friends I can fall back on if babelfish doesnt work out.
-Dan
You can fly into any international airport in the world and assume
that the ground control staff can speak English.In the same way, the lingua franca of the global Internet is English.
No, not in the same way at all. There is no treaty to which countries
who wish to connect to the internet are bound, stating that they will
conduct their business in English.
If we are going to be politically correct and insist that every NOC
in the world be capable of communicating in all of the major languages
of the world, the Internet will grind to a halt.
And if we are going to insist that they all speak English, we are going
to be insisting to deaf ears; case in point, all the complaints here about
abuse complaints being blackholed.
The very practical hard reality is that those running the Internet
communicate in English. The reason for this is very simple: cost.
In Europe, adding simultaneous translation into the major EU
languages can easily double the cost of holding a conference.
This sort of compromise is universal. There are many languages
within China, for example, but people compromise by using one of
them for universal communications, the language commonly called
Mandarin.
Nobody is insisting that the world's NOCs communicate in English.
They just do, because it's practical. In most countries, there is
a very high probability that anyone with a technical education has
had several years of English in school. This is certainly the case
in Japan, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most of Southeast Asia,
and the countries of northern Europe.
It may be that in ten years or so machine translation will be
accurate enough and cheap enough to allow the sort of thing that
you propose. However, I suspect that most people will use this
high quality machine translation to improve the quality of their
translations to and from English. Once again, it's simple economics:
if there are N languages, the cost of writing translators to and
from English is going to be proportional to N, but the cost of
writing a full set of translators between all N languages is going
to be proportional to N squared, a huge number.
Attempting to build a universal tool for translating problem reports
into all the languages of the world is a utopian project that is not
going to succeed. A more realistic goal would be trying to get
English-speaking engineers to write problem reports in good, clear
English. I don't think that that is going to happen, and it's far
easier to achieve than what you are proposing.
The very practical hard reality is that those running the Internet
communicate in English. The reason for this is very simple: cost.
In Europe, adding simultaneous translation into the major EU
languages can easily double the cost of holding a conference.
Thats weird. WSee, the company I work for is based in Europe, and
we have offices pretty much everywhere. In theory everyone
is meant to have English speaking people there, but in
practice we spend a lot of our time finding people to speak
a common language.
See, Europeans have this knack to speak more than one language.
So, the dutch people here speak english and german at least.
Some also speak French. Some also speak Norweigan, Finnish,
Danish, Sweedish, Swiss, Italian ..
I've had to get a Dutch guy to ring someone in our swiss office who he
knew could also speak Italian to speak to someone in our
Italian office. 
Nobody is insisting that the world's NOCs communicate in English.
They just do, because it's practical. In most countries, there is
a very high probability that anyone with a technical education has
had several years of English in school. This is certainly the case
in Japan, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, most of Southeast Asia,
and the countries of northern Europe.
If they were doctors or pilots then sure, I can believe they've had
several years in school. But these are technical people.
We've all complained privately about the falling average clue level
out there. Gear requires less and less clue to operate, and
as internationalisation of computer equipment gets more popular
you'll find that the monkey that only speaks Chinese, has
setup a default install of redhat 7.0 on his servers and
has configured his cisco to do BGP but fucked all the access
filters is going to be a PAIN to get anything to fix.
Combine this with cultural differences and you're going to be
increasingly shocked as the internet becomes less US centric.
Sorry guys, but we are all going to have to deal with it eventually.
Now, this website. I like it. Who wants to work on generating a few
templates?
Adrian
I guess I missed the email where I proposed something.
Could you quote it back to me?
"Europeans have this knack..."
OFF-TOPIC and stupid.
Europeans have this knack of taking a perfectly good on-topic
operational problem and turning it into a whine about how
Americans don't try and speak their N languages.
Referring to me?
God, I hate being flamed.
Welcome to the Internet. We speak English. Welcome to
telecommunication carriers. We speak English. Welcome to
the International Space Station. We speak English. Welcome
to maritime SOS. We speak English. Welcome to my backyard.We speak English. You don't have to like it, but it's not
xenophobic, xenocentric, Americentric, Anglocentric, or anything
other than REALITY created through EXPEDIENCY.
Thats strange.
I see lots of work with the free unices in an attempt to get
internationalisation to work.
I see lots of commercial software applications and operating systems
which have localisation and internationalisation options.
And, on mailing lists with a subscriber base that is non technical
and non-English-subscriber-limited, I frequently get emails sent
by people in some other language[1].
In fact, I could say that a lot of foreign users can get away being
on the internet without a decent understanding of English.
The internet != telco != ISS != Maritime SOS != any other internationally
agreed upon and perhaps regulated area where English has been accepted
as being the "language of choice". The internet has no regulations,
and as such you must understand that not everyone on the internet -
admin or user - is required to speak English.
Adding to that, the intelligence level required to pilot an airplane,
operate telco infrastructure, fly a spacecraft or sail a boat
is _NOT_ being dumbed down so any idiot user that can read can use.
Now, if it were me, I'd force any company with an internet connection
and a BGP connection to have a NOC/sysadmin(s) capable of speaking
a common language. I'd prefer it to be English because I don't speak
any other languages (yes, I'm Australian, and as my dutch friends will
be quite happy to point out _i do not speak any other languages_)
but I'd be happy with some form of standard.
The internet has a bunch of technical standards which we loosely
agree to. There's no law stating "thou shalt speak English if connected
via BGP4 to thy internet".
Live with it.
Adrian
[1] Generally they are french.
welcome to the land of bigots.
our son brought a bumper sticker back from university of montana "ignorance
and pride, the cowboy way"
randy
I can only conclude from your input that you believe it is better for everyone to learn
several languages to cause international operations to work more soomthly. It is real
nice to have a standard language. In many cases (see above) English is the standard.
That doesn't make us the land of bigots. I have flown aircraft in 13 countries - It was
sure nice (and STANDARD) to be able to (have done it) call Mayday on the guard freg
and have soemone understand.
By the way, Mayday comes from the French word " m'aides" which means help me.
On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 12:26:00AM +0800, Adrian Chadd exclaimed:
The internet has a bunch of technical standards which we loosely
agree to. There's no law stating "thou shalt speak English if connected
via BGP4 to thy internet".
And are _any_ of those technical standards written in a language other than
English? Think about the acronyms we use in network-speak every day - how many
of them stand for phrases in a language other than English?
I'm not saying that it's good, bad or indifferent that English is the primary
language of the Net, but I _am_ saying that we need to be realistic: the Net
was created as an American project, by American engineers, on American
dollars, and likewise for the protocols and standards that run it. I'm 100% in
favor of internationalization, but at a certain level, there must be an
agreed-upon standard of communcation - BGP needs to be BGP everywhere in the
world, not some other acronym depending on whatever the operator's local
language happens to be.
Again, I'm not saying that communication shouldn't (or cannot) be attempted or
encouraged in a multitutde of local language - I'm just observing that those
who try to deny the English basis of the Internet and the protocols that drive
it are ignoring its history.
Ok, they're ignoring it's history. Now what?
There are four choices:
1) Try to get China to pass a law requiring it's citizens who administrate
Internet systems to learn English.
2) Block all access to your systems from China.
3) Type English at them loudly and slowly.
4) Try to communicate with them in Chinese.
Which of these four do you think is most likely to acheive all your goals,
I.E., get the problems fixed without removing access to Chinese systems for
your users?
Or, to put it as my father might:
Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which fills up first.
Acronyms can be translated too. The termination point for my Bell Canada
ADSL service is labelled "ADSL/LNPA", for example.
I think what you meant to say was: "the English Acronyms I use when
speaking English only make sense in English!" 
Joe
In fact there is a simple variant of your third option: send clear,
coherent messages in standard English. I think that on the whole
you will find that it works wonders.
There is a strange assumption underlying what you are saying here:
Chinese people can't learn English.
You are wrong.
China's use of the Internet is skyrocketing. People in China
understand that the common language of the Internet is English, and
they are learning it.
In fact if you run down a list of RFCs, you will find that a
remarkable number have authors with Chinese names.
:China's use of the Internet is skyrocketing. People in China
:understand that the common language of the Internet is English, and
:they are learning it.
Actually, the common language of the Internet these days, is the language
of whomever has the largest consumer demand, and the means to pay for
your services. Given the trade agreements in the works, I think Babelfish
will be bigger than Yahoo in a few years.
In the unlikely event people start to see communication as something
other than a transaction, we would see some balance in the languages
people spoke. Unfortunately, it seems language is also at the ridiculous
whims of The Market(tm) too.
If you really want to stop the attacks coming in from CN, tell your vendors
they have 6 mo's to provide you with a well written and tested product, or
you are switching everything over to OpenBSD. 
Jim Dixon wrote:
There is a strange assumption underlying what you are saying here:
Chinese people can't learn English.
Is it "can't" or "don't feel the need to"?
I don't think it's "can't."
It is horribly USA-centric to expect everyone to speak English,
get pissed when they don't, but not at least attempt to speak others'
languages.
China's use of the Internet is skyrocketing. People in China
understand that the common language of the Internet is English, and
they are learning it.
But there is nothing that requires them to learn English. Your attitude,
at best, smacks of provincialism.
In fact if you run down a list of RFCs, you will find that a
remarkable number have authors with Chinese names.
I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese people who speak fluent
English. That doesn't mean they should have to learn English
to enjoy the Internet.