In the past two months we’ve had two phone calls from Chinese ISP and domain registrars telling us that some one wants to register a domain name that corresponds to or sounds like our company name in Chinese. They tell us that if we don’t agree we can stop this by paying them RMB 13,000. Yeah right! This is one big con. And it is not just some small operator - we’re getting calls from the major network backbone operators. They explain all this to my secretary (who knows nothing about DNS of course) and make it…

Just before Christmas we stayed in a very nice hotel with very little clue about what is going on with their network. To cut down on the support calls to their “IT Butler” they, via their network service provider, had re-directed all SMTP port 25 traffic to the service provider’s open relay SMTP server.