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== APCAUCE Organizes Fourth Asia Pacific Conference on Net Abuse ==
The fourth Asia Pacific Net Abuse conference was held on 2/26/2004 at the Palace of Golden Horses hotel, Kuala Lumpur, and attended by over 70 delegates from ISPs, government regulatory authorities and internet associations from around the Asia Pacific region. 

The keynote address, a holistic overview of the spam situation, was delivered by Dave Crocker, a man who has, in a quiet and unassuming manner, been involved over the last thirty years in the development and implementation of some of the fundamental concepts of internet and email. 

This was followed by a panel discussion on the cause and effect of antispam blocklist listings. Richard DG Cox of the SBL antispam blocklist ([http://www.spamhaus.org/ http://www.spamhaus.org]) and Syahrul Sazli, a senior systems administrator at Jaring ([http://www.jaring.my/ http://www.jaring.my]), one of Malaysia's largest ISPs, discussed this issue. The panel was moderated by Suresh Ramasubramanian, manager of antispam operations at Outblaze ([http://www.outblaze.com/ http://www.outblaze.com]), which is a large mail hosting provider that uses several blocklists to filter spam from reaching its users. 

The panelists drew attention to the problems faced by asian ISPs, who are increasingly finding their mailservers and IP addresses blocked for spam because of an increasing trend of spam hosting. 

The reason for this trend is apparently that ISPs and hosting providers in some asian countries are becoming increasingly popular with spammers around the world, who are perpetually looking for ISPs from which they will not be terminated for spamming. Quite a few asian providers are apparently fast becoming infested with spammer hosted websites and mailservers, either because of their lack of knowledge about spam, or because of slow reaction times on the part of the ISP's support and antispam staff. Jaring had persistent problems with one such spammer, and faced the unappealing prospect of extensive listings in the SBL. 

This panel struck a chord with several ISPs in the audience, who peppered the panelists with several questions about listing / removal criteria of blocklists and their role in spam filtering. 

The panel was followed by a regional update session, where representatives from various asia pacific economies, associated with internet associations, governments, regulatory agencies / watchdog bodies et al gave short updates on the status of spam problems, and of antispam legislation in their respective regions. 

The speakers included - 

Shamsul Jafni Shafie - Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission 

Li Yu Xiao - Director of the Antispam Task Force, Internet Society of China 

David Harris - Counsellor, Internet New Zealand 

James Seng - InfoComm Development Authority, Singapore 

Andrew Maurer - National Office of the Information Economy (NOIE), Australia 

Arthur Shay - Shay and Partners, Taipei 

Jeonghye Choi - Internet Association of Korea 

The regional update session, which brings together people from around the asia pacific region, was first introduced in '''APCAUCE''' 2 at Taipei, in February 2003. It has been quite successful in its aim of exposing people who are responsible for consulting on or implementing antispam legislation to their counterparts from other regions. 

The final event of the day was a panel that discussed new antispam proposals that are being introduced today. The panelists were Dave Crocker and David Harris, and the discussion was moderated by James Seng. This panel was well received and provoked an animated discussion on the features, merits and demerits of these new proposals 

As this panel points out, the current proposals can be categorized into three broad headings - 

1. Sender Pays email schemes - such as the "e-stamp" project introduced by Daum, one of korea's largest ISPs, and Microsoft's recent penny black project. 

2. Spam Disincentive Schemes such as Yahoo's domain keys. these were summarized by Dave Crocker. 

3. SPF / Sender Policy Framework ([http://spf.pobox.com/ http://spf.pobox.com]) - James Seng presented a slideshow on SPF, on Meng Weng Wong's behalf. 

The next '''APCAUCE''' event will be held on July 28-29 2004 at '''Kathmandu''', Nepal, during a meeting of SANOG ([http://www.sanog.org/ http://www.sanog.org]) - the South Asian Network Operators Group.