Internet Shut-Out. Macedonian users are outraged at the level of blocking Macedonian ISPs seem to be facing. It seems Macedonia has a reputation for fraud worldwide that perhaps it does not quite deserve.
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Macedonia is a small landlocked country which gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Like its neighbors, Macedonia has faced slow economic growth and human rights violations. Economic woes and political uncertainty have kept the Macedonian economy weak. 2002 CIA estimates put Internet users in Macedonia at 100,000, about 5% of the population.
In March 2004, Macedonia added computer fraud to its criminal code. This was, Balkanalysis claims, a response to a "initial (and relatively minor) upsurge of email lottery fraud and (non-internet) identity theft." Others, such as Yahoo!, see the situation differently, warning that orders from "Romania, Macedonia, Belarus, Pakistan, Russia, Lithuania, Egypt, Nigeria, Colombia, Malaysia, and Indonesia have a very high incidence of fraud, and often have unverifiable addresses."
It seems Macedonian users are paying the price for a few bad apples, lack of government action, or perhaps both. Macedonians claim to be increasingly blocked from international sites and fear these policies "will make internet ghettoes of entire countries." These accounts seem to focus on American businesses, which are secretive about their blocking policies.
That said, e-mail seems to be flowing freely. Only one Macedonian ISP (mol.com.mk) is on the Spamhaus Realtime Blacklist and none (currently) are on the Open Relay Database. Macedonia seems to have no real problem with spam (and correspondingly phishing). There are no formal spam laws and ISPs are only recently enforcing spam provisions in terms of service to stop some fraudulent spam. This means the blocking is simply from access, not from incoming e-mail.
This strange blocking situation is quite different from China's "great wall" of international filtering of Chinese spam-prone e-mail. Instead, Macedonian e-mail (not spam-prone) seems to be accepted. Meanwhile, Macedonian pirates (all Macedonians) are blocked from American commercial websites for their own (American) protection as opposed to the Chinese government blocking access to American commercial websites for their own (Chinese) protection.
This scenario is troublesome. First, it is privately implemented and, as Macedonian users have already discovered, even less transparent than Chinese filtering. Second, it is easy to envision a slippery slope: American companies blocking countries in which most people can't afford to pay. This list would probably not differ much from Yahoo!'s warning list.
The irony lies at the solution. For Macedonian users, the clear answer is IP tunneling or proxying. That's right, the same system used to short-circuit Chinese government blocking will be used this to circumvent American filtering. Macedonian users, in a democratic European nation, will tunnel into another democratic (but non-blocked) nation, say, France. So the IP address will appear to be French to American sites but will then transmit the information back to Macedonia.
Thanks to Sam Vaknin for insight and help.
For more countries, see the Spam Laws Worldwide index.