Re: Death of the Internet, Film at 11

[John Weekes <jw () nuclearfallout net>]

On 10/24/2016 9:37 PM, bzs () TheWorld com wrote:
> As I've suggested before how much would you attribute this to a lack
> of English skills by recipients?

I do not think that is a significant factor.

Here are some points along those lines:

- abuse () cnc-noc net times out. It's not a matter of whether they know 
English; they just don't accept the email.
- Some Hong Kong ISPs /do/ respond and ask questions. In English. (As 
does a sampling of other foreign ISPs around the world, including those 
in Japan, Europe, Russia, etc. -- but mainland China is consistently 
silent.)
- The major Chinese players (including China Mobile, China Telecom, and 
China Unicom) are some of the largest companies in the world, with just 
China Mobile having 241,550 employees, according to their 2014 annual 
report. It is unlikely that they don't have internal translation 
capabilities. I also have no doubt that they have a large NOC, and they 
could have a large abuse team (but perhaps choose not to). Large teams 
are more likely to have some bilingual members, and English is a very 
common second language.
- These large Chinese companies are global companies with PoPs inside 
the U.S, and peering with U.S. providers. They sell services to, and 
interact with, companies around the world, including in English.
- I have had others tell me that engineers at these Chinese providers 
contact them for peering upgrades in English -- but that they ignore 
abuse concerns communicated over the same channels.
- Knowing English is not necessary to read tcpdump output, recognize 
attack traffic, and check IP addresses. Recipients don't have to respond 
back, so that's mostly what they need.
- It's not hard to use online translation services.
- It's not hard to respond back and say "Use Mandarin" (or the 
equivalent, in their preferred language).
- I tried sending emails to Russian providers in Russian for a time. I 
received quite a few responses back along the lines of "please just use 
English." This has made me think twice about trying to pre-translate.

> Are they all sent in English?

Currently, mine are.

> Just curious but one wonders what most here would do with an abuse
> complaint sent to them in Chinese?

If I were to receive one in Chinese, I would personally paste it into 
Google Translate. That is what I do with Japanese complaints/responses, 
which are the main ones I see that aren't in English. Most others ISPs 
seem to use straight English, or both English and another language.

-John