E-mail from state-owned Internet service provider (ISP) HiNet is being blocked by foreign companies because of an excessive amount of spam, a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmaker said yesterday.
HiNet currently has 3.8 million clients, about 2.4 million of which are ADSL subscribers. The system sends out over 22 million pieces of electronic mail and receives about 150 million pieces daily.
According to Cho Po-yuan (
"We're asking Chunghwa Telecom Co to pay attention to the matter and immediately take care of it," he said.
Cho also produced negative remarks obtained from the Internet about HiNet. Some ridiculed the company as being a "Taiwanese spam-friendly provider" and some called it a "Taiwan spam house."
Pierre Hsu (
"I did not realize the severity of the problem until I found out that HiNet is blacklisted by foreign ISPs and that my friends abroad could not receive the e-mail I send them," he said.
Pi Shin-min (
Kang Chung-yung (康崇原), deputy managing director of the Internet Services Department at Chunghwa Telecom, said that HiNet is not a "spam provider" and that it has been doing its best to prevent clients from receiving spam.
"We'd like to point out that we are not the one who is sending out spam, but [rather it is some] clients inappropriately taking advantage of the service we provide and affecting the interest of others," he said.
Kang said the company accepts customer complaints and revokes the contracts of those found to have been sending excessive amounts of mail from their account.
Although the company terminates about 1,300 contracts a day with such offenders, there are a lot more out there, he said, claiming that 60 percent of potential spam is blocked by the company daily.
Kang called on the legislators to pass the statute governing commercial spam (
Visibly displeased with Kang's answer, Cho requested Chunghwa Telecom take a more pro-active approach to handle the problem.
"I highly suspect that you prefer doing business with spammers rather than safeguarding the interests of your clients and the image of the nation," he said.
Kang, however, said that it is illegal for the company to read the content of its clients' letters, unless the law is changed or a new law is enacted to allow them to do so.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching