Quite frankly, spammers and malware pushers do more to damage the notion of "free speech" than any number of white-hat black-listers. These advocates ought to be on the front lines of the anti-spam fight, showing that government oversight and regulation aren't necessary because the community is capable of policing itself. If we continually show that we can't be trusted with nice things, then nice things will no longer be allowed to us...

Is it just me that finds it mildly amusing that someone else called Kaspersky is making money from malware? (Yes I know the speeling doesn't quite match).

And should be prosecuted for its own capricious and malicious behavior. They often blacklist entire blocks of IP addresses belonging to ISP customers simply because some 12-year-old in the neighborhood tried running a TOR server for a couple of weeks, or some similar innocuous thing.

Yea, that's a good one. You wouldn't happen to be affiliated with e360 Insight or similar mass-marketing organization would you? Subscription to Spamhaus' block list is strictly VOLUNTARY. They do a very useful service reducing the effectiveness of bulk email senders by preventing garbage from reaching their subscribers' inboxes. I realize that those who send bulk email are under the impression that I want numerous scams/shams in my mailbox daily but no, you are wrong. You are as welcome as the vermin that come to raid my outside garbage cans. Kudos to Spamhaus!!!

lolwhat?

Holy crap, I can't believe the load of trite you uttered there.

Spamhaus does not block IP ranges. Hell, if they did, the webhosting company where I work would have a lot more blacklisted IPs (as we get customers forwarding spam, not maliciously). Hell, if you want a "criminal organization", go look for SORBS. They blacklist massive ranges and extort (yes, extort) the holders to pay to have them unblocked.

Methinks that you're just burned because you were slammed by Spamhaus for bad practices or because you weren't smart/savvy enough to secure your own network/boxes...

"Free speech advocates aren't quite so sanguine. They worry the current informal and unregulated take-down process could eventually be co-opted by copyright owners or even repressive governments to shut down websites they don't like."

One is all for free speech, but one has no qualms in applauding this result. That criminal rings would attempt hide behind talk of free speech reminds one of the Bob Dylan line that "patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings." Behind the speech aspect (text served up for human consumption) in this case, there is machinery besides, and the intent of that machinery is quite clearly to steal from and defraud unsuspecting netizens. Hiding behind the "free speech" argument here is akin to defending a suicide bomber by saying that their act constitutes a "statement". That does not wash.

One would hope the same chaps who co-operated to bring the required pressure to bear in this case would not be quite so keen to collaborate with requests from "repressive governments". Judging by the types of people who made this happen, most of them would probably flatly refuse to help or simply give the "repressive government" agent the run-around. One hopes, at any rate.

This reminds one of another, similarly vexing social issue: when shall we finally ban organ-grinders from the streets of our fair cities? That is what one really wants to know!

The net-abuse routing out of Atrivo was not just spam (both mail and web form spam), it was all sorts of malware, exploits, illegal porn, botnets and banking fraud.

This is not a free speech issue - this is simple crime.

Atrivo are not themselves the black-hats; the blame lies with a few of their resellers - primarily Esthost - which take up a majority of their netspace. I'm sure Atrivo will be back, but hopefully they will get the message that continuing to stick up for the criminals at Esthost is no longer acceptable.

Meanwhile Esthost are already moving resources to other netblocks they have which are routed by other shady upstreams. So on the one hand it's good to finally have something done about the biggest source of malware on the web after years of abuse, but on the other those of us blackholing them on a local level will probably get some new IP ranges to block...

I don't always agree with the aggressiveness of spamhaus's decisions, but in the grand scheme of things they have done a lot of good.