I really should have done this after 5 years, but I apparently forgot or was caught up with other things. But, anyway, it's been 7 long years of running the Abusive Hosts Blocking List - sometimes tedious, sometimes quite humorous, sometimes quite expensive. To recap 7 years...
October 2003
First announcements were made about the AHBL, and it replacing the Summit Blocking List - our first incarnation of abuse fighting services that was sabatoged and wrecked by the actions of an overweight, arrogant, and downright greedy individual. Although we had much less resources then before to begin with, we had the support of several launch partners as well as other DNSbl providers, and came out guns blazing. It didn't take long before we had a dedicated user base and were finding/listing proxies faster then we had resources to handle.
2004-2005
Over the first two years, we added new services such as the RHSbl, which gave users/providers the ability to spot spam domains in the From: and body of e-mails. When integrated with SpamAssassin, a powerful tool got even more powerful and accurate. We suffered growing pains as our hardware hosting the services suffered failures and corruptions, forcing us to rebuild several times.
Richard Scoville's spamming for his 'FreeSpeechStore' got him in hot water on multiple occasions. Libel/Slandering people, then trying to extort money out of them (Pay-Per-Libel), doesn't exactly go over very well with us. Abuse reports were filed, providers were called, and heads rolled.
Barbara "SpongeBarb Earplants" Schwarz got what was coming to her after she abused usenet, wikipedia, and other resources to the point where she got tossed out of the SLC Library, all the while screaming bloody murder about how we violated her 'frea speach' 1st amendment rights (poor old bat, she forgets she's not an American citizen). According to her, a 'still existing nazi group' has put ear implants into my head and is telling me to go after her. Could have fooled me!
2005-2006
At the end of 2005, Richard Scoville of the FreeSpeechStore, with help from Barbara "SpongeBarb Earplants" Schwarz treid to sue myself, Andrew Kirch, and the SOSDG/AHBL. Naturally, he made several critical mistakes with his case (as Lincoln once said, "A man who represents himself has a fool for a client."), and wasn't expecting the outpouring of help from the community in the form of donations to help our defense. It didn't take long before our lawyer, the amazing and quite skilled Mary Claire Fischer, had Scoville backed into a corner. As if his case wasn't as flimsy as it was, outside the courtroom he was making threats towards anyone who donated money and calling the judge a lame duck, while inside the courtroom it seemed like a scene from Benny Hill at times.
In the end, as expected, he epically failed with the judge dismissing the case because of lack of jurisdiction. Apparently, he didn't do his research carefully enough - but what do you expect from the law offices of Dick, Babbles, and Kookery? The whole case makes for a rather fun reading if you don't mind the few hundred pages of 'evidence'. Funny thing is, throughout the case, he didn't even dispute the fact we called him a spammer.
A huge thank you goes out to all of our friends who helped us raise over $10k to help cover legal costs!
2006-2007
With the legal case out of the way, we started adding more services such as the TORbl and IRCbl, both of which were great resources of IRC admins and operators to help cut back on rampid drone/bot abuse. Towards the end of the 2006 year, I stepped down as administrator of most of the SOSDG and AHBL with major health issues.
2007
With Xen getting mature, the SOSDG and AHBL were migrated to a fully redundant and highly reliable virtualization platform. Most of the AHBL was automated, making maintance alot easier for everyone involved. With newly inspired confidence and vigor, I rejoined the SOSDG as an administrator again and began work on the next generation AHBL.
2008
With assistance from various individuals, we swapped over to new hardware in a new data center - more bandwidth, more storage, more CPU power. In Nov, we suffered a complete hardware failure with the SCSI RAID backplane failing and causing 4 of the 6 hard drives in the main server to be marked as bad. Thanks to the help of our storage tech, we managed to save years of data and transferred it to replacement hardware.
2009-Current
With our services stable for the first time in many years, we've had to adapt to a changing enviroment where open proxies were losing ground to huge botnets under the control of spammers. Manual additions these days outpace automatic from the proxy scanner. We're preparing for two new services due out in the next 2-4 months - one of which I can't talk about yet, the other being a new DNSbl that takes pages from other lists, including SPEWS and the DSBL, and promises to deal with snowshoe spammers and other commercial mailing list providers who don't properly police their customers.
Quite a rocky road, but given how many other lists have fallen over the same time period, I think we did quite well for ourselves. To the spammers, scammers, and abusers, know we'll be watching and ready to hold you accountable to your actions.
