Internet Ghost-Towns: The Blocked IPs Where the Bad Guys Used to Live

When a block of IP addresses or a collection of domain names becomes associated with bad action — spamming, jabbering, denial-of-servicing — various ad-hoc Internet groups will add it to a blacklist of rogue IPs or badware domains that are blocked at a very low level in the network. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to readily diffuse an all clear signal to everyone who follows along with this block, which means that gradually, the net is acquiring slums — blocks of useful space that can’t be occupied by legitimate users because someone bad once lived there and now no one will accept their traffic — via Boing Boing