Richard M. Scoville, editor of a site called the Free Speech Store, is suing the operators of the Abusive Hosts Block List (AHBL) for $3.525 million.
On December 17, Scoville got a Texas county court to issue a temporary restraining order, forcing the AHBL to remove his site’s IP address (71.40.8.100 - Road Runner Commercial) from its anti-spam blocklist until the case is litigated. Spam Kings Blog: Site claims $3.5M damages from spam blacklist

I am glad someone has the time to do this, even if it isn’t the strongest case. At TRC we had a similar incident at TRC last year where we got listed in a blacklist and it had a significant impact on business operations. Our “spam” crime that got us listed was being on the same subnet as a suspected spammer! Nevermind that we had operated on the same static IP for years and that there were zero complaints against our IP, we were still listed. When we contacted them for removal they were abrasive and uncooperative and at one point told us to move to a new hosting facility to solve the problem. We were at a major hosting facility as it was and that was an unreasonable recommendation. I’d like to see more of these blacklisters get sued when they are lazy in their implementation or are unresponsive to false positives.

I am now using WordPress to post this entry. Thanks again to Eric for the help in setting this up.

Update: You may notice a few issues, missing images, etc. as the site migrates over and I cancel TypePad.

I decided to become a Typepad customer after hearing about it from Joi Ito.  At the time I was running Moveable Type on a server that I own and wanted a highly reliable, user friendly alternative and I was willing to pay for it.  I moved my personal blog to Typepad and also established a blog for a graduate level course I teach at Georgetown.  All was good….until Typepad started falling apart at the seams.  First it was sluggish performance, which indicated to me that they didn’t have the processing power to back up their installed customer-base.  Then it was mismanagement of upgrades that took all my blogs down for extended periods.  There is a certain amount I am willing to attribute to growing pains, but they’ve exceeded my threshold of tolerance.

So, watch for even bigger changes as Eric helps me get WordPress up and running on my own server again and the Georgetown course blog moves to a wiki.

While I love Typepad, I’ve found that having my primary URL be a blogging site to be a bit of a hassle.  Within the next two weeks, I will be moving www.devost.net to a primary server that I own and then use blog.devost.net as a link to this content.  In addition, we’ll be starting a family blog that is separate from this site for hosting photos, etc.  Please bear with me during the transition phase and keep an eye on this site and www.devost.net for some big changes.  Thanks!