One could argue that the "botnets for rent" business model is in more widespread use than either EC2 or gridserver...
I'm unclear whether that statement needs a smiley or not...
i'd say that since EC2 won't be shut down when it's found out about, that you need a smiley. "widespread use" is too narrow a term. none of us expects white-hat e-commerce business to move into rented botnets, and rented botnets aren't all going to be in the same address space or ASN.
IMHO, Amazon will eventually be forced to bifurcate their EC2 IP space into a section that is for "newbies" and a section for established customers. The newbie space will be widely black-listed, but will also have a lower rate of abuse complaint enforcement. The only scalable way to deal with a system like EC2 is to provide clear demarcations of where the crap is likely to originate from. Regards, Ken -- Ken Simpson CEO MailChannels - Reliable Email Delivery http://mailchannels.com 604 685 7488 tel