According to a statement by the FTC, the agency has shut down an ISP named 3FN and/or APS Telecom because it "recruits, knowingly hosts, and actively participates in the distribution of spam, child pornography, and other harmful electronic content." The ISP was operated by another company named Pricewert LLC, and powered more than 15,000 websites. According to the FTC, this is the first time they've ever shuttered the operation of an Internet service provider. "We're very proud, because in one fell swoop we've gone after a big facilitator of some of the utterly worst conduct," new FTC boss Jonathan Leibowitz tells the Washington Post.

According to security firm MXLogic, the kind of spam drop seen with the recent shutdown of McColo wasn't seen here because scam and scumlords have subsequently built redundancy into their networks.

Back in 2004, the state of Virginia convicted Jeremy Jaynes under a then tough new anti-spam law, sentencing him to nine years in prison for spamming. Jaynes appealed the conviction, arguing that the law, as written, violated his Constitutional free speech rights. Last fall the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Jaynes was correct -- and that the specific law violates his (and political and religious organizations) right to free speech (see ruling). Virginia's Attorney General disagreed with the ruling and hopped to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, though today the highest court in the land refused to hear the case. Jaynes would celebrate not having to go to prison, if he wasn't already there serving time on an unrelated charge of securities fraud.

Spamhaus has long kept a list of the top ten most spam-laden networks. Many of the list's ISPs are regular fixtures because they've decided to save money by ignoring the problem of infected botnets on their network. Verizon has traditionally been a frequent mainstay on the list (which changes daily), and according to Spamhaus, hosts the most infected botnet machines of any broadband ISP. However, the telco tells the Washington Post security blog, that within the "next few months," Verizon will join most ISPs in locking down port 25, and will be migrating customers to send/receive e-mail on port 587.

The past week has seen a number of people complaining about receiving text message spam from AT&T about the premiere of the latest season of American Idol, which AT&T is a sponsor of. Whether users can opt-out of subsequent texts or not, customers thought spamming them was a miserable decision. But AT&T justifies the move to the New York Times, calling it just a "friendly reminder," and insisting it "makes perfect sense to use texting to tell people about a show built on texting." What makes sense is not further insulting customers who are already paying you way too much money for services like SMS that cost you virtually nothing to provide.

Spamhaus maintains a running list of the worst spammers, biggest spam producing countries, and the networks that are the most tolerant to Spam. Interesting in this latest iteration is the fact that while Microsoft has cleaned up their act and booted spammers from their domains, those spammers appear to have fled to Google's networks, placing the onus on Google to uh, not be evil. Google is now ranked fourth on the Spamhaus network list. Brian Krebs of the excellent Washington Post Security Fix blog explains:Google says they've already begun "implementing improvements to minimize the impact of the issue." Other notable names on the list include Sprint and Verizon, who appear at numbers eight and nine on the list, respectively.

"Although all networks claim to be anti-spam, some network executives factor revenue made from hosting known spam gangs into corporate policy decisions to continue to sell services to spam operations," says Spamhaus. "Others simply decide that closing the holes in their end-user broadband systems that allow spammers access would be too costly to their bottom lines."