SPEWS gone walkabout?

According to discussions on usenet, Slashdot, and other places, SPEWS (Spam Prevention Early Warning Ssystem) seems to have been idle since late August. Since the administrators of SPEWS are anonymous, nobody knows how to reach them to ask what the story is. Whether they were all hit by a bus, or got burned out from running the site is anybody's guess.

Unlike many other blocklist operators, SPEWS did not maintain their own DNS system. Instead, they published a list of bad IP blocks and allowed others to maintain the actual DNS Blocklists. Those maintainers have continued to publish the data even though they haven't received an update from SPEWS in quite some time. As the problem continues, those block lists become more and more obsolete.

I expect that if SPEWS does not show signs of life pretty soon, administrators will stop using them, and the DNS Blocklist maintainers will drop the data.