A few years back, I considered uninstalling Flash, but there was Homestar Runner. Now, I'd consider uninstalling it, but there's the animated segments of Homestuck.

If I uninstall Flash, won't I just miss out on the next awesome cartoon whose name matches the regex /^Homest.*/ ?

Sure, I know and like DNSBLs including Spamhaus's, but this is a distinct application from XBL. Specifically, removal needs to be rapid in order for it to be useful for rejecting customer Web traffic. That's an engineering requirement that email anti-spam systems don't have, since SMTP is designed to retry for days if necessary to get a message through. Moreover, hosts that send any legitimate email are very few compared to hosts that send Web requests; and even though email admins are frequently dense, unresponsive, or victim-blaming, they're still a level above typical users in knowing what the fuck is going on with their computer.

One approach would be to have each DDoS victim continually (e.g. every hour) assert which addresses were attacking it, and only list those addresses which are currently attacking. This way, as soon as a host stops attacking, it will drop off the list. This has weaknesses — for instance, an attacker can use your host all night while you're not using it, without you noticing — but it's still an improvement over what we have today. And it still depends on each subscribing site having a good enough backchannel to the listing service to stay open during the DDoS. Back in the day we'd do it with a dedicated modem line — the bandwidth requirements are really quite minimal — but nobody knows what that is any more.

Sites under DoS attack should publish (through a channel not congested by the attack) a list of the IP addresses attacking them, through some trustworthy third party. Then, other sites should subscribe to that list and refuse service to those addresses until they clean up and stop attacking.

For instance, consider your uncle who uses AOL. His computer is infected with botnet garbage and is participating in a DoS attack against (say) Slashdot. Slashdot sends a list of attacking IPs, including your uncle's, to Team Cymru (the third party). Cymru aggregates these and publishes a list, updated every three hours. AOL subscribes to that list. When your uncle goes to check his AOL email, he gets an error: "We regret to inform you, your computer has been hacked, and is being used by criminals to break the Internet. You can't get to your AOL email until you kick the criminals off by installing an antivirus program and running a full scan. Click here to install Kaspersky Antivirus for free. Thank you for helping keep criminals from breaking everyone's Internet. Sincerely, Tim Armstrong, CEO, AOL."

Then your uncle gets mad and calls up AOL and complains. They try walking him through using the antivirus program, but he just curses them out and says he'll go to Hotmail instead. He tries ... but Hotmail also subscribes to the same list and tells him the same thing: "Your computer is infected with malware and is being used to attack other sites on the Internet. You cannot obtain a Hotmail account until your computer is clean. Click here to install Microsoft Antivirus." He gives up and calls AOL back, and they help him get his computer cleaned up. Within half an hour, it's off the botnet; and within three hours, it's off the list of attacking hosts, and your uncle can get his AOL email again.