ORBS's main service was a blacklist of Internet mail servers -- computers capable of routing mail across the Net -- that the ORBS administrator, Alan Brown, had identified as potentially capable of forwarding spam. Now that blacklist is no longer available to network administrators, and they want to know why. One popular theory mooted on the Net is that Brown closed down the site rather than comply with a New Zealand court order demanding that he remove two specific ISPs from the blacklist. But Brown, who lives in New Zealand, is keeping silent. "I am unable to answer any of your questions," he writes in an e-mail. "Sorry."

Even without an explanation, the demise of ORBS is significant, stirring up, once again, an ongoing worldwide debate over how best to administer the Internet and mediate the Net's intersection of humanity and technology. Questions about ORBS's behavior always centered on the problem of how to handle e-mail abuse. But more generally, ORBS symbolized the ongoing struggle between the Net's tendency to encourage individual freedom and the necessity of combating anarchy.

Ever since the Net moved beyond its roots as a small, open, academic community, users have attempted to balance opposing forces. Most favor the right to speak out, along with the right to privacy; they rail against censorship, but at the same time desperately seek the ability to censor unsolicited e-mail by limiting spammers' access to their networks.

ORBS supporters say the blacklist was a fully justified form of preventive medicine. Brown saw his mission as identifying every mail server on the Net that allowed "open relays" -- in essence, that permitted the forwarding of mail from one point on the Net to another without any restriction. Spammers love open relays; they employ them to hide their identities and funnel out massive amounts of e-mail for free. But at the same time the open relays bog down the system for other customers.

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Brown used simple software agents and diagnostic probes to comb the Internet, looking for mail servers configured for open relaying. Whenever he found one, Brown would post the Internet protocol (IP) address on his list -- even if the address had never been used by a spammer. ISPs, systems administrators and everyday citizens who configured their computers to block addresses listed on ORBS could then close off a spammer's favorite distribution tool even before the spammer knew it existed.

More controversial, Brown also placed on his list servers that blocked his probes, whether or not he could ascertain if they had open relays. ORBS supporters say such a policy was the only way to keep a flood of open-relay-capable servers from pumping spam across the Net. The end, they argue, justified the means.

The immediate impact of the ORBS shutdown could mean more spam, says Michael LeFevre, a London technology company executive. "I've received four spams since ORBS went down last week," he says. "I only received two or three previous to that this year."

But not everyone is sorry to see the site go. ORBS has plenty of critics. ORBS wasn't just a useful technology, they say; it was also a tool used by a specific person, Alan Brown, an overzealous spam fighter who went too far. ORBS's own ISP pulled the plug on Brown in 1998 after receiving complaints about the way that Brown used probes to test servers for open relays. Although another ISP agreed to host ORBS soon afterward, Brown's detractors say that he never learned his lesson: He repeatedly insisted that he had the right to test servers as often as he wanted.

"Alan Brown created some nice technology -- nobody faults him on that point," says Tom Geller, founder of Suespammers.org, a nonprofit group that lobbies for strict spam legislation. "But he used it in an irresponsible way, invading others' private networks and using others' resources against their stated wishes." He became a living contradiction -- a man who, says Geller, "used others' network resources to prove that it's wrong to use others' network resources."

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