"I remember when you'd get funny looks for running a mail server that wasn't an open relay," says "Der Mouse," a Canadian spam-fighting veteran who refused to give his off-line name. "I remember when there was a machine on the Net that was advertised as having no password on its administrative log-in. Want a guest log-in? Log in and create yourself one. I remember when the Net was a friendly and civilized place."

"Today it is more of an armed camp, suspicious of everyone," he continues in an e-mail. "The Net I knew and loved is dead, killed by uncivilized greedy incompetents who came barging in, without caring that when you barge into a foreign culture it behooves you to learn how they do things. This would not have been a problem, except that they arrived in sufficient numbers to overload the mechanisms that normally would have either brought newcomers up to speed on the culture or rejected them; as a result they killed off the culture we had, the only culture I've ever seen work based on mutual friendship and helpfulness on a large scale."

Spam signified the death of the original Net culture, Der Mouse and others argue. By the mid-'90s, systems administrators started fighting it by closing off open relays. Shutting the pipes made it harder for, say, employees of a company to log on to their corporate network from home, but by limiting who could use the network, closed relays also kept spammers out. This, in turn, saved companies and individuals money, since open relays essentially let anyone borrow servers and bandwidth without having to pay for them.

But some network administrators moved slower than others. So ORBS appeared, with a mission to move them along. At first, most people on the Net welcomed the service. Open relays were sometimes hard to find, and ORBS worked more quickly than other spam-fighting lists. The Mail Abuse Prevention System's Realtime Blackhole List, for example, acts like an after-the-fact plug. Its main list contains domain names that spam has already been sent from, and MAPS only adds servers to its list after the system administrator of the offending mail server has been given a chance to close the hole but hasn't done it.

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ORBS, on the other hand, "tested relays and listed them immediately," says William James, a computer consultant in Mississippi. "No negotiation, no notice. It was fast. Someone running an open relay ran the risk of losing a substantial amount of traffic without any notice."

Over time, however, Brown's pace and intensity started alienating the very people who sympathized with his cause. John Oliver, a systems administrator in San Diego, remembers butting heads with Brown in early 1999. ORBS probes invaded his servers and tested them for 45 minutes, over and over again. The probes returned and retested a few days or weeks later, "as often and as frequently as they saw fit," Oliver says.

Each day that the tests ran, Oliver's server logs lengthened. He received pages and pages of server activity that directly resulted from Brown's tests. "It was annoying because since I wasn't running an open relay, it was wasting my time," he says. "And, of course, I didn't appreciate the implicit accusation that I was an irresponsible admin."

Brown regularly tested servers without any evidence of wrongdoing, says Der Mouse. "Let me be precise: He repeatedly 'tested' my home mail server, and if he had any reason to think it had ever relayed spam, he steadfastly refused to produce it," he says. "He also repeatedly did so after I explicitly denied him permission to do so."

MAPS also had a run-in with ORBS. In 1999, MAPS listed ORBS on its Realtime Blackhole List, in response to several complaints about the way that ORBS was supposedly abusing networks. The group removed ORBS and stopped blocking it from its own servers three months later, but not before ORBS threw MAPS into its own black hole. Even Suespammers.org found itself blocked over a dispute with ORBS. Until the day the list died, spam fighters who used Brown's list couldn't access the Suespammers site, a major resource that might have helped them in their war on unsolicited e-mail.

"Alan's problem is that he was so convinced that testing was necessary that he felt that anyone who didn't want him testing their systems, as often as he wanted to, was somehow just as bad as an actual open relay," says Peter Seebach, a systems administrator who subscribes to several spam-fighting mailing lists. "This is where I drew the line; without any spam coming through a system, and with the admin's request that he not test it, he had no business hitting systems over and over again. I don't see a meaningful distinction between what he did and what script kiddies do with root scripts" that attempt to break into a system.

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