Dr. Nathaniel S. Borenstein

Distinguished Engineer. IBM Lotus Division
President, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

Dr. Nathaniel S. Borenstein is a Distinguished Engineer with IBM Lotus Division, working on Internet standards and strategy and overseeing the Lotus research program.

He is also the President of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and a part time research faculty member at the School of Information of the University of Michigan.

He has been an Internet user, developer, standardizer, entrepreneur, and social activist since 1980.

His credits include the MIME standard, the Andrew Mail System, the metamail software, the Safe-Tcl programming language, "Programming as if People Mattered" and two other books, three patents, the startups First Virtual Holdings and NetPOS.com, and the "One Planet, One Net" manifesto.

Presentation

So Many Good Ideas, So Little Cooperation: The Technical Politics of Spam Control

Spam is bad. The amazing degree of unanimity that greets such a simple declaration is, paradoxically, the biggest impediment to progress in anti-spam standards. In 2003 there were probably tens of thousands of people working seriously on stopping spam. Unfortunately, in open standardization efforts, the difficulty of reaching convergence seems to increase exponentially with the number of people participating. Dozens of antispam technologies have been implemented and shown to be of use, but none of them alone can stop spam. Moreover, a growing set of legal strictures against spam, though potentially of great importance, serve in the short term only to further complicate progress in the technical community.

For a very large and impassioned community to work effectively on a single problem such as spam, it is essential to approach the many alternatives in a spirit of conciliation and cooperative heterogeneity, and to componentize the problem so as to maximize parallelism and minimize interference. In this talk, I will offer my perspective on the ongoing process of taxonomizing the antispam world, which I claim is a necessary prerequisite to effective Internet-wide spam control.

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