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"A Spy In the House of War: My Life
as a NATO Collaborator."
People who've known me for a long time are often surprised to hear that, in the waning days of the cold war, I consulted for NATO. Two years later, in 1989, I published an article about the experience. Twenty two years later, in 2011, I found out that twenty years earlier, in 1991, I had won an Olive Branch award for the article, but was never told. |
| Programming As If People Mattered |
| Perils and Pitfalls of Practical Cybercommerce (Lessons from the First Year of Internet Commerce) |
| Whose net is it anyway? |
| One Planet, One Net, Many Voices: The Story Behind CPSR's Principles for the Internet Era |
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In 2012, Vint Cerf wrote an article "Internet Access is Not a Human Right." I responded with my own article, Vint Cerf is Too Modest; Internet Access is a Human Right. But Vint is a great guy who I admire tremendously, and our disagreements have always been friendly. |
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Multimedia electronic mail: will the dream become a reality?
(The beginnings of the standards effort that became MIME) (Communications of the ACM, April, 1991.) |
| Upper Layer Protocols, Architectures and Applications |
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Multimedia Applications Development with the Andrew Toolkit (MAD AT NSB) |
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The Design and Evaluation of Online Help Systems
(Ph. D. thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, May, 1985.) |
UNIX Emacs: a retrospective (lessons for flexible system design)
Cooperative work in the Andrew message system (Proceedings of the CSCW '88 conference, Portland, Oregon, September, 1988.)
Power, Ease of Use, and Cooperative Work in a Practical Multimedia Message System (Int. J. of Man-Machine Studies, April, 1991. Reprinted in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware, Saul Greenberg, editor, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. Reprinted in Readings in Groupware and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Ronald Baecker, editor, Morgan Kaufmann, 1993.) Proceedings of IFIP Conference on Message Handling Systems, October, 1988. Reprinted in Message Handling Systems and Distributed Applications, E. Stefferud, O-J. Jacobsen, and P. Schicker, editors, North-Holland, 1989.
Architectural Issues in the Andrew message system (Proceedings of IFIP Conference on Message Handling Systems, October, 1988. Reprinted in Message Handling Systems and Distributed Applications, E. Stefferud, O-J. Jacobsen, and P. Schicker, editors, North-Holland, 1989.)
Carnegie Mellon's Andrew: The Evolving User Interface of the Messages Program (Poster at CHI '88, Washington, May, 1988.)
An overview of the Andrew message system (SIGCOMM '87 Workshop, Stowe, August, 1987.)
Computational mail as network infrastructure for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW '92 conference, Toronto, November, 1992.)
Email with a Mind of Its Own: The Safe-Tcl Language for Enabled Mail( IFIP WG 6.5 conference, Barcelona, May, 1994, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1994. Reprinted in Upper Layer Protocols, Architectures, and Applications, M. Medina and N. Borenstein, editors, North-Holland, 1994. Reprinted in Readings in Agents, M. Huhns and M. Singh, editors, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998.)
Help texts vs. help mechanisms: A new mandate for documentation writers (in Proc. SIGDOC Conference on System Documentation, Syracuse, NY, June, 1985. (reprinted in Asterisk, Volume 12, Number 6, pp. 8-10, 1986.)
 | I have written a fair amount over the years on my personal blog, which is still there: The View From Guppy Lake |
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Artificial Intelligence and Human Destiny -- Religious Studies Independent Project and Fellowship Proposal, 1980 |
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Natural Attitudes Towards Artificial Intelligence -- Religious Studies Independent Project, December, 1979 |
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Judaism and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence -- paper for Modern Jewish Thought, January, 1979 |
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RESERV-MAC: Reserve Expandable System Enhancing Record Verification, Management, and Circulation -- Burling Library Reserve Book System manual, June, 1978 |
Mortal Fallings -- a novella about violent religion in the dystopian future of the 1990's.
Preface to Introductory Transrational Morality -- an AI "textbook" from the far future speculates on the moral foundations of humans, now extinct.
The Life And Times Of A Few Small Appliances -- an unfinished and cluttered novella that should be a shorter story. It's about the first self-conscious robot tasked with trying to be human. Suffering chronic depression and a cognitive parasite, he becomes an accidental rapist and incompetent do-gooder. In the end he learns his whole life has been a lie, and chooses a path of self-deconstruction.
Eternal Truths -- an initial story in a hypothetical world where Jewish belief continues to evolve over centuries on an entormous multigenerational intergalactic spaceship, and schisms form over the relative rights of intelligent and unintelligent machines.
Another Rambling Legend From the War -- an inter-apocolyptic old uncle tells tall tales of previous wars as the next one approaches. (Reading this 40 years later, I'm amused to note that I thought a camera would be more expensive than an infantryman.)
Resurrectin Day -- a fragment of an unfinished story with the intriguing premise that the soul of every dead human can be retrieved, but only at the distance their soul has travelled at the speed of light since the moment of their death. I have no recollection of where I was heading with the plot, but I still like much of the way it started.
Second Honeymoon -- a maudlin romantic fantasy in which a NASA engineer and his wife hijack a space shuttle to spend their last years exploring the cosmos together.
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The Sun Magazine: Readers Write |
I've been on occasional participant in the community of The Sun Magazine for over 30 years. Because they keep such good archives, you can find all my appearances in The Sun right here. But these are my favorites:
 |
Grinnell Scarlet And Black Columns |
A few columns I wrote for the Grinnell student paper in 1979-80
Black and White are Gray Matters
Cannabis, a Personal Mind-Expander
Activism of the 'Me Generation'
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Morris Daily Record Columns |
Learning to Appreciate Father Who Really Cares
America Strong Enough to Condone Flag Burning
All of Us are Really Only Members of the Chorus
Looking for Detour on Our Overindulgent Road to Ruin
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Writings from my time at Mimecast |
I was Chief Scientist of Mimecast from 2010 to 2022. I did a lot of writing during that time; this is what I've dug up of it so far. Many of these first appeared in the online blogs of XConomy and MSExchange.
Predictions for the Technology Industry in 2011
Predictions for the Technology Industry in 2012
A Brief History of the War on Spam
A disturbance in the force (replumbing the Internet)
Fighting Patent Trolls with LOT
Get Ready to Archive Everything (MSExchange.org, July 13, 2012)
The Inevitability of Archiving Social Networking Data
(Xconomy, March 27, 2013)
Assessing the Appalling Austin Enterprise Email Events
Big Opportunity for Detroit
Unsecured Data is Not Secure
It's All About Me:
Why Email Security Remains Elusive
Cloud Tweaks Q&A
Defending the Competition
A Disturbance in the Force
Can Customers Prepare for the Coming Round of Protocol Enhancements?
Dr. Strangedev, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ever-Increasing Diversity of Devices and Services
When Elephants Mate: An Eagle's View of HP's Autonomy Acquisition
How I stopped worrying and learned to love the cloud
Email As Infrastructure
Email is for Grownups:
Why Business is Skeptical of Social Networking
Resistance is Not Futile, but the Internet Wants to Dumb You Down
The End of the PC Era?
Spam or Anonymity: We Don't Have to Choose
Fundamental Complexity and the So-Called Death of Email
Encryption Follies, Infinitely Repeated
Goodbye Facebook! We barely noticed you were here!
Good Cloud, Bad Cloud
It's Interesting Why We're Boring
Thoughts On Hillary Clinton's Email
A Short History of Email's Future
Human Error: Living with the Weakest Link (Xconomy, March 10, 2015)
Why Things Need Clouds
Jobs' Google Job Gibberish: A Bullet Dodged
Information Technology at Its Best: Remembering John Ferguson
Lighten Up: It's Only Email!
The Long Wave Goodbye
More Eggs, More Baskets: The Importance of Diversity in Email Management
My Email Bankruptcy (a one-time event)
No Email Day? No Point, No Way
Has the Pendulum Stopped?
Email and Food: Essential, but not Status Symbols
One cheer for DKIM!
Oral Arguments on Patent Work
A Reflection on the Value of Minor Suffering
Paper and Airplanes: the Long Road to Obsolescence
Software Patents and the Hacker Ethic
Postel's Law: What the Internet Teaches Us About Life
Push BYOD Complexity to the Periphery
Email's Past, Present, and Future
Mimecast and Exchange Migration
Being Close from Afar:
Maximizing Value and Minimizing Risk with Remote Workers(Xconomy, November 30, 2012)
Shaping the Still-Evolving Internet
Email Isn't Dying, But it Could Be Healthier
RIP Secure Email?
Scary but Safe: Being in the Cloud is like... Being in the Clouds
The Shape of Email
Richard Stallman's Cloudy Vision
But This Internet Had Such Promise! (Xconomy, February 7, 2013)
Email Sucks, but Usefully
Tax the Internet!
The End of Personal Computers
The Scourge of Patent Trolls
The UnAmerican Internet
The Unfinished Business of Building the Internet
Welcome to My World, Mr. Zuckerberg
What is Email and How Does It Fit in the Bigger Picture?
A Taxonomy of Interpersonal Communications
Feeling Insecure About Security
Why Spam Might Be Good
Why is anyone still hesitant about moving their email services to the cloud?
Lessons from Wikileaks
A Counterweight to the Payment-Content Alliance?
>
An Outline of the Larger Work I Never Wrote
Part 146: We're Slaves to Our Attachments
Part 501: Human Communication is Absurdly Complex! (MSExchange.org, October 3, 2011)
Part 221: The Legacy of Punch Cards
Part 127: There's No Central Authority
Part 362: Too Many Lazy Idiots
Part 562: People Lie About What They Want
Part 101: There's Just Too Much Of It (MSExchange.org, September 19, 2011)
Part 114: Dumb Robots, Complex Vacations
Part 1: We Don't Even Know What It Is
Part 150: We Don't Know Who It's From (MSExchange.org, September 20, 2011)
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., and Ned Freed, "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions): Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 1341, Proposed Internet Standard, June, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information", RFC 1343, June, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Implications of MIME for Internet Mail Gateways", RFC 1344, June, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., and Mark Linimon, "The Extension of MIME content-types to a New Medium", RFC 1437, April 1, 1993.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., and Ned Freed, "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 1521, Draft Internet Standard, September, 1993.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "The text/enriched MIME Content-type", RFC 1523, September, 1993.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information", RFC 1524, September, 1993.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "The text/enriched MIME Content-type", RFC 1563, January, 1994.
Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies", RFC 2045, Internet Standard, December, 1996.
Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", RFC 2046, Internet Standard, December, 1996.
Freed, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) Part Five: Conformance Criteria and Examples", RFC 2049, December, 1996.
Borenstein, N. and M. Kucheraway,
"An Architecture for Reputation Reporting", RFC 7070, November, 2013
Borenstein, N. and M. Kucheraway,
"A Media Type for Reputation Interchange", RFC 7071, November, 2013
Borenstein, N. and M. Kucheraway,
"A Reputation Query Protocol", RFC 7072, November, 2013
Borenstein, N. and M. Kucheraway,
"A Reputation Response Set for Email Identifiers", RFC 7073, November, 2013
Tomkinson, N. and N. Borenstein, "Multiple Language Content Type", RFC 8255, October, 2017
I've also published over a dozen internet drafts, early documents on the standards track. Most of them are early versions of what eventually became the above RFC's, but a few others are still interesting:
The application/green-commerce MIME Content-type was a speification of the MIME type for First Virtual's payment model.
The Simple MIME eXchange Protocol (SMXP) This was a protocol for exchanging transactions like First Virtual's, only designed to be broader.
The Green Commerce Model is an explanation of the fundamental model and trust architecture of First Virtual payments.
KidCode: Naming Conventions for Protecting Children on the World Wide Web and Elsewhere on the Internet Without Censorship was a proposal for marking pornography on the Internet to protect children. It would have been much better than what actually happened.
A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information This described the "mailcap" format that became an informal standard for specifying how to handle MIME types without ever becoming a formal standard.
The application/pgp MIME Content-type This specified how PGP should be encoded in MIME.
One Planet, One Net: Principles for the Internet Era This was an unsuccessful attempt to involved the IETF community in CPSR's "One Planet, One Net" campaign (see above).
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Weapons in the Fight Against Spam", Readwrite, August 31, 2015
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Why Your Things Need the Cloud", GigaOM, February 14, 2015
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Robots to the Rescue," ILTA Peer to Peer, December, 2014
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Leveling Information Silos in the Workplace," Xconomy, October 3, 2014
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "What Will the Internet Look Like in 25 Years?," Forbes, April 4, 2014
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "WWW: Hope," Doubt, and Debate for the next 25 Years, Computerworld UK, March 27, 2014
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Web25: Three Predictions for the Future of the Web," Marketing Tech News, March 17, 2014
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Business and Personal Emails: Not the Same Privacy Game," Techradar Pro, February 18, 2014
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Why Business and Personal Email Are Not the Same," Xconomy, December 30, 2013
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "The End of Personal Computers," Xconomy, October 1, 2013
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Paper and Airplanes: The Long Road to Obsolescence," Xconomy, December 25, 2012
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "MIME @ 20: A Happy Anniversary," Grinnell Magazine, Winter, 2012
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Alternative Online Payments: The Dream That Refuses to Die," Xconomy, December 29, 2011
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Email Complexity and the March of Progress," MSExchange.org, December 22, 2011
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Easy Migration: An Added Benefit of Cloud-based Archiving," MSExchange.org, December 1, 2011
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Spam or Anonymity: We Don't Have to Choose," MSExchange.org, November 15, 2011
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Steve Jobs: The Soul of an Industry," Xconomy, October 6, 2011
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "An Underappreciated Email Pioneer: Einar Stefferud," 1930-2011, MSExchange.org, September 25, 2011
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., and James Blake, "Cloud Computing Standards: Where's the Beef?", IEEE Internet, May/June, 2011.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "CMU's Andrew Project: A Retrospective", Communications of the ACM, Virtual Extension, December, 1996, Volume 39, No. 12. Pages 298-311.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., et al., "Commerce on the Net: New Ways to do Business", EDI Forum: The Journal of Electronic Commerce, Volume 7, Number 4, 1995.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions", Multimedia Systems, Issue #1, June, 1993.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "MIME: The New Internet Standard Format for Multimedia Email," EDD '92 Conference, Parsippany, New Jersey, October, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Enhanced Electronic Mail as Application Infrastructure: MIME, Metamail, and the Second Generation of Email", invited paper for Infocom '92 conference, Bombay, November, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Andrew & MIME: How Messages 8.5 Accomodates the New Mail Format Standard", Andrew Consortium Technical Conference, Pittsburgh, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions): A Standard Format for the Second Generation of Internet Mail", OSN: The Open Systems Newsletter.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Multimedia Electronic Mail", invited article for Encyclopedia of Microcomputers, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Colleges Need to Fix the Bugs in Computer Science Courses", Chronicle of Higher Education, July 15, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Internet Multimedia Mail: Emerging Standards for Interoperability", Proceedings of the IFIP TC6/WG6.5 International Conference on Upper Layer Protocols, Architectures and Applications, Gerald Neufeld & Bernhard Plattner, editors, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1992.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Multimedia Mail From the Bottom Up, or Teaching Dumb Mailers to Sing", USENIX Winter '92 conference. Reprinted in ConneXions magazine.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "A Bottom-Up Approach to Multimedia Mail", ConneXions magazine, November, 1991.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "An Expanding Universe of Electronic Communications", Bellcore Exchange magazine, November/December 1991.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "MAGICMAIL: A Secure and Portable Language for Enhanced Email Services", Human Computer Interaction Consortium conference, Ann Arbor, 1991.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Why Do People Prefer FAX to Email?", IFIP WG 6.5 International Symposium on Message Handling Systems, Zurich, October 1990. Reprinted in Message Handling Systems, P. Schicker and E. Stefferud, editors, North-Holland, 1991.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., chairman, "Report of the Multimedia Mail Workshop of the IFIP WG 6.5 MHS '90 Conference", in Message Handling Systems, P. Schicker and E. Stefferud, editors, North-Holland, 1991.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., and James Gosling, "UNIX Emacs as a Test-bed for User Interface Design", ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software, Banff, October, 1988.
Borenstein, Nathaniel, Craig Everhart, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Adam Stoller, "A Multi-media Message System for Andrew", USENIX Technical Conference, Feburary, 1988.
Blower, et. al, "Embedded Training and Help: Opportunities for User Support", Final Report of NATO Workshop on Human Factors in Command and Control Systems, September, 1987.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "The Role of On-line Help in Command & Control Systems", invited position paper, Ibid.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "A House of Cards: A History of the Inorganic Evolution of the CMU BBoard System", Software Maintenance, Vol. 3, No. 11. (Also CMU-CS-TR-85-152.)
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Is English a Natural Language?", in Foundation for Human-Computer Communication, North-Holland, 1986.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Is Natural Language a Natural Command Language?", in Proc. IFIP Working Conference on the Future of Command Languages, Rome, September, 1985.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "Help Texts vs. Help Mechanisms: A New Mandate for Documentation Writers", in Proc. SIGDOC Conference on System Documentation, Syracuse, NY, June, 1985. (reprinted in Asterisk, Volume 12, Number 6, pp. 8-10, 1986.
Borenstein, Nathaniel S., "The Evaluation of Text Editors: A Critical Review of the Roberts & Moran Methodology Based on New Experiments", CHI '85, San Francisco, April, 1985.
Clitherow, Peter, Michael Muller, and Nathaniel Borenstein, "Docu-matic: Improving Customer Access to Electronic Documents", Bellcore QIA '90 conference, October, 1990.
Clitherow, Peter, Michael Muller, and Nathaniel Borenstein, "Electronic Publishing of Intelligent Documents", Bellcore Electronic Document Delivery conference, February, 1991.
Why is Email So Complicated?
While I was at Mimecast I wrote a series of blog posts on the topic of "Why is Email So
Complicated?" I never wrote nearly all the pieces I envisioned, but
here are the ones I can still find, along with an introduction and
outline. They're in no special order; the "Part #" is basically whimsical.
Part 0: An Introduction
Internet Standard Documents
I have published 16 Internet RFC's, part of the Internet standards process:
Additional Publications
(This was an old attempt at an exhaustive list. Some of these probably duplicate entries above. Some articles were republished in multiple places.)
