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W3C – Forgeproofing and Foaf

At Vishwak, we value the openness of WWW and importance of standards for our business; so we are members with W3C. Representing Vishwak, I am a member in the Advisory council in W3C. Yesterday, while browsing my profiles page in W3C site I came across two interesting items.

ForgeProofing: SPAM in email is a huge problem nowadays and this becomes worse if you are in a email group. W3C has added few interesting filters to prevent EMail Forgery. The way it works is by examining whether mail claiming to be sent from an email address matches a pattern that you have specified. If so, it is allowed through. If not, it is assumed to be a forgery and is rejected by our mail hubs. For example: Identify a pattern in the “From:” line of mail that you send. For example, suppose the From: line in email you send includes your full name and your email address. Or it can be a pattern identifying your email client software, indicated in the User-Agent Header. Though these techniques are not fool-proof they can certainly limit casual spammers.

FOAF: The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is about creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. In short, FOAF is about your place in the Web. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online. You can access my FOAF here (it is a machine readable XML file).

Twenty20 – India vs Pakistan

I was part of history yesterday (at least let me feel it that way), watching among millions through TV of course the first ever Twenty20 match played by India. This was the 10th International Twenty20 match. Having watched a cricket match after few years, I feel the 20:20 format has great potential and in all likelihood become mainstream cricket just the way One-Day did for Test matches. The four hours (half-a-day) is very convenient for audience to enjoy a good cricket match and sight-seeing all within a day.

In yesterday’s match (India vs Pakistan) it was good cricket with typical swings of a India-Pakistan match till the last ball. I really enjoyed watching the bowl-out which decided who got the 2 points with each side nominating 5 bowlers who bowled one ball each. Of course, the way Indians played left much to be desired!. One thing was obvious, though Indians may not be the champions in the game – Indian businesses (sponsors) are clearly who are paying for the tournament.  

Kids DVD – Why commercials?

Regular readers who waste time reading this blog know that I have a 4 year son and I buy lot of DVDs (CDs) for him. We try and restrict his TV viewing to an hour or two per day, not easy many times and requires all tricks of parenting.

Few months back I bought from Amazon (USA) a series of DVDs titled “Max and Ruby“. This series has appropriate content for kindergartners, the main characters are two rabbits (Max the boy and Ruby his elder sister). Max is a usual next door mischievous boy and Ruby tries to teach Max lot of basic etiquettes and behavior on daily settings. My son loves the series and it reduces his time watching Chutty TV (Sun TV’s Kids channel, which most of the time has content not for his age).

OK, let me come back to why I started this post. These original DVDs that I bought should be ideally commercials free, at least  not disturb me before the main story. The DVDs start with half-a-dozen commercials promoting other products from the same company (Nick Jr), which I will have to keep skipping it till the main story starts. With some other similar Kids DVDs they start with promotions for movies which are not appropriate for kindergartners. When the content producers and Hollywood keep complaining about piracy, they should understand to respect the wishes of a paid user. 

Do you feel the same way?