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 of the Advisory Council in W3C. Yesterday, while browsing my profiles page in the 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 an 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 the 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).