Foafnet questions

topic posted Thu, December 9, 2004 - 12:42 PM by  offlineRob

1) To support foafnet, you just need to have the ability to export/import foaf, and the UI to enable this?

2) If I was signing up at a foafnet enabled site, is the idea that I would import my foaf date from:

a) my blog/site?
b) some central site?

3) I can see wanting to import info about yourself when joining a new site, but importing/exporting friends seems like it could be trickier. For example, if I am a member of 3 foaf sites and on each of those sites I have 20 contacts, do I update some central file so that it has 60 contacts? Or is the idea that if I was going to join a 4th site that I would have to choose one of my three foaf files to use?

sorry if there questions are lame, but I am tryin to get up to speed on this
posted by:
Rob
online Rob
Austin
  • Re: Foafnet questions

    Sun, December 19, 2004 - 12:07 AM
    Not lame at all dude.....

    1 - yes
    2 - a,b,c,d and anywhere else you can find FOAF
    3. Importing friends is key. One of the UI gudieliens is "Export allowes" box - as an Export control mechanism. Default to this off - and require peopel to opt in and THEN it's OK to expert their emails.

    Get it?
    • Re: Foafnet questions

      Mon, December 20, 2004 - 12:24 PM
      Marc,
      I'm starting to get FOAFnet SPAM. That is, people are starting to move their FOAF networks and I'm getting emails to confirm the data (and try to get me signed up) on these new networks. It's getting scary.
      • Re: Foafnet questions

        Mon, December 20, 2004 - 1:06 PM
        Interesting. How are they getting your email address? Are these services storing the actual email instead of the SHA1?

        Though, maybe it's your friends who are the culprit?
        • Re: Foafnet questions

          Tue, December 21, 2004 - 12:45 PM
          No, SHA1 is broken.
          • Re: Foafnet questions

            Mon, January 3, 2005 - 12:35 PM
            got a pointer to some relevant info?
            • Re: Foafnet questions

              Mon, January 3, 2005 - 1:08 PM
              my email address is known
              thus, the SHA1 of my email address is known
              no protection
              TADA!
              • Re: Foafnet questions

                Mon, January 3, 2005 - 1:20 PM
                hmmm, I guess I'm missing something here. If your email address gets published and you get spammed, how does that say anything about SHA-1? If you're claiming someone (i.e. a spammer) extracted your email from a SHA-1 hash I'm not buying. Maybe in a year or three, but not now.
                • Re: Foafnet questions

                  Mon, January 3, 2005 - 2:04 PM
                  It's not the hash that's broken, it's the implementation. Think about it. There are massive email databases out there. So, I buy one or make my own. Compile the SHA-1's for those email addresses and now I can use that table to translate a large chunk of the SHA1s in Tribe FOAF files.
                  • This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.

                    Re: Foafnet questions

                    Mon, January 3, 2005 - 3:16 PM
                    If your email address is out there you will be spammed. Don't be fooled though, generating SHA-1 hashes for 100 million email addresses is going to require a non-trivial amount of compute time. Add to that the overhead of setting up and maintaining a db to associate the 'cracked' emails with demographic info and now your talking real infrastructure.

                    The biggest problem I see is what value is there to a spammer to being able to associate email addresses with social network identities? Spammers don't target their missives because there's no incremental cost associated with sending another email.

                    Not leaving your email address in the clear in FOAF is better than the alternative. The question ends up being does FOAF add enough to make the cost acceptable. Clearly I vote yes. The risk is basically 0 and the benefit is you get to float around the "social internet" with your friends.
                    • Re: Foafnet questions

                      Mon, January 3, 2005 - 5:28 PM
                      I'm not concerned w/ regular SPAM. I have a SPAM filter that does the job. The problem is when they can find my friends email addresses, because my friends email addresses are explicitly white listed. This is the flaw.

                      And processing 100 million addresses is trivial. It only requires a $500 Dell.
    • Re: Foafnet questions

      Mon, December 20, 2004 - 3:47 PM
      thanks. Actually, I tried signing up for tribe.net again as a test and I saw the "Import FOAF" option. Pretty snazzy. I still think that sync'ing contacts across multiple sites is kinda tricky, though. I see this ultimately being a service (peopleagg, etc) rather than file based.

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