Robert Hanneman and Mark Riddle of UC Riverside have published an online text on social networks.

Hanneman, Robert A. and Mark Riddle. 2005. Introduction to social network methods. Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside

“This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. The text relies heavily on the work of Freeman, Borgatti, and Everett (the authors of the UCINET software package). The materials here, and their organization, were also very strongly influenced by the text of Wasserman and Faust, and by a graduate seminar conducted by Professor Phillip Bonacich at UCLA. Many other users have also made very helpful comments and suggestions based on the first version. Errors and omissions, of course, are the responsibility of the authors.You are invited to use and redistribute this text freely — but please acknowledge the source.”

Bruce Shneier report that Tel Aviv University researchers have demonstrated a passive attack that can recover the PIN used by bluetooth devices during the pairing protocol, allowing the attacker to eavesdrop on a Bluetooth network. The approach works for the four digit PINs adopted by industry. See their Mobisys 2005 paper or this news article.

Google has published a sitemap protocol allowing site owners to inform crawlers of the URLs on the site that are available for crawling. Since the URLs can include parameters, this allows a site to expose all or parts of its “hidden web”.

“A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain additional information about those URLs, such as when they were last modified, how frequently they change, etc.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can not reach all areas of a Web site through a browseable interface — i.e. users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links. For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.
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Please note that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a Sitemap (or Sitemaps) to a search engine, you will help that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.”

You can also define relevant attributes for each URL including how often the URL changes, when it was last modified, and its priority relative to other URLs on the same site.

Li Ding defined a similar scheme for RDF documents some months ago as part of his work on Swoogle.

GoogSpy is a site that lets you see what companies have purchased Adwords on Google. This GoogSpy result shows who owns the semantic web, for example. Only one company, Stylus Studio, owns RDF and eBay claims sole ownership of OWL. You can see the other Adwords that these companies have purchased (e.g., a company that bought “semantic web” also bought “universal computer”). Finally, you can see all of the Adwords purchased by a given company. Microsoft bought quite a few, including linux.

The Semantic Web And Policy Workshop (SWPW) will be held on 7 November 2005 in conjunction with the 4th International Semantic Web Conference in Galway, Ireland. The workshop will cover policy-based frameworks for the semantic web as well as the use of semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for other application domains such as multiagent systems, grid computing, networking, and storage systems. Submitted papers should describe original research results or articulate a position, describe an application or demonstrate a working language or system. Papers must be submitted electronically by 25 July 2005; decisions will be announced on 5 September with final camera ready copy due on 30 September.