On Social Networking and Communication Paradigms

F irst off, I wish all readers of IC a happy and healthy new year. We traditionally rotate our tracks at the start of the year: for 2008, K.J. Lin and Yan Wang are editing one on ecommerce (see p. 60 for an introductory piece), and M. Brian Blake and Mike Huhns will be covering Web-scale workflow (see p. 55). We also introduce new (and remove older) columns around this time: Stephen Farrell tests out a new column on practical security (p. 93), and you’ll note that the “From the Newstand” department is no longer featured in the magazine. Finally, my colleague Barry Leiba at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center has taken over the Internet Standards department that Jim Whitehead managed for us for several years. Jim has our deepest thanks for his efforts. Although Barry will cover a range of standards in the department — he starts with an overview of what he will be looking at on p. 71 — his own area of research is one near and dear to me: combating email woes, such as spam. His column this issue discusses several proposed standards for identifying when the sender of email has been forged, but I’d like to touch on several other aspects of this problem myself.