M. Tariq Banday

Challenges of CAPTCHA in the accessibility of Indian regional websites

This paper reviews Indian Government guidelines regarding the inclusion of regional content in government websites, compares them to World Wide Web Consortiums (W3C) guidelines for multilingual version and use of CAPTCHA tests and analyzes some Indian Government websites in light of these guidelines. It also analyzes some other non-Indian government websites in terms of multilingual content and use of CAPTCHA tests. It further reports results obtained through several user studies and experiments regarding the use of English and regional CAPTCHA tests on non-English pages of multilingual websites in terms of accuracy and response time.

Analyzing Internet e-mail date-spoofing

Spammers and phishers constantly keep on changing spam structure to circumvent anti-spam procedures and target maximum recipients. Of late, it has been observed that spammers spoof date header of their spam e-mails to keep them on top in the recipients mailbox with an aim to maximize the chances of immediate attention of recipients. This form of spoofing can cause confusion to recipients, create problems in time bound transactions, increase chances of opening spam, worsen the problem of false positive, result in loss of work productivity, render date header field insignificant and would spawn a host of legal issues. This paper reports date-spoofing, analyzes implications of date-spoofed e-mails on some commercial and corporate e-mail servers and surveys e-mail user behavior. It further discusses detection of date-spoofed e-mails to enable forensic examinations of date forged e-mails and presents possible technical solutions to stop date-spoofing.

e-Learning, Web 2.0 and beyond

Integration of Web based ICT tools in education aiming to bring quality education to everyone and everywhere is a worldwide phenomenon. Teachers and learners are benefited as these tools increase efficiency and effectiveness of learning, teaching, planning and managing by establishing linkages and collaboration, facilitating experimentation and lifelong learning and providing easy to use management and administrative tools. Web has created various opportunities for extending teacher-learner, learner-learner and teacher-teacher communications, interactions and collaborations beyond classrooms. However, the use of Web based tools for education face diverse challenges on multiple fronts which may not only lead to digital divide, security and privacy issues but may also make integration ineffective or even injurious. This paper makes an appraisal of opportunities and challenges of the use of Web tools for education. The opportunities created by these tools in various areas of education have been studied and examined. It also identifies current and possible issues associated with the use of Web based ICT tools and proposes solutions to overcome these issues for effective integration of Web based ICT tools in education.

Recent Developments in the Domain Name System

Domain Name System (DNS) makes it possible to access information from host computers and to send and receive messages anywhere on the Internet. It is a distributed set of databases residing in computers around the world that contain IP address mapped to corresponding domain names. Currently, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages DNS and designs policies for its operations. Recently, DNS has witnessed phenomenal developments in terms of technical, operational, and managerial decisions which have made significant impact on Internet-related policy issues such as intellectual property, privacy, e-commerce, and cyber- security. This paper surveys remarkable developments that Domain Name System has undergone in recent times. The advancements particularly advancements in the areas of international domain names, managerial decision of expanding generic top-level domain space, deployment of DNSSEC protocol at the root servers, approval of Triple X top-level domain, domain resolution policy, present status of contractual compliance programs and privacy of domain name holders have been presented in detail.

Design of CAPTCHA Script for Indian Regional Websites

To improve accessibility of Indian regional websites especially government websites content is offered in regional languages besides English language. However, these websites use CAPTCHA tests in English languages in regional language pages. This reduces usability and accessibility because non-native speakers of English language are required to pass CAPTCHA tests in English language. The accessibility of such websites can be improved substantially if secure CAPTCHA tests in regional languages are used. However, such an implementation is challenging as Indian regional languages are unique in many ways, are written differently and have different alphabets, glyphs, pronunciations, accents, etc. This paper reviews existing CAPTCHA scripts and Indian regional websites in terms of their usability, accessibility and multilingual support. It reports the design of CAPTCHA script in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English languages which can be used to generate CAPTCHA tests in websites offering content in these languages. The designed CAPTCHA script offers features such as audio, localized onscreen keyboard, random patterns and fonts to improve usability and security.

Folder classification of Urdu and Hindi language e-mail messages

Automatic classification of e-mail messages into folders help recipients to organize messages in their local mail store. Both web and desktop e-mail client applications permit customization to support e-mail classification by defining rules to handle incoming e-mail messages. However, automatic language based folder classification of e-mail messages is neither supported by commercial web mail applications nor by desktop client mail applications. This paper reviews e-mail folder classification and language detection techniques. It proposes the use of Microsoft language translator API service to classify incoming e-mail messages into language specific folders. The evaluation of the proposed procedure by experimentations through a compatible e-mail client utilizing this service developed for the said purpose has shown significant classification accuracy.

The Split Domination in Arithmetic Graphs

forms of encryption techniques are being used to ensure privacy of data transmitted over Internet. Digital signature which uses Public Key Encryption (PKE) ensures privacy of conversation, integrity of data, authenticity of sender and non-repudiation of sender. Several applications on desktops, mobiles and other devices use it to secure data of various applications, services and access to devices. Digital signature exists as a file on some storage device or is embedded in hardware devices. Digital signature certificates are digital signatures that are signed by some third party certifying authority. This paper describes working of digital signature through illustrations and explains various procedures and algorithms involved in signings the data through use of digital signature. It introduces an open source software tool that can be used to study processes, procedures and algorithms used in digital signatures. It also presents information about different types of digital signature certificates currently available, file formats used therein and programming support of digital signature in .NET languages. Further, it presents an excerpt of digital signature scenario in Indian Government.

Multilingual e-mail classification using Bayesian filtering and language translation

E-mail SPAM is continuously growing threat to its users, E-mail Service Providers (ESPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as it consumes users mailboxes, bandwidth, and time by flooding the system with unwanted and unsolicited messages. It can contain unsafe content such as virus programs, phishing frauds, and other malicious code that can be used to hatch varied types of attacks. Several techniques and tools including anti-spam filters are employed to filter out spam e-mails at servers and clients. This paper reviews methods and techniques used to filter spam e-mails currently employed at major e-mail service providers and evaluates their performance to filter non-English language e-mail messages. It proposes a technique to build a translation module that can be used to augment current spam filters to enable them to filter spam from non-English language e-mail messages. It permits the spam filter to train itself through training data set in chosen language and tune its parameters with every incoming message. The implementation of the technique through a translation module and experiments using a publicly available e-mail data corpus have successfully validated the correctness and working of the proposed technique.

Realization of Microsoft Outlook® Add-In for Language Based E-Mail Folder Classification

Web and desktop mail applications support multilingual features for composing and viewing e-mail messages in regional languages besides English language, however, they do not support automatic language based message classification. This paper surveys various online language detection and translation services and the use of Microsoft language translation service to classify incoming e-mail messages into language specific folders. It further reports design of an Add-in for Microsoft Outlook that can be used to improve the existing multi-lingual facilities in it by permitting automatic classification of incoming e-mail messages into different folders on the basis of the language used in the e-mail message.

e-learning in Web 2.0 world: A case study

Advances in Web improved quality of learning as it enables dissemination of content and enriches communication of different forms between its users. This paper presents various Web 2.0 tools for e-learning. It demonstrates actual use of some Web 2.0 tools to supplement classroom teaching of engineering students and reports their impact on the overall professional development of students on the basis of the questionnaire served to them. It illustrates: (i) collaborative planning and formulation of seminar papers, project reports and experimental write ups using Web 2.0 tools, (ii) using lab demonstration videos, e-books and online course material with instant AV and text instructions, and (iii) demonstrating electronic experiments (through simulation) and programming exercises, etc. using online desktop sharing facility.