Orkut is an Internet social network service run by Google and named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
It claims to be designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Similar to Facebook, Friendster and MySpace, Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-set-up simple forums (called "communities") of users. Since October 2006, Orkut has permitted users to create accounts
without an invitation. In April 2007, Orkut introduced polls in communities.
History
Orkut was launched on January, 2004 by the search company
Google, the brainchild of Orkut Büykökten, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an
independent project whilst working at Google.
In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on
inCircle code.[[[Ambiguous]]]
Originally the Orkut community was felt to be elitist, because its membership was by invitation only. At the end of July 2004
Orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark and by the following September it had surpassed 2,000,000. As of August 2007, the number of members equated to over 67,000,000 users.
Features
Orkut has a list of features unique to itself like "Scrapbook","Communities" etc., apart from normal features such as messaging
and photo albums.
A user first creates his or her "Profile", in which he/she mentions his/her "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details,
with the option of choosing which group ("Friends", "Friend's friends","everyone") of people would be allowed to view the
particulars. A user can also upload his/her photo as the photo of his profile. If necessary, a user can completely remove his
profile photo if they wish.
Scrapping, though the word is not accepted officially in english, is popular among the Orkut community as a kind of offline
chatting. Users can scrap on another member's scrap book, even if that member is offline. The scrap recipient will be able to see
it when he or she visits their scrapbook. Contrary to personal messaging or email, scrap book entries are public, meaning that
any one with an orkut account can read others' scraps. Users can reply to a scrap from their scrapbook itself by replying to a
scrap. Scraps can also be in HTML, enabling users to post photos, videos, audio files and other
embedded objects directly into others' scrapbook.
Another unique feature of orkut is "Communities". Anyone with an orkut account can create a community on anything. One can
post topics, inform users about an event, ask them questions or just play games. There are more than a million communities on
Orkut with topics ranging from pizza to pasta or from film star to superstar. The first five communities on Orkut were started
with in 24 hrs of launch of orkut. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to
their profile from either YouTube or Google Videos with
the additional option of creating either restricted or un-restricted polls for polling a community of users.
In addition to this, there is a personal messaging feature which is rarely used by members.[citation needed] It is mainly used by community
owners to ask others to join their community. One issue of this feature is that it lacks confidentiality, [citation needed] owing to the reason that if you know
the exact link of the message then you can read such messages.
Users have options to rate their friends in the order of "Best Friends", "Good Friends", "Friends", "Acquaintances" and "Haven't
met". Further, each member can become fans of any of the friends in their list and can also evaluate whether their friend is
"Trustworthy", "Cool", "Sexy" on a scale of 1 to 3 (marked by icons) and is aggregated in terms of a percentage. Unlike
Facebook where a member can view profile details of people only on their network,
Orkut allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your "Ignore List". Importantly, each member can
also customize their profile preferences and can restrict information that appear on their profile from their friends and/or
others (not on the friends list). The highlight feature is where any member can add any other member on Orkut to his/her "Crush
List" and both of them will be informed only when both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".
When a user logs in, they see the people in their friends list in the order of their logging in to the site, the first person
being the latest one to do so. Orkut's competitors are other social networking sites including MySpace and Facebook.
Orkut Redesign
The new orkut interface announced on 24th august..
On Friday, 24th of August Orkut announced that the whole new face of website will be launched soon. The new UI contains round corners and soft colors including small logotype at upper left corner. The redesign has
been announced on the official Orkut Blog. Orkut will be spreading out this UI by the next week to some of the user groups, says
Eduardo Cordeiro.
By Thursday, 30th of August, most users on orkut could see changes on their profile pages as per the new redesign. On the
31st, Orkut announced its new features including improvements to the way you view your friends, 9 rather than 8 of your friends
displayed on your homepage and profile page and basic links to your friends' content right under their profile picture as you
browse through their different pages. It also announced the initial release of Orkut in 5 new languages: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi,
Tamil, and Telugu. Profile editing can take place by clicking the settings button under your profile photo (or alternatively,
click the blue settings link at the top of any page).
On 4th September, Orkut announced another new feature. You can now see a "Updates from your friends" box on the homepage where
you'll get real-time updates when your friends update or make changes to their profiles, photos and videos. Moreover in case of
some things on your profile you want to keep private, Orkut has added an easy opt-out button on the settings page.
Criticism
Flooders and fake profiles
As the number of Orkut users increased, there was a rise in the number of fake and clone profiles, something that can be
achieved just in a matter of a few minutes.[1] Due to the
large number of users and the deactivation of the jail system, the profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated
easily. These profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It isn't hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some
stating they own hundreds. Also, many of the users use these profiles to steal art that has previously posted online and deem it
their own. The original artist are not asked for approval, much less even named.
Later, the clones started to flood communities and scrapbooks by submitting topics or scraps hundreds or thousands of times
manually. Shortly thereafter, by simply examining the source code of the page, they found it was possible to create
Javascript codes to automatically flood the site. Soon (given that Orkut is a complex social
network), flooding wars started to occur frequently between some antagonistic groups. Another new phenomenon is Scrapbook
wars, when a group of users are engaged to zero or increase the scrapbook counter of someone.
In 2005 invisible profiles, communities and topics started to appear in Orkut. This could be achieved by using
HTML escaping codes and 1x1 pixel photos to fool the engine behind the site.[2]
In the August 2005 a freeware program made in Delphi
called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything" - this was
developed by a Brazilian) specifically for flooding Orkut. It quickly spread through the users
and was easily downloadable (the most common Floodtudo versions were 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.2). As this program was massively used
by thousands of spammers, a big spam wave struck Orkut in September and October 2005. However, changes implemented by the
developers in November made this program non-functional.
As the flooding of Orkut was getting out of control, the developers implemented some features in order to stop this, such as
not allowing two or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted, forcing the user to wait before posting another
topic or scrapbook entry, and the usage of captchas, whenever a scrap entry has a hyperlink.
They gave more rights to community moderators as well, so that they can just ban users instead of relying on the developers to
remove them, and now community moderators are able to mass-delete posts too.
Other ways of profile and community attacks still exist, like testimonial flooding attacks on scrapbook and member counters,
multi-profile floods and social engineering.
Hate groups
There has recently been controversy revolving around the use of Orkut by various hate
groups. Virulent racists allegedly have a solid following there. Several hate communities focused on racism, Nazism and white supremacy have
been deleted due to guideline violation. However the number of these communities and profiles has not stopped growing because
they can be very easily created and it is hard for Orkut to check them [citation needed].
In 2005, various cases of racism were denounced to police and reported in the Brazilian
media.[citation needed] In 2006, a judicial measure
was opened by the Brazil federal justice denouncing a 20-year-old student accused of racism against those of African ancestry and
spreading defamatory content on Orkut.[3]. Brazilian
Federal Justice subpoenaed Google on March 2006 to explain the crimes that had occurred in Orkut.[4]
Anti-religion, anti-national, and anti-ethnic hate groups have also been spotted. Recently an Indian court has issued notices
to Google on some of the groups. The Mumbai Police too is seeking a ban on Orkut post objections raised by political groups.
Groups denigrating various political leaders and celebrities have also emerged.
Copyright disclaimer
Orkut's terms of service state:
By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a
worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create
derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.
However, they also state:
This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked
for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
Orkut users retain copyright to all original work posted on the Orkut service [2].
State Censorship
Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is now blocked by the government. As they say,
this is due to national security issues, as Orkut users have the ability to spread messages rapidly, but the government says it's
due to Islamic ethical issues about dating and match making. To get around this block, sites such as orkutproxy.com (now
defunct) were made for Iranian users. Other websites such as Yahoo! Groups and
Google Groups have communities dedicated to receiving updates on the newest location of
Iran's Orkut proxy. Though it was once possible to bypass governmental blockage of Orkut, the site has closed its
HTTPS pages on all anonymous proxies. Now it is almost impossible for ordinary users to visit this
site inside Iran. Also many sites have been published since Orkut's blockade in Iran following the same path such as MyPardis, Cloob or Banhaneh. Of course these
websites deal with a high degree of risk to get filtered too, so they have their own censorship policies to meet Iran's
un-written regulations and rules of filtering.
In August 2006, United Arab Emirates followed the footsteps of Iran in blocking the site. This block was
subsequently removed in October 2006. On July 3, 2007,
Gulf News revisited the issue, publishing complaints from members of the public against Orkut
communities like "Dubai Sex", and officially bringing the complaints to the attention of the state telecom monopoly
Etisalat [3]. The ensuing moral panic resulted in a renewed
ban of the site by Etisalat by July 4, 2007 [4], still in effect
despite Google's promise to negotiate the ban with the UAE [5]. Saudi Arabia is another country that has
blocked access to Orkut, while Bahrain's information ministry is also under pressure to follow
suit [6].
Security and safety
Hacking accounts and communities with XSS
In 2005 dozens of communities' ownership was hacked by a Computer Security expert known as Shamsher Terror to demonstrate the
undiscovered security vulnerabilities. A similar feat was performed by a Brazilian
hacker called Vinícius K-Max , using a cross-site
scripting (XSS) vulnerability. Eventually, various phishing sites were developed with the intent of stealing other
people's accounts and communities.
MW.Orc worm
On June 19, 2006 FaceTime Security Labs' security researchers
Christopher Boyd and Wayne Porter [discovered a worm], dubbed MW.Orc.[5]
The worm steals users' banking details, usernames and passwords by propagating through Orkut. The attack was triggered as
users launched an executable file disguised as a JPEG file. The initial executable file that causes
the infection installs two additional files on the user's computer. These files then e-mail banking details and passwords to the
worm's anonymous creator when infected users click on the "My Computer" icon.
The infection spreads automatically by posting a URL in another user's Orkut
Scrapbook, a guestbook where visitors can leave comments visible on the user's page. This link lures visitors with a message in
Portuguese, falsely claiming to offer additional photos. The message text that carries an infection link can vary from case to
case.
In addition to stealing personal information, the malware can also enable a remote user to control the PC and make it part of
a botnet, a network of infected PCs. The botnet in this case uses an infected PC's
bandwidth to distribute large, pirated movie files, potentially slowing down an end-user's
connection speed.
The initial executable file (Minhasfotos.exe) creates two additional files when activated, winlogon_.jpg and wzip32.exe
(located in the System32 Folder). When the user clicks the "My Computer"
icon, a mail is sent containing their personal data. In addition, they may be added to an XDCC
Botnet (used for file sharing), and the infection link may be sent to other users that they know in the Orkut network. The
infection can be spread manually, but also has the ability to send "back dated" infection links to people in the "friends list"
of the infected user.
According to statements made by Google, as noted in Facetime's Greynets Blog the company had implemented a temporary fix for
the dangerous worm.[5]
HTTPS Not Obvious
On and around April 17, 2007 users began reporting that secure
(https) access to the orkut login server was no longer available. This led to some users
cancelling accounts, because of fears that insecure access could lead to compromise of Orkut accounts and by extension
Google accounts as well as Gmail accounts since the password for
login is transmitted as clear text.
In fact, Google had changed the main login page to http rendering to improve efficiency, but the actual login is still secure
using https in an iframe [7]. This information has not been well published by Google, and does not give the
users the reassurance of seeing the "secure connection" padlock in the browser. On Friday 17 July 2007 a revised logon page,
which is rendered in https was brought in, addressing these issues.
Session Management and Authentication Issues
On June 22, 2007 Susam Pal and Vipul Agarwal published a
security advisory on Orkut vulnerabilities related to authentication issues. [6] The
vulnerablities are considered very dangerous in cybercafes, or in the case of man-in-the-middle attack as they can lead to session hijacking and misuse of legitimate
accounts. [7] The vulnerabilities are not known to be fixed yet and therefore pose
threat to the Orkut users.
A week later, on June 29, 2007 Susam Pal published another
security advisory which described how the Orkut authentication issue can be exploited to hijack Google and GMail sessions and
misuse the compromised account of a legitimate user under certain conditions.
Joseph Hick performed an experiment on the basis of the advisories published by Susam Pal, to find out how long a session
remains alive even after a user logs out. [8] His experiment confirmed that the sessions remain alive for 14 days
after the user has logged out. It implies that a hijacked session can be used for 14 days by the hijacker because logging out
does not kill the session. [9]
Legal Issues
Brazil
On August 22 2006, Brazilian Federal Judge José Marcos
Lunardelli ordered Google to release Orkut user’s information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be
using Orkut to sell drugs and involved in child pornography by September 28. The judge
ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information is turned over to the Brazilian government. The information
the government is requesting would also be used to identify individuals that are spreading child pornography and hate speech, according to the Brazilian
government. As of September 27 2006 Google has stated that
they will not release the information, on the grounds that the requested information is on Google servers in the U.S. and not
Google servers in Brazil, and is therefore not subject to Brazilian laws.
India
Of late, the number of Indians on Orkut has been increasing rapidly.[10] On October 10, 2006, the Bombay
High Court's Aurangabad bench served a notice on Google for allowing a hate
campaign against India.[11] This referred to a community on
Orkut called 'We Hate India', which initially carried a picture of an Indian flag being burned and some anti-India content.[12]
The High Court order was issued in response to a public-interest petition filed by an Aurangabad advocate. Google had six
weeks to respond. Even before the petition was filed, many Orkut users had noticed this community and were mailing or otherwise
messaging their contacts on Orkut[citation needed] to report the community as bogus to Google, which could result in its
removal. The community continues to exist and had spawned several 'We hate those who hate India' communities.
Prior to the 60th Independance Day of India, orkut's main page was revamped. The section which usually displayed a collage of
photos of various people, showed a stylized orkut logo. The word orkut was written in the Devanagiri script and was colored in the Indian national colours.
Clicking on the logo redirects to a post by the orkut India Product Manager, Manu Rekhi,[13] on the orkut internal blog. There has also been some media outcry against Orkut
after a couple of youngsters were apparently lured by fake profiles on the site and later murdered.[14]
On November 23, Bombay High Court asked the state government to file its reply in
connection with a petition demanding a ban on social networking site, Orkut, for hosting an anti-Shivaji Web community.[15]
Recently, the Pune rural police cracked a rave party which is illegal in India.[16] The accused have been charged under anti-narcotic laws, the
(Indian) Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropics Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS). Besides the NDPS, according to some media reports, the
police were deliberating on the issue of charging the accused under the (Indian) Information Technology Act, 2000 perhaps because
Orkut was believed to be one of the mode of communication for these kind of drug abuses.[17]
See also
References
External links
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