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Orkut pine 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 Friendster and MySpace , Orkut goes a step further by permitting the creation of easy-to-setup 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, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an independent project while working at Google.Orkut is a favorite site of satyapal. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Orkut Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut on inCircle code. Originally, the Orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership was by invitation only. At the end of July 2004 Orkut surpassed the 1,000,000 member mark, and at the end of September it surpassed the 2,000,000 mark. As of August 2007, the number of members was over 67,000,000. FEATURES Orkut has a list of features unique to itself like "Scrapbook","Communities" etc., apart from the normal features like messaging and photo album. 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. Orkut added a feature in June 2007 where a user can completely remove his profile photo. 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. Previously, if a person wanted to reply to the scrap, he or she had to visit the person's profile, then go to their scrapbook to send a scrap. But in late 2006 Orkut changed this, adding a feature by which one can reply to a scrap from their scrapbook itself. 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 on absolutely everything from pizza to pasta from Film star to superstar, from your pet to your teacher. The first five communities on Orkut were started with in 24 hrs of launch of orkut. Orkut added video embedded feature in February 2007, allowing users to share YouTube and Google Videos . In April 2007 , Orkut added a feature called "Polls" where in community users can be polled. Participation can be open for all or can be restricted to only the members of community. In August 2007, Orkut added html support to scraps. Now users are able to directly post photos, videos, audio files and other embedded objects in scraps sent to others. Earlier, scraps were restricted to plain text. In addition to this there is a personal messaging feature. Users rarely use this feature. It is mainly used by community owners to ask others to join their community. Though the messages are meant to be personal they aren't. If you know the exact link of the message then you can visit read their messages. There is also a feature to upload photos and videos into your Orkut profile. One can have up to 12 photos on his album. Each photo can also be tagged with a citation. The video upload feature was added in early 2007, probably after Google 's acquisition of YouTube . Users can even link their videos from Youtube or Google Video and make it play as an inline video within orkut. 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, he sees the people on his friends list in the order of their logging in to the site, the first person being the latest one to do so. If person A deletes person B from his friends' list, person A will be deleted from person B's friends' list also. Orkut has many other competitors such as MySpace and Facebook , widespread internet communities. The only major feature that orkut lacked is a Blogging service. Google has added several new features to orkut in 2007. This involves a blogging service as well. On August 17th Orkut changed its symbol to a sleek one and On August 23rd Orkut changed its login page logo once again displaying its victory in the MTV Youth Icon Awards 2007 Orkut Redesign 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 at 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. You have to edit your profile by clicking the settings button under your profile photo (or 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. 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 Captcha s, 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 Group s. 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. In 2005, various cases of Racism were denounced to police and reported in the Brazilian media. 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.'' 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 is another country that has blocked access to Orkut, while Bahrain 's information ministry is also under pressure to follow suit {Link without Title} . Security and safety Stealing accounts and communities with XSS On January 1 , 2005 a Brazilian Hacker called Vinícius K-Max attacked Orkut, stealing community ownership rights, 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 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. 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 {Link without Title} . 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 |
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