Orkut

Orkut

File:Orkut - login.png The new Orkut interface
Type of site	Social Network Service
Available in	Portuguese Hindi Marathi English Tamil Spanish French Malayalam Kannada and other 38 languages
Owner	Google
Created by	Orkut Büyükkökten
URL	http://www.orkut.com/
Commercial	Yes
Registration	required

Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. The website is named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.

Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil. In fact, as of May 2009, 49.83% of Orkut's users are from Brazil, followed by India with 17.51%.

Originally hosted in California, in August 2008 Google announced that Orkut would be fully managed and operated in Brazil, by Google Brazil, in the city of Belo Horizonte. This was decided due to the large Brazilian user base and growth of legal issues.

History

Orkut was launched on January 22, 2004 by Google as independent project of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer. The community membership was originally by invitation only. At first year, United States had the largest user base. By word of mouth various Brazilians began adopting and inviting more friends, in a viral driven by the blogosphere. Soon after, Brazil surpassed U.S. in number of users and orkut started becoming heavily popular in Brazil. Americans then started leaving the service and switching to other similar sites such as MySpace and Friendster. This phenomenon was covered by the English blogosphere with some criticism towards Brazilians because they communicate among themselves using their native language Portuguese and not English.

From that time, orkut growth was driven by Brazilian users, first being opened to everyone by register and becoming one of the most popular websites in Brazil. The creator Orkut Büyükkökten visited Brazil in 2007, in attempt to understand the success in that country. In 2007 orkut began attracting large amount of Indians who were not intimidated by the number of Brazilians on the site. Interestingly, Estonia is also among the three countries in the World in where Orkut is the most popular social networking website.[4] Orkut was the first international social networking website to become as popular in Estonia and even though the brazilian "invasion" was seen as annoying by some Estonians, the majority continued to use it. As for now, orkut also has a simplified site for mobile users. "m.orkut.com". In 2008, a new feature was introduced for users having slow internet connections to access orkut using the "View orkut in lighter version" setting.

Features

Traffic on Orkut by country
Traffic of Orkut on March 31, 2004
	United States		51.36%
	Japan		7.74%
	Brazil		5.16%
	Netherlands		4.10%
	United Kingdom		3.72%
Template:Country data World	Other		27.92%
Traffic of Orkut on May 13, 2009
	Brazil		50%
	India		15%
	United States		8.9%
	Japan		8.8%
	Pakistan		6.9%
Template:Country data World	Other		29.6%

A user first creates a "Profile", in which the user provides "Social", "Professional" and "Personal" details. Users can upload photos into their Orkut profile with a caption. Users can also add videos to their profile from either YouTube or Google Video with the additional option of creating either restricted or unrestricted polls for polling a community of users. There is an option to integrate GTalk (An instant messenger from Google) with Orkut enabling chatting and file sharing. currently gtalk has been integrated in orkut. Users can directly chat from orkut page.

Themes

The new features in orkut is Themes. Users can change their interface from a wide range of colorful theme library.Themes are currently only available in India and Brazil.

Other miscellaneous features

Members can make groups to join friends according to their wishes. 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" (this feature has been recently changed so that users can choose between showing their profile to all networks or specified ones). 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). Another feature is that 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. Ning is a more direct competitor, as they allow creation of Social Networks which are similar to Orkut's communities.

Orkut redesign

On August 24, 2007, Orkut announced a redesign. 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. By August 30, 2007, most users on Orkut could see changes on their profile pages as per the new redesign. On August 31, 2007, 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 6 new languages:: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. Profile editing can take place by clicking the settings button under the user profile photo (or alternatively, clicking the blue settings link at the top of any page).

On September 4, 2007, Orkut announced another new feature. user would be able to see an "Updates from your friends" box on the homepage, where it's possible to get real-time updates when friends make changes to their profiles, photos and videos. Moreover, in case someone wants to keep some things on their profile private, Orkut has added an easy opt-out button on the settings page. Scraps were also HTML-enabled letting users post videos or pictures. On November 8, 2007, Orkut greeted its Indian users Happy Diwali by allowing them to change their Orkut look to a Diwali-flavored reddish theme. On April Fools' Day 2008, Orkut temporarily changed its name on its webpage to yogurt, apparently as a prank. On 2 June 2008, Orkut has launched its theming engine with a small set of default themes. along with the photo tagging has also arrived at Orkut.

Controversy

Fake profiles

As with any online social networking community, a number of fake and cloned profiles exist on Orkut. 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 is not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds. Most profiles are made to send random friend requests to people and annoy them just for fun, Indian and south asian orkut users refer to these type of users as "the frandshippers", many actually enjoy the company of these profiles by playing along with the joke, examples of a few famous profiles are Nazim Hakim, Buttless Chaps (manager), Hoppesh Huttabala and Zubiii.

Invisible profiles

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. This hole was later fixed, and currently there is a lower limit on profile image dimensions.

Flooders

In August 2005 a freeware program was 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.

Another most commonly used Scrap Flooder "Carbon Copy Scraper" & "Blind Carbon Copy Scraper" (commonly called CCS & BCCS ) was javascript based (popular versions 2.4, 3.3, and 5.1), available on almost every famous orkut community. The main idea behind this was to let profile holders send the same scrap to all their friends at a once, but it was missued by spammers.

As the flooding of Orkut was becoming out of control, the developers implemented some features to stop it by

• not allowing 2 or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted
• forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry
• requiring captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked.

Community moderators were given the ability to ban users outright instead of relying on the developers to remove them.

Electronic spam

Recently, Orkut implemented an automated system to prevent spam. Orkut users can't send too many friend requests or scraps within a short time interval. If anyone does so, the user will temporarily be disabled from that feature for 24 hours to 1 week, depending on the users activity.

The Frandshippers

Between 2006 and 2007, Orkut was full of stalkers which were called "frandshippers" by South Asian and Central Asian users, these were mostly male users looking for female friends who would often keep trying to convince people to accept their friend requests, eventually fake profiles of frandshippers were made to annoy people on purpose, some even to humour them.

Hate groups

There has recently been controversy revolving around the use of Orkut by various hate groups. Virulent racists and religious fanatics allegedly have a solid following there. Several hate communities focused on racism, Nazism and white supremacy have been deleted due to guideline violation.

In 2005, various cases of racism were brought to police attention and reported on 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 Black African ancestry and spreading defamatory content on Orkut. Brazilian Federal Justice subpoenaed Google on March 2006 to explain the crimes that had occurred in Orkut.

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 are seeking a ban on Orkut post objections raised by political groups. Groups denigrating various political leaders and celebrities have also emerged. Also in a reported case of 2005, racist groups have been reported. They were anti-Tamil groups.

State censorship

In Iran

Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is now blocked by the government. According to official reports, this is due to national security issues, and 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. At one time it was possible to bypass governmental blockage of Orkut, but 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.

Many other sites have been published in Iran since Orkut's blockage, using the same social-networking model - examples include MyPardis, Cloob and Bahaneh.

In the United Arab Emirates

In August 2006, the 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. By July 4, 2007, Etisalat had placed a renewed ban on the site, which remains in effect despite Google's promise to negotiate the ban with the UAE.

In Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is another country that has blocked access to Orkut, while Bahrain's information ministry is also under pressure to follow suit.

Privacy

Earlier in Orkut it was possible for anybody to view anyone's pictures, videos as well as scraps, but people started misusing the photos and videos and placing them on the Internet with fake details. Many of them were vulgar, especially pictures of women. Moreover, the scraps could be easily read.

Currently privacy covers such features as scraps (separate read and write access), videos, photo albums, testimonials, and applications. These privacy levels are available to users:

In December 2008, Orkut developers introduced another privacy update that allow users to restrict viewing of their albums to certain number of friends, as well as selected e-mail contacts. The user can limit visibility of her/his profile to a certain region or group of regions (known as a "network"); in this case outside of these regions no user information is available.

Security and safety

In December 2007, hundreds of thousands of users accounts were affected, using another XSS vulnerability and a worm. A user's account was affected when the user simply read a particular scrap containing an embed which caused the user to automatically become a part of a community on the site, without approval. The affected user's account was then used to send this scrap to everyone present in the user's friend list thereby creating a sort of a huge wave.

MW.Orc worm

On June 19, 2006 FaceTime Security Labs' security researchers Christopher Boyd and Wayne Porter discovered a worm, dubbed MW.Orc. 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

In and around April 17, 2007 users began reporting that secure (https) access to the Orkut login server was no longer available. In fact, Google had changed the main login page to http delivery to improve efficiency, but the actual login remained secure using https in an iframe. This information had not been well-published by Google, and did not give the users the reassurance of seeing the "secure connection" padlock in the browser. On July 17, 2007, a revised login page, which is delivered via https, addressed these issues.

Session Management and Authentication

On June 22, 2007 Susam Pal and Vipul Agarwal published a security advisory on Orkut vulnerabilities related to authentication issues. The vulnerabilities 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. 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. 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.

W32/KutWormer

On December 19, 2007, a worm written in Javascript started to cause havoc. Created by a Brazilian user called "Rodrigo Lacerda", it automatically made the user join the virus related community and infect all friends' scrapbooks with copies of itself, the worm infected over 700,000 orkut users, it was a huge wave of infection. The worm is spreading through Orkut’s recently introduced tool that allows users to write messages that contain HTML code. The ability to add Flash/Javascript content to Orkut scraps was only recently introduced.

W32/Scrapkut worm

On March 3, 2008 W32/Scrapkut.worm was found. The worm attempts to spread itself by sending orkut users scraps that contains the link to the worm itself. Aliases are Downloader.Banload.ONK (GRISoft)

• TR/Dldr.Orkut.A (Avira)
• Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Banload.auf (IKARUS)
• Trojan.DL.Win32.Banload.dzm (Rising)
• W32.Scrapkut (Symantec)

Other attacks

Private album crack

In December 2007, a Brazilian cracker named "Rodrigo Lacerda" published a script that allowed users to scrape other people's private photos. The exploit consisted of generating album photo urls, due to their simple structure.

This crack made Orkut team implement new secure album/photos implementation.

Legal Issues

India

On October 10, 2006, the Bombay High Court's Aurangabad bench served a notice on Google for allowing a hate campaign against India. 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. 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 to report the community as bogus to Google, which could result in its removal. The community has now been deleted but has spawned several 'We hate those who hate India' communities. Prior to the 60th Independence 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, 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.

On November 24, 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.

Recently, the Pune rural police cracked a rave party filled with narcotics. 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 a mode of communication for these kind of drug abuses.

The Cyber police in India have entered into an agreement with Orkut to have a facility to catch and prosecute those misusing Orkut since complaints are rising.

Brazil

On August 22, 2006, Brazilian Federal Judge José Marcos Lunardelli ordered Google to release by September 28 Orkut user’s information of a list of about two dozen Brazilian nationals, believed to be using Orkut to sell drugs and to be involved in child pornography. The judge ordered Google to pay $23,000 per day in fines until the information is turned over to the Brazilian government. According to the Brazilian government, the information would also be used to identify individuals who are spreading child pornography and hate speech. As of September 27, 2006 Google has stated that it 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.

See also

• List of social networking websites
• List of Google products
• Social network
• Business network
• Social software

References

• Butalia, S. (2004). ‘The potential for marketers to exploit the emerging trend of online social networking groups’
• Dwoskin, E. (2006). Google won't hand data to Brazil judge
• Hempell, A. (2004). Orkut at eleven weeks: An exploration of a new online social network community
• Hunt, Kasie, "Osama Bin Laden Fan Clubs Build Online Communities", [5], March 8, 2006.

Testimonials for Orkut http://www.orkut4all.com orkut scraps graphics images collection

External links

• Official website
• Official blog