Orkut

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 Friendster and MySpace, orkut goes a step further by permitting "communities" of users. It is also invitation-only: users must be invited to join the community by someone who's already there.

History

Orkut was quietly launched on January 22, 2004 by Google, the search engine company. Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, developed it as an independent project while working at Google (permitted by its policy). Some discomfort with this exists among users and potential users of orkut, especially since Google's other noteworthy product of 2004, the Web-based email client Gmail, allows the company to automatically scan the text of users' private emails in order to target ads toward them.

While previously working for Affinity Engines, he had developed a similar system, InCircle, intended for use by university alumni groups. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based orkut on inCircle code. The allegation is based on the presence of 9 identical bugs in orkut that also exist in InCircle.

Originally, the orkut community was felt to be elite, because its membership is by invitation only. However, 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.

While the intended invitation method was e-mail between two acquaintances, invitations to orkut are obtainable via the web with a bit of diligence or eBay, just like Gmail invites.

Orkut's use as a social tool is complex, because various people frequently try to add strangers to their own pool of friends, more often than not just to increase the number indicating their number of friends next to their name in their profile. Many "add-me" communities exist, solely for this purpose. A large number of bogus, cloned, fake, invisible and "orphaned" profiles also exist.

Controversy

Popularity in Brazil

|| Brazil || style="width:100px;" |

|| 67.04%

|| United States ||

|| 12.85%

|| India ||

|| 6.38%

|| Pakistan ||

|| 1.95%

|| Iran ||

|| 1.54%

|| United Kingdom ||

|| 0.73%

|| Japan ||

|| 0.60%

|| Portugal ||

|| 0.49%

|| Canada ||

|| 0.46%

|| Italy ||

|| 0.42%

The orkut community has been watching a large surge of Brazilian users registering on its service, in spite of the percentage of Brazilian users has been decreasing. The number of Brazilian orkut users has reached more than 67% of the total users, followed by United States, with about 13% (As of July 14,2006). Due to the number of Brazilian users and communities in the Portuguese language, users from other parts of the world became upset with the service, when it established Portuguese as the first "alternate default language," (as English was the primary default language) prompting many community owners to enforce an English-only posting policy. Some went as far as to start online communities and discussion groups dedicated to complain about this phenomenon. Hoaxes have also been spread, with the intention of tricking Brazilian users to change their nationality in orkut.

According to statistics, orkut has also become popular in Brazil, where greater than 3% (June 2005) of the population are registered orkut users. This is the highest percentage of any single country's population using the service.

In a recent interview to a Brazilian news site, the creator of orkut said he doesn't understand the phenomenon and complains about the fact that North-American press and users are ignoring the service and using similar services like Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. He also noted that Brazil is actually the main focus of orkut.

Flooders and fake profiles

As the number of orkut users increased and due to the low reliability and security of the site, 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. 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.

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.

On January 1, 2005 a Brazilian hacker attacked orkut, stealing community ownership rights, using phishing techniques. Eventually, various phishing sites were developed with the intent of stealing other people's accounts and communities. A couple of months later, 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.

In the August of 2005 a freeware program made in Delphi called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything" - this was developed by a Brazilian) was created 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 of 2005. However, changes implemented by the developers in November made this program unfunctional.

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. 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.

Many reasons exist for flooding. As a social network, it's obvious that people have or develop enemies on the site, but some of them attack simply for the sake of trolling. Flooding is one of the reasons for orkut's poor site performance, as it causes a heavy overload on orkut servers, decreasing their reliability even more.

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. Because of the invitation-only structure, closed groups of like-minded people are able to thrive. 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. blacks and spreading defamatory content on orkut. ^*." target="_blank" >Brazilian Federal Justice intimated Google [http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/informatica/ult124u19750.shtml on March 2006 to explain the crimes occurred in orkut.

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.

This does not mean that any contribution to the orkut community (be it forum posts or photos) becomes the property of the site owner; while it means that orkut can use any submitted information for any purpose, the original submitter doesn't lose any rights to his materials.

Although other popular social network services such as Friendster and MySpace contain similar statements, this policy offended many dedicated orkut users, some of whom deleted their accounts as a protest.

Iranian censorship

Orkut was very popular in Iran, but the website is blocked by the government. As they say, it 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.

Jail

Users who misbehaved or were reported to misbehave could be "jailed". Their account was suspended, their site access was reasonably limited, and their profile picture was temporarily replaced with a silhouette of a man behind prison bars. Although this served a useful purpose, the way users were selected to be jailed caused heated discussions and complaints among orkut users: every user's profile has a "Report as Bogus" button, which, if pressed, automatically flagged the user to be jailed. Conceivably, this means that anyone could be jailed at any time by pressing a single button.

Another way to be jailed was to have a robot-like behaviour. To safeguard against bots and similar kinds of software automation, users who added friends or joined communities in a very quick or repetitive manner were automatically put to jail. However, this also often happened to new users trying to add all his friends at once.

Users who were jailed were not informed of the reason, nor were they notified that they had been jailed. Jailing usually did not last long (up to 24 hours in most cases), but was often disturbing to users, as there is no direct contact to the orkut team (their contact form only answers with template emails) and jailing limits one's options to waiting or posting in a designated forum. Ironically, site users once reported that Orkut Büyükkökten, the creator of the site himself, was jailed. The jail system is currently deactivated due to its inefficiency. Now when someone clicks on the "Report as Bogus" button, he is directed to a complaint form entitled "flag for review", where he is able to provide further details about the abuse he is reporting.

Speed and reliability

As of April 2006, orkut often runs slow or is unavailable, producing a "Bad, bad server. No donut for you." error message — behavior consistent with that of an underpowered server under heavy load. The outages tend to occur during the day hours in the Americas, home of more than 80% of orkut users.

Security and safety

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 controlled by a hacker. 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.

References

Meneses, J. (2004). The Orkut.com case: a reflection on the exploration of new ways to online sociability in the tradition of the study of virtual communities

Butalia, S. (2004). ‘The potential for marketers to exploit the emerging trend of online social networking groups’

External links

orkut - official website
Orkut Büyükkökten's - Personal Home Page
Google revives discredited Microsoft privacy policy for Friendster clone - Article at The Register
Estadao Racist cases involving orkut and Brazilian justice (in Portuguese)

Community websites | Google | Social networking | Virtual communities | Communications in Brazil

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