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 the creation of easy-to-setup simple forums (called "communities") of users. Since October 2006, Orkut permits users to create accounts without an invitation. In April 2007, Orkut introduced polls in communities.

Orkut is the eighth most visited site throughout the world. It is also the 31st most visited site in US.

Orkut was launched on November 17, 2002 by the search company Google, the brainchild of Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer, who developed it as an independent project while working at Google.

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 15th July, 2007, the number of members was over 62,638,127.

Orkut allowed its users to add videos from February 2007.

URL	http://www.orkut.com/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Social Networking
Owner	Google
Created by	Orkut Büyükkökten
Launched	November 2002

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 and sent 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 1st 5 communities on orkut were started with in 24 hrs of launch of orkut. 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 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.

Controversy

Confirmed terrorist activity

Mr. Matthew J. Sheffer reported in his "Awareness Through Agility: Teenagers as a Model for Terrorist Development of Situational Awareness" article in the Winter 2007 edition of the IO Sphere journal [The Professional Journal of US Joint Information Operations] that Orkut has been used by terrorist groups for their malicious activities.

"Orkut's popularity is most evident when searching through its social communities based on support for specific terrorists or terrorist networks" but that instead of a basis of a university sports team "the relationships are built on support for terrorism".

This implies that continuation of this trend validated by Kasie Hunt of USA Today may result in additional extremist organizations creating and maintaining substantial recruiting and sympathizer lists on Orkut.

Popularity in Brazil

The Orkut community has been watching a large surge of Brazilian users registering on its service, despite the overall percentage of Brazilian users decreasing. This is the highest percentage of any single country's population using the service. According to the New York Times it's pronounced "ohhr-QOO-chee" in Brazilian Portuguese. The number of Brazilian Orkut users counts for 55.81% of the total users, followed by The United States and India, with about 18.94% and 14.82% respectively (as of May 16, 2007). However these statistics do not reflect the demographics by country in a reliable way as members are free to submit any nationality (or country of residence) they wish and many indeed do so. According to Alexa website the number of Brazilian Orkut visitors counts for 72.5% of the total users, followed by India and The United States, with about 16.1% and 2.7% respectively (as of 22 February, 2007). 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.

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, as its popularity is especially increasing amongst teens and young adults, similar to MySpace in North America.

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. 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.

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.

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 Black people 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 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 August 2006, United Arab Emirates followed the footsteps of Iran in blocking the site. This block was subsequently removed in October 2006.However, Orkut was blocked again on the morning of July 4, 2007. Saudi Arabia is another country that has blocked access to Orkut.

Speed and Reliability

As of September 2006, Orkut often 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 75% of Orkut users.

Frustration tends to grow among such people who faced these problems a lot. Due to this several anti-orkut communities had been set up in Orkut.

Orkut sometimes displays an "under construction" screen while the server is under maintenance. These occurrences last from a few minutes to a few hours to a few days.

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 [ 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.

Type 1 XSS

On October 25, 2006 another Brazilian hacker discovered a XSS Type1 vulnerability which would make it possible to inject HTML into Scrapbook's URL. Rodrigo Lacerda used this vulnerability to create a cookie stealing script that was known as the Orkut Cookie Exploit which was injected into the Orkut profiles of the attacking member(s). By merely viewing a site containing an iframe that linked to the attacker's Scrapbook, targets had the communities they owned transferred to a fake account of the attacker. By December 29, 2006, Orkut had fixed the vulnerability.

Type 2 XSS

On November 8, 2006 Rajesh Sethumadhavan discovered an XSS type 2 vulnerability which would make it possible for Orkut members to inject HTML and JavaScript into their profile. On December 12 Orkut had fixed the vulnerability.

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 lead to some users cancelling acounts, 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 . 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.

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. 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. The vulnerablities are considered very dangerous in cybercafes, or in the case of

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.

"Jail"

In the first year of Orkut, 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 meant that anyone could be jailed at any time by pressing a single button.

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

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. 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. Often the creator of such groups give false information about their location to instigate further hatred.

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 continues to exist and had spawned several 'We hate those who hate India' communities.

Recently, the Shiv Sena went on a rampage on some internet cafes in Kalayan and Thane in Mumbai area, due to a a creation of a community called "We hate the Shiv Sena". The community was created by some people who are frustrated with the Shiv Sena's, who are known for being a very intolerant political party. The Shiva Sena has launched a ultimatum to internet cafe owners in Mumbai and Maharasthra to block Orkut or they will do it themselves. The irony of this situation is that are also pro Shiva Sena communities in Orkut.

Even after many controversies it remains popular among students.

Software and PC Games Download

Communities such as 'Software Download (Full)(Free)' and 'PC Games Download (Full)(Free)' and 'Xtream Downloaders' are growing very rapidly to share and download content from web links. These communities apparently have a cult-like following. There are concerns over members providing links to download software or games illegally.The communities have a thread where people are encouraged to ask for links to download movies,games,etc.Report suggests that some warnings have already been issued by the authorities to curb illegal activity. Owners counter argue by claiming that they provide only legal content for their members and that they have no control over the content shared by the community members and there are no illegal files uploaded on the community, so the authorities should rather curb the source than just mere agents, who provide the objectionable content. Similar communities are also mushrooming on Orkut trying to mimic the same. There is no further report on any action by the authorities.

I Hate Hatred

A few communities like 'I Hate Hatred' have also sprung up, which encourage the orkut users to report the objectionable communities as bogus.

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.

The community had been blocked by the Pune police after a few violent incidents were reported in the city when its existence came to light two weeks ago.

Recently, the Pune rural police cracked a rave party which is illegal in India. 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. Some Indians believe that Orkut digital social network should be moderated heavily in a place where people lack the maturity and misuse its facilities.

Fake login pages

A lot of fake login pages have been created by hackers to steal user's account information.