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 (required 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, had servers scan emails for keywords in order to deliver
advertisements targeted at them, which sparked an idea that Google was
"reading your e-mail".

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. [citation needed]
As of September 22, 2006; there are 28,339,727 users on orkut.

Controversy

Popularity in Brazil
Demographics of orkut Brazil 63.81%
United States 13.78%
India 9.42%
Pakistan 1.80%
Iran 1.23%
United Kingdom 0.71%
Japan 0.55%
Portugal 0.47%
Canada 0.44%
Italy 0.39%
The orkut community has been watching a large surge of Brazilian users
registering on its service, despite the overall percentage of Brazilian users
decreasing. The number of Brazilian orkut users has reached 63% of the total
users, followed by United States and India, with about 13.8% and 9.4%
respectively (As of September 29, 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[citation needed].

According to statistics, orkut has also become popular in Brazil, where more
than 9% (Aug 2006) 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 called Vinícius K-Max attacked orkut,
stealing community ownership rights, using a XSS vulnerability. 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 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. 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. 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. In 2006, a judicial measure was opened by the Brazil
federal justice denouncing a 20-year-old student accused with racism against
blacks and spreading defamatory content on orkut. Brazilian Federal
Justice subpoenaed Google. on March 2006 to explain the crimes that had
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, 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.
In August 2006, United Arab Emirates followed the footsteps of Iran in blocking
the site.

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.

Other Features
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
his/her list and can also evaluate whether his/her 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 his/her network, Orkut
allows anyone to visit anyone's profile, unless a potential visitor is on your
"Ignore List". Importantly, each member can also customize his/her
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 initimated about it only when
both parties have added each other to their "Crush List".

Speed and Reliability

The "Bad, bad server" screen, one of the commonly known sights on
orkut.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 80% of orkut users.

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

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.

Legal Problems in Brazil

On August 22nd 2006, a Federal Judge in Brazil named Jose Marcos Lunardelli
ordered Google to release Okurt user’s information by September 28th. 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 be used to identify individuals that are spreading child pornography and
hate speech, according to the Brazilian government. As of September 27th 2006
Google has stated that they will not release the information and will instead
file a brief explaining why the refuse to release the information.